Another interesting discussion I’ve brought back from my 1995 paper Publishing Models for Internet Commerce:
Though it has not often been stated this way, what is a nonfiction book, a vertical market magazine, or a newspaper, but a user interface to a body of information too large to be contained in the work itself? The essential act at the core of non-fiction publishing has always been the design of information interfaces…. Now, technologies such as the Web make it possible to create information interfaces at a much more powerful level…one of the most exciting things about the Web, long term, is that it is the first environment that allows non-programmers to create user interfaces.
This line also caught my eye:
In the old model, the information product is a container. In the new model, it is a core. One bounds a body of content, the other centers it.
(Apologies to those of you who’ve gone and read the whole original. There’s a lot of dated material in there, so I thought I’d just abstract some of these important bits.) Here’s the quote above with a bit more context and extended discussion:
Though it has not often been stated this way, what is a nonfiction book, a vertical market magazine, or a newspaper, but a user interface to a body of information too large to be contained in the work itself? The essential act at the core of non-fiction publishing has always been the design of information interfaces.
In our computer books, we find the selection and arrangement of material at least as important as the technical information we provide. The way in which we tell the story is the story. Even a technical book ideally captures a point of view–in our case, the point of view of an experienced user “talking straight” to one who is intelligent and eager to learn. We use various techniques to create the effect of a conversation between the person in the know and the one who wants to be. What is that but a user interface to information? The ranks of less successful publishers are filled with those who think that all you have to do is dump out an assemblage of facts.
Now, technologies such as the Web make it possible to create information interfaces at a much more powerful level. For example, rather than relying on an apparatus such as footnotes or bibliographies to refer to external sources, an online publication can take the reader directly to them. Additional types of data can be woven into the presentation, and much more sophisticated layering of information is possible.
While great strides have been made in the development of automated tools for searching for information, there are also tremendous resources available the “old fashioned” way, in which someone who has studied an area in depth creates a managed information space that selects from, models, and makes accessible the larger universe that is out there….
When thinking about online books, publishers focus too narrowly on the content. Early online products have focussed on searchability and multimedia as key advantages over print products. But the Web shows a third key advantage of an online product: the creation of information interfaces.
I like to refer to a non-Web product in this context: Microsoft Cinemania. To a casual eye, this looks like a very similar product to Encarta, Microsoft’s online encyclopedia. However, Encarta embodies the old model of the online book: a bounded body of information (however large). Cinemania, a collection of movie reviews, clips, and backgrounders, cries out to be a user interface that allows users of an online service to download the movies themselves.
In the old model, the information product is a container. In the new model, it is a core. One bounds a body of content, the other centers it.
I believe that there’s a tremendous market for those in the publishing business to turn their experience in making sense of complex bodies of information to this new world of online information publishing. To me, one of the most exciting things about the Web, long term, is that it is the first environment that allows non-programmers to create user interfaces.
In the first stage of online publishing, authors, artists, editors and publishers could participate only by becoming programmers, or by assigning rights to their work to software companies. With the Web and its successors, by contrast, information professionals will create independent information products–user interfaces to information created not with software but with the tools they are already familiar–words, pictures and other familiar carriers of meaning.
(An aside to investment bankers: there was a time when software was unthinkable without hardware. The separation of hardware and software via open systems and the PC standard led to the creation of a new industry. The Web’s separation of content creation from software should stimulate the birth of another new industry, in which online information products flourish on an open software platform.)
(I developed this closing thought further in a 1997 paper, Hardware, Software, and Infoware, which led in turn to The Open Source Paradigm Shift and What is Web 2.0?)
The convergence between information products and computer interfaces is one of the biggest changes of the past fifteen years, and what is most remarkable about it is how little it has been remarked.