We won’t deny it: GoodBookery aims to redefine the book. For us, the book is a platform for social change.
Definitions of the book abound; the main two groups define the book as a physical object and as a medium for content delivery. “Oxford American Dictionary and Thesaurus” defines the book as “a written or printed work consisting of pages glued or sewn together along one side and bound in covers” and as “a literary composition intended for publication”. Paul Duguid says the book is “the incarceration of the word”. I.A. Richards believes the book is “a machine to think with” and George Landow as “a teaching and communicating machine”. Regis Debray called the book “a living stone”. Marcel Proust defined the book as “a fulcrum that creates space out of time”, and Patrick Bazin as a “capsule of suspended time, padlocked into its box”. Moving further into the fourth dimension, James Bridle defines the book not as a physical, but as a temporal object, due to our relationship with books over time: “Books are souvenirs of themselves”. In sum, while the book is many things to many people, it’s safe to say that, as David Weinberger puts it in “Everything Is Miscellaneous”: “We don’t really know what a book is.”
Leave the confusion to the scholars. We know what the book is: a platform. Think of a collaborative book as a place where stories come together to form collections of human tales. The power of each story grows when it’s published, and even more so when it convenes in print with others. If one story gives its author a voice, many stories gathered in a collaborative book give their authors (and readers) a movement. The book then becomes a tool for organizing communities around their interests, passions, or causes. Collaborative books that GoodBookery will soon help you create multiply the effect of their stories and direct it toward the common good.
The book is a platform. What are you going to build on it?
(Image credit: Horia Varlan)
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