Michael Mundiberg, American artist, programmer and booksprinter

"Code sprint" is what it's called when several programmers get together for a short time to jointly write an open source programme. In the same way, it might be possible to envisage a "book sprint", except that it’s different authors who work together. So far, the self-styled sprinters have written handbooks on software under open source licence - and distributed them via the Floss platform ("Free Libre Open Source Software") among other options.

Now a team has got together again, but looking for the first time at a different genre. During the Berlin media arts festival "Transmediale" and within five days, they have written a non-fiction title on the topic of collaborative working. Alongside the co-developer of the writing platform Booki, Aleksandar Erkalovic, one of the booksprinters was the American artist and programmer Michael Mandiberg. It was significantly more challenging than a software manual booksprint, according to Mandiberg. For him, "book sprint" is a method for the future which will be all the better the more concrete the task it takes on.

Self-publishing as a challenge for traditional structures

This means that good novels are likely to represent one of the biggest challenges - for collaboratively working authors, at least. Publishing companies, on the other hand, couldn’t care less about the way a good book is created. "I would publish a good manuscript, no matter how many authors it has. And when it’s a bad one, one author too many has already been at work", says, for example, Michael Zöllner, publishing director at Klett-Cotta.

Depending of course on whether he would ever be offered a work of that origin, given that author groups or individual authors of this kind generally turn to other distribution channels. Their works find their way to readers or users via platforms such as Floss or print-on-demand service providers like Lulu. Or they are made available as part of the network culture under a Creative Commons licence regulating public usufruct.

Whether this form represents a challenge or indeed a threat to publishing companies is viewed differently. The booksprinters themselves are convinced of it, at any rate. "What we are doing is just one of many forms of writing and distribution that threaten the publishing houses", according to a confident Michael Mandiberg. Publishing consultant Ehrhardt F. Heinold holds a similar view. He can certainly imagine that the growing self-publishing culture will one day make the classic publishing company superfluous. "In the USA, self-publishing is already a big issue", as Heinold has observed.

And it is no longer just a parallel culture which leaves the creation of books in the major commercial and literary publishing companies virtually untouched - at least as long as bestselling authors such as Ken Follett or Stepehenie Meyer don’t decide to publish their works themselves in future. Last autumn, for example, the Canadian publishing company Harlequin Enterprises which specialises in series of romantic novels and books for women, joined forces with Author Solutions to set up the self-publishing company Harlequin Horizons. According to Donna Hayes, publisher and CEO of Harlequin Enterprises, the partnership is an innovative and original approach aimed at discovering new authors and extending the conventional publishing company product.

Sources: taz, e-book-news