Books and NeoBooks
Author: Peter Kaminski Issue: 2024-02-07
Books and NeoBooks
by Peter Kaminski
Books
I’m one of seven co-authors of a newly-published book: AI Futures–An Anthology, currently out in paperback only. I’ll post again when there’s an ebook, or when I have my chapter available as a separate PDF.
Jordan Sukut and I have a focused project this February to move one of the Lionsberg wiki books from Obsidian / Massive Wiki, through to ebook and paper book. Follow along via our wiki website: Jordan and Pete Publish a Book, and on weekly working calls on Mondays in February at 9:00am PT / 12:00pm ET. Click the Contact Us link on the website to get in touch.
NeoBooks
Is a NeoBook a book? Let’s see!
We had a good, informative call this week (Mondays at 10:30am PT / 1:30pm ET):
[Image not included in the current archive. Images may be included in the future.]
Adapted from what I said at around the 1h 0m 30s mark:
If I may ground us a little, I think the NeoBooks project is kind of Jerry’s idea that let’s figure out–I’m going to say “new,” but “new” is not really the right thing. Let’s figure out some different kinds of ways of “knowledging in the world.
For centuries, we’ve been using this thing called “books,” and maybe more recently, magazines, and novels, and fiction, nonfiction. Books have become a centralized and well-known way to do knowledge, well-respected in lots of ways, reviled in other ways.
Let’s kind of try to break that mold a little bit. They’re useful; and, they’re counter-useful in some ways at this point.
The idea of NeoBooks is not to focus on the Book part, but to focus maybe on the Neo part. To use “book” as a way to get some attention, and to talk a little bit about the gravitas around knowledge and information and things like that. But then, to free it from the static nature of “book” with the Neo part.
Sometimes maybe the knowledge comes out in a song.
Maybe sometimes the knowledge comes out as a chatbot that knows all the material you want to convey, and the main interface to your knowledge is not a book to read, but that people walk up to it, and they either type or they talk. They have a conversation with the knowledge.
The NeoBooks idea has always been multipolar representation of information.
So then, how do we form teams that work on “NeoBooks?” The idea is the NeoBooks project can help people who are streaming in going, I’ve got stuff I want to convey or communicate or learn. Those people come here, and we can help them connect with ways to do that.
One of the least interesting ways being publishing a book. One of the more interesting ones may be publishing a wiki. Or maybe another more interesting one is setting up a forum where you set up the forum with a lot of information, and you pick a few of your closest friends who know about the topic, and start the conversation going.
Maybe there should be a “soil health forum” that is a NeoBook, along with a GPT chatbot, along with a Kindle volume co-written by Klaus and ChatGPT, to let people know, hey, there’s this thing called soil health. And even if you found it on Amazon, you should still learn a lot about the topic, and maybe it will also point you to more interactive ways to learn, or more rich ways of interacting with the knowledge that Klaus and ChatGPT put together.
So it’s like all of those things.
The idea of NeoBooks was never to be about one particular kind of object. It’s about how to use the techniques that we have, social techniques and informational techniques, to help people publish.
If “publish” is even the right word, because it’s not really.
“Interact” and “express” and “learn,” those are probably better verbs than “publish.”
Related:
- Peter Kaminski (author)
- 2024 (year)
- Topics: Tools and Platforms, Regenerative Systems and Agriculture