Book of the Week: Share or Die (3)
Last Monday we presented “Share or Die” as book of the week. On Wednesday we published some great quotes from the book that can give you a sense of what you will find inside the book.
Now you can go ahead and read the full book by yourself, it’s under an open license. Of course, we recommend you buy the PDF version, as a way to support the effort made by Shareable.Net
We got some exclusive extra content about “Share or Die”. In this last part of our presentation of the book we provide an interview with it’s editor Malcolm Harris. Enjoy!
1) Can you breafly describe the process of creation of this great book? Which criteria did you follow to select and connect such a diverse type of experiences and authors?
We used a combination of methods to get the quality and breadth of content in the ebook. We reached out to our personal as well as organizational friends, and then asked them to reach out to their friends. We asked strangers whose writing we liked to submit and put out an open call. It was important that we not just present one view-point or subject position, and get at a real variety. I don’t think we got representative necessarily, but the spread of content and form is pretty impressive, if I do say so myself.
2) About the content: How do you think the book will impact in these times of great social upheaval where youth have a lead role? (i.e. the “indignados” movement in Spain)
Well we certainly can’t take credit for that miraculous turn. (Shareable actually had a correspondent – my dear friend Willie Osterweil – in Spain reporting from the camps.) I like to think of our connection as neither causal nor coincidental. Unemployment is a serious issue for young people, and now in parts of the world it’s a serious problem for governments and social stability. For anyone who hopes for a better world, look to the Indignados and their counterparts from New York to Athens who are working to make it present now. Young people are ready to take the reigns of a world financial system that serves very few at the expense of many. And they’re doing it in genuinely non-hierarchical solidarity. They represent hope for a lot of us. We at Shareable are going to keep publishing on the protests – which are unsurprisingly going ignored by traditional media.
3) Will you release the PDF version under a free license in the future?
Publishing this e-book is an experiment for us. It’s our first ebook, and our primary goal with the ebook is to get the writing out there, but we also need to generate financial support for our nonprofit. So our current setup is to offer a free version on our site and then offer a beautifully designed premium PDF version for sale. Once we finish serializing the book on the site, the free version will have all the content of the premium version. That said, we’re no different than any other publisher these days in that we don’t have it all figured out. We’re open to all options that will serve our goal including offering a free PDF as well as using a traditional publisher. And we’re open to suggestions about how we can best achieve our goal with a free PDF or other means. We hope readers will help us out if they have ideas or experience.
4) Are you planning or working in a sequel or a related topic book?
There are no plans right now for a follow-up. We’re working to get the word out about Share or Die and run a site that’s constantly growing. But we’re watching the format, as long as Share or Die proves useful, I would be surprised if this is the final Shareable ebook.
