‘Public Parts’ and its public parts: In a networked world, can a book go viral?

niemanlabs reporting (October 2011):
Last month, Jeff Jarvis published his new book, Public Parts: How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way We Work and Live. Last week, Evgeny Morozov published a scathing review of it. In response, Jarvis rebutted Morozov via Twitter, Google+, and then, finally, a Google Doc (custom link: http://bit.ly/AnsweringMrGrumpy) that copied Morozov’s nearly-7,000-word review, in full, and then proceeded to plug the holes Morozov had hacked therein.
There is something both ridiculous and refreshing about all this. Ridiculous because 90 percent of Morozov’s criticisms are wildly unfair (and also because, you know, http://bit.ly/AnsweringMrGrumpy)…and refreshing because here is a work of book-bound nonfiction — chock full of claims to be assessed and arguments to be discussed — that is actually being assessed and discussed. In a public forum! Discourse, and everything!
That shouldn’t be an anomaly, but it is. Books both e- and analog — the kind that exist not to tell a tale, but to advance an argument — face a fundamental challenge: The interests of books-as-artifacts and books-as-arguments are, in general, misaligned. Books are great, definitely, at capturing ideas. Books are great at claiming cultural ownership of ideas. Books are great at generating speaking gigs based on ideas. Books are great at getting authors paid for ideas. But books are much, much less great at actually propagating ideas — particularly ideas of the relative nuance that Morozov’s “Internet intellectuals” tend to favor.
 ...Here in FutureOfNewsLand, we talk a lot about conversation and collaboration, about how those new values are transforming our sense of what journalism is and can become. Our assumptions about information itself are shifting, reshaping “the news” from a commodity to a community, from a product to a process. The same changes that have disrupted the news industry will, inevitably, disrupt the book industry; Public Parts hints at what might come of the disruption. Books as community. Books as conversation. Books as ideas that evolve over time — ideas that shift and shape and inspire — and that, as such, have the potential of viral impact.
... In addition to his traditional “buy my book” events, Jarvis has been talking about Public Parts — er, #publicparts — on Twitter. He posted the book’s introduction and an interior section on Scribd. He embedded a free excerpt from the book’s audio edition on Buzzmachine. (He made similar moves with his first book, What Would Google Do?, creating, among other things, a public slide deck of the book’s main points, a YouTube video discussing those points, and a browsable digital version of the book itself.) The subtitle of Public Parts was crowdsourced.
These all have, in their way, commercial motives; Jarvis’ book is not an act of charity, intellectual or any other kind. It doesn’t matter. The events’ net effect speaks to a new kind of object: the public book, defined as much by its publicness as by its bookishness. At the end of Public Parts, Jarvis mentions that his next project may not be a book at all, but rather a book-without-a-book: a Godinesque series of public events held both in person and online. “The book,” Jarvis writes, “if there is one, would be a by-product and perhaps a marketing tool for more events.”
The book, if there is one. The book, a by-product. Imagine the possibilities.
http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/10/public-parts-and-its-public-parts-in-a-networked-world-can-a-book-go-viral/?utm_source=Daily+Lab+email+list&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=3d987b3398-DAILY_EMAIL