The Mediactive book is now available on the Barnes & Noble Nook e-reader. You can also get Nook apps for iPhone, iPad, Android and other platforms.

Josh Stearns is a program director at Free Press, a media advocacy organization. In a lengthy review, he calls Mediactive “a handbook for engaged media citizenship.” I may borrow that line…

In the three days since Mediactive was published here in PDF format, about 1,500 visitors here have downloaded the book, and many more have visited the Table of Contents, which connects to the HTML version. Far fewer have purchased the book, of course, but it’s selling — and I’ve barely begun the real marketing process, which will take place in the new year.

The World Bank’s Johanna Martinsson, communication associate in the institution’s Communication for Governance & Accountability Program, has a long blog post today about the need for a mediactive culture. She calls the book

a great source for everyone, and it will make you think twice next time you read or write something (because Gillmor suggests that in a participatory culture, we ought to do both to become fully literate).  With the current state of media (and no doubt it’s going to continue to evolve and diversify), we can no longer afford to take a back-seat and be passive consumers of information.  If we do, we run the risk of being misguided and form opinions that are not based on fact.

BoingBoing’s Cory Doctorow has written a wonderful blog post about the book. He calls it a “master class in media literacy for the 21st century” and

an extraordinary text that disrupts the current poor-me narrative of failing journalistic business models and counters it with a set of sensible, entrepreneurial proposals for an Internet era news-media that invites broad participation without surrendering critical thinking and healthy skepticism.

Cory, a longtime friend, is one of the real heroes in the ongoing struggle to keep cyberspace open and innovative. He’s also a fabulous writer. I’m grateful for his support of this project.

I’m happy to say that Mediactive, the book, is now available in print (Amazon and Lulu) and in a Kindle edition.

And because this project lives under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license, I’ve also published it in full on this site. In addition, you can download it here as a PDF.

This is only the beginning. I’m working on an epub edition to use with other online services, and will be creating a variety of e-book editions that include other kinds of media. Beyond that, I intend Mediactive to be an ongoing, iterative process — with updates here on the website and, eventually new versions of the book itself.

Lots of people have helped me get this far on the journey. I thank you all, and look forward to the next steps.

We’re in the home stretch for the book part of this project, with a few wrinkles left to iron out. There’s a picture of the cover on the left-hand side of the page.

If you want to be notified when it’s available for sale, let me know.

Some members of the traditional publishing industry don’t care for what I write, and some who do aren’t thrilled with one of the ways I try to spread my ideas. So when Mediactive appears between dead-tree covers a bit later this year, the traditional publishing industry won’t be in the mix.

I’m going with Lulu, a company that understands the changes in media. This is a self-publishing service — an operation that takes my work and turns it into books that can be sold, by me and by anyone else who wants to sell them.

Some background: Last fall, when I started serious work on the book part of this project, I was under contract to the publisher that brought out We the Media a few years ago; we parted company in January. At which point, my literary agent — the beyond-terrific David Miller of the Garamond Agency — started looking for a new publisher.

My former publisher was fine with Creative Commons, as proved by the fact that we did the first book that way. But as David told me at the outset of the new search, I was likely to limit the potential field because I had one non-negotiable requirement: The book will be published under a Creative Commons license. In this case, as with We the Media, the kind of Creative Commons license would say, essentially, that anyone could make copies of the work for non-commercial use, and if they created derivative works, also only for non-commercial purposes, those works would have to be made available a) with credit to me and b) under the same license.

The principle was simple: While I want my writing to get the widest possible distribution, if anyone is going to make money on it I’d like that to be me, my publisher and my agent.

Almost a decade after Creative Commons was founded, and despite ample evidence that licensing copyrighted works this way doesn’t harm sales, book publishers remain mostly clueless and/or hostile. As David explained to editors, the main reason I’m still getting royalty checks for We the Media is that the book has been available as a free download since the day it went into bookstores. Had we not published it that way, given the indifference (at best) shown by American newspapers and magazines, the book would have sunk without a trace.

That logic persuaded no one in New York (not that we got that far in most cases — more about that below). And to my genuine if not major regret, the Creative Commons roadblock forced me to turn down a deal from a publisher that would have been perfect for this project had I only been writing a book and nothing more.

Two points: First, and most obviously, if a principle means anything, you stick by it when doing so is inconvenient, not just when it’s easy. Second, this isn’t just a book, at least not way traditional publishers understand books even as they dabble online.

To publishers, books are items they manufacture and send out in trucks. Or else they’re computer files to be rented to publishers’ customers, or customers of Amazon, Apple and other companies that use proprietary e-reading software to lock the work down in every possible way. In both cases, publishers crave being the gatekeepers.

Mediactive aims to be a multi-faceted project. Over the next few years, I hope to experiment in lots of media formats and styles with the ideas here. And — this is key — I also plan to experiment with it in the broader context of the emerging ecosystem of ideas.

That ecosystem is evolving at an accelerating rate, and the people who have had specific roles in the one that prevailed in the past — authors, literary agents, speaking agents, editors, publishers and others — are going to have to change with it. Some get this and some don’t, but I’m happy to say that the people I work with directly at this point are definitely in the getting-it category. (I’ll talk much more about this broader context in an upcoming post.)

Meanwhile, I’m having terrific conversations with the folks at Lulu. They aren’t the only outfit of this kind around, by any means, but I like the way they see their own part of the emerging ecosystem.

Incidentally, had I signed with a traditional publisher, the book would not have reached the marketplace for a year, most likely, if not even later. With Lulu, it’ll be available this summer.

Rejections

Editors from big publishing houses have a habit of rejecting books in what they must believe is a kind way. They say something to this effect: “It’s really interesting and we like Dan a bunch, and while it isn’t for us we’re sure it’ll find a great home with someone else.”

Please, folks. Any competent author would prefer this: “We didn’t like it, and here’s why….” Honest criticism is more helpful.

One reason several editors did offer was a bit surprising. An editor wrote, echoing several others, “The main problem that people had was that they felt that they knew much of the information that Dan was trying to get across…”

Wow. You mean that people who read and publish books for a living already know the value of deep and thoughtful media use? Uh, one of the major motivations for this project is the ample evidence that way too many other people don’t know this.

In my days as a newspaper reporter, I learned that the only audience that really counts is your editor. It  was a reality in the world of highly concentrated media, but no more. Any serious writer needs a good editor, but people who become your audience — and if you do it right, your collaborators — are the ones who really count.

Another reason for saying No had the ring of actual truth: The publisher’s publicity and marketing people “felt that the major media would avoid the book because of the criticism of their techniques.” One reason I’m writing it…

Lulu

It was after I turned down the New York publisher’s offer that I contacted Bob Young, Lulu’s founder and CEO. Bob also started Red Hat, one of the first companies to prove that it was possible to make money with open-source software by providing services, and he’s been an ardent supporter of ensuring that what we call “intellectual property” involves as many choices as possible.

Bob had told me about Lulu several years earlier, and in that conversation he’d suggested it would be a good fit for me someday. Now, we both thought, this might really be the time.

He put me in touch with Daniel Wideman, who runs what Lulu calls its new “VIP Services” for established authors making the move to this kind of publishing. Daniel said he very much liked what I was trying to accomplish in this new project, and we had several further discussions. In the end it was clear to me that this would indeed be a good fit.

So here we go. I’ll be letting you know how all this works, by which I mean many of the details of the process.

Back to work…my to-do list has just gotten a whole lot longer. But it’s my list this time.

Here’s the third in a series of chapter drafts of the Mediactive book. (Here’s everything I’ve posted so far.) Remember, this is a draft, not the final version, though my editor and I believe we’re fairly close. Feel free to chime in with ideas about what I’ve missed and especially what I have gotten wrong, or send email. The chapter begins after the jump. (Note: Some of the HTML is weird, and the footnote links aren’t working right.) Read the rest of this entry »

Today I’m starting to post chapter drafts of the Mediactive book. (Here’s everything I’ve posted so far.) Remember, this is a draft, not the final version, though my editor and I believe we’re fairly close. Feel free to chime in with ideas about what I’ve missed and especially what I have gotten wrong, or send email. The chapter begins after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »