As the year draws to a close, it is rare to find another excuse to visit my beloved Tainan. My daily routine here consists of trying a different flavor of ice cream on Zhengxing Street, eating various fruits, and agonizing over whether to choose peanut, sesame, or a mix for my mochi on Guohua Street.
The “excuse” this time was “Connecting Local: Digital Innovation Workshop for Local Chronicles,” hosted by Carbon Valley Digital (3ook.com’s local partner in Taiwan) and co-organized by the Google News Initiative and Digital Transformation Association. The goal was to promote the idea that, beyond paper distribution, local chronicles should utilize digital technology to enhance information storage, facilitate circulation, and promote niche topics.
The workshop lasted all afternoon and was incredibly rich in content. Relying on my memory, this article roughly records—and takes the liberty to reorganize and supplement—the dialogue between myself and Valeria from Islander Studio, sharing it with those who attended and readers who couldn’t make it.
“YouPaper”
Decentralized publishing covers a vast area. It involves applying decentralized thinking to listing, storage, curation, and governance, avoiding single points of failure in every aspect of publishing. Due to time constraints, my dialogue focused on listing and operations, using 3ook.com as an example to discuss how decentralized publishing empowers local chronicles and niche topics.
When talking about 3ook.com, I am invariably asked how it differs from other e-book platforms like Kindle or Google Play Books. This time was no exception. In the context of Taiwan’s local chronicles, we can understand it this way: Kindle is like the Netflix of publications, while 3ook.com is more like the YouTube of publications.
Let me share a true story. When the first edition of my humble work, Sociology of Blockchain, was released in 2020, I self-published the e-book. I prepared the file and uploaded it to a mainstream Taiwanese e-bookstore, waiting for approval. A few days later, the store rejected it on the grounds that “the cover does not contain the book title.” The cover was a photo of the Lennon Wall I took in Prague; the title and author name were actually there, just written unobtrusively. I was unwilling to change my cover design, so I simply gave up on listing it there and sold it on my personal blog instead.
I mention this trivial matter not to complain, but to illustrate that mainstream e-bookstores believe they must gatekeep the quality of books—for instance, rejecting covers that appear to lack titles (even if they are there, just stylistically subtle), or enforcing other opaque criteria I am unaware of.
In contrast, 3ook.com, built on the philosophy of decentralized publishing, only checks if the file format complies with epub or pdf standards and if necessary metadata (like title and author) is filled out during the listing process. Beyond that, it makes absolutely no judgment on whether the publication looks “presentable.” Whether the cover is a blank page, the content is only one page long, or the illustrations are children’s doodles, none of these are reasons to prevent listing. In fact, once the text is uploaded and metadata is completed, the publication is listed immediately. The entire experience is very similar to YouTube.
Celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, YouTube is now an all-encompassing video platform that everyone watches to some degree. But twenty years ago, when co-founder Jawed Karim uploaded that low-resolution, poorly filmed, 19-second video (“Me at the zoo”), most people’s reaction was, “Who would watch this junk?” Fortunately, the founders didn’t intend to gatekeep the quality of the content, and that is why we have the YouTube of today.
Publications are to books what videos are to movies. Although neither “movies” nor “books” have precise definitions, convention and industry authority dictate that most videos are not considered movies, and most publications are not considered books, preventing them from being listed on mainstream e-book platforms. This is usually not due to technical reasons, but factors like length, style, or positioning. Just as it is normal for Netflix to select quality movies and series, there is nothing wrong with mainstream e-book platforms having their own positioning. The problem lies in the fact that when a publication doesn’t fit the mainstream imagination of what a book “should look like,” it lacks a suitable home on the internet.
The emergence of 3ook.com is precisely to fill that void, providing a landing spot for local chronicles, marginalized groups, niche content, and any publication that might struggle to enter the “halls of high culture.”
Meaning is Assigned by Posterity
Some argue that the reason most publications aren’t considered books is a lack of information density or the “meaning” a book should possess. I don’t entirely disagree, but rather than letting a few professional organizations decide, I advocate for a decentralized ecosystem where the audience judges. Traditional professional editors and literary critics should certainly continue to exist—the market isn’t everything; otherwise, we wouldn’t need the Golden Horse Awards or the Oscars, box office numbers would suffice. However, professionals should judge technique, craftsmanship, and artistry, not whether a work is worthy of being published in the first place.
Often, whether a work is considered a book and enters the traditional publishing ecosystem is one thing; whether a work has meaning and is worth preserving is another. Local chronicles—small in market but deep in significance—illustrate this best. Beyond that, annual reports of companies large and small, leaflets from NGOs, theater pamphlets, student newspapers, class newsletters, doujinshi, family memoirs, or even personal zines all hold meaning for the world, or at least for a small group of people. Yet, these are almost never placed in e-bookstores for purchase or download.
Physical paper requires considering the costs of printing, warehousing, logistics, and display, so pre-publication selection is necessary. But with advanced technology, bandwidth and storage have become incredibly cheap; the cost of digital publishing is negligible and is no longer a constraint.
Furthermore, whether a work will be popular or hold epochal significance is often only known in hindsight. Taking YouTube as an example again, most viral videos are unintentional works by amateurs, whereas calculated, meticulously crafted videos often struggle to become classics. Since the technology is mature and cheap enough, borrowing from the experience of video, copyright holders of publications only need to consider if they mind others reading and possessing their work. There is no need to assess market reaction beforehand. This isn’t to say promotion isn’t important—that comes later. Promote as best as you can, but works have their own destinies. No one can predict the final audience reached or the impact made. Since that is the case, why not just publish it?
In Hong Kong, currently shrouded in a “New Cultural Revolution,” countless movies, theater productions, concerts, sharing sessions, book clubs, and various events have been cancelled. Just at the end of last month, the stage play We Are Gay (我們最快樂), which premiered in 2022 and which I was eagerly looking forward to seeing in its rerun this year, was unreasonably suppressed and cancelled.
If we can normalize digital publishing—listing event-related publications without a second thought while events can still seemingly be held and appear to be in no danger of cancellation—I could at least read the pamphlet from the premiere of We Are Gay. Even if it cannot change reality, it is, more or less, a historical record. It reminds future generations that these works once appeared, events once took place, interactions once happened, and that Hong Kong was once normal.
Decentralized publishing is not the exclusive domain of tech geeks. Quite the opposite: only by eliminating various technical and professional thresholds, making publishing as simple as posting a video, can we distribute publishing power to the people. In the future I am striving to realize with 3ook.com, no one will give up on publishing a work for fear that it isn’t “high culture” enough, and no work will go out of print due to a lack of commercial value. Through everyday publications, the masses will collectively record history and preserve culture in their daily lives.
p.s. At Chuan Mei Theater, which went out of business earlier this year, two films were screened on a limited basis. I took the opportunity to watch A Foggy Tale (大濛) and was deeply moved. I don’t know if it’s coincidence or historical inevitability, but this is already the third work involving transitional justice I’ve seen this year, following the I Am Still Here and It Was Just An Accident.
As for my home, Hong Kong, we are still at the stage where even films like Deadline (自殺通告)—where you couldn’t find elements endangering national security even if you picked through it with a fine-tooth comb—can become banned films. Without transition, where is the justice?
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