by Drew Martin
There is an interesting "Techwise Conversation" on IEEE Spectrum, Is Micropublishing the Death of Publishing – or Its Salvation? It is conducted by Steven Cherry with Thad McIlroy, James Morrison, and Philip Parker. McIlroy is an analyst and consultant for the electronic publishing industry. Morrison is a writer/editor/designer, and the brilliant Australian behind The Caustic Cover Critic blog. Parker is a professor of marketing at INSEAD, and author of hundreds of thousands of titles by way of his patent (7266727), which supports his invention for,
“Automatic authoring, marketing, and/or distributing of title material. A computer automatically authors the material."
“Automatic authoring, marketing, and/or distributing of title material. A computer automatically authors the material."
At first (the first few times I listened to his part of the interview) I could not wrap my head around what he was talking about. It seemed so post-human. Parker creates algorithms that create books from cover to cover in a matter of minutes, including a table of contents and supporting charts for the relevant information. The algorithms mimic the process of how an economist would gather and compile data. Cherry questions Parker whether his books with titles such as Webster’s Slovak-English Dictionary and 2007-2012 World Outlook for Wood Toilet Seats (which sounds totally absurd) are typical. Parker replies,
The most interesting part of the interview was Parker's insight on genre,
"Yeah. The basic idea, this is kind of the thought process of automation, is that you don’t create a software to write books or videos or PC games. We do all formats, by the way; it’s not just books. But you do it by genre, so you have to say, well, fiction versus nonfiction, and you could say, well, let’s do nonfiction. And then within nonfiction, well, there’s different types. There’s genres, there’s bibliography, there’s biographies, there’s crossword puzzles, there’s dictionaries. And then what you have to do is you say, no, that’s not really true. There’s no such thing as a bibliography; there’s an annotated bibliography. And then you say, no, there’s not really an annotated bibliography; there’s a sub-subgenre called Cambridge-formatted annotated bibliography, etc., etc.
And as you drill down within a genre and you can no longer find a subgenre, typically at that level you’ll discover that authors, the people who do them manually, actually follow very formulaic patterns. And that’s true for poetry and other types of writing styles as well. And so that’s what I meant by “genre,” is that you drill down to the point at which there’s a formulaic approach to authoring in that domain."
This leads to a conversation about poetry, with Parker commenting,
Shakespeare wrote a sonnet, No. 76, which was a type of metapoem, where he kind of complained a little bit that he was stuck using the same formula in writing his own poems. So it’s a metapoem because it’s about himself and the poem itself. We took that concept and created algorithms of a computer program writing sonnets, stating it cannot write a sonnet properly, but doing so, it writes a sonnet properly. So it follows the iambic pentameter formulation, has the exact correct number of lines. It’s highly constrained writing once you get down to that level."