Create more than you Capture...

Wired interview with tim o'reilly 

Wired: Your new credo these days is “Create more value than you capture.” What does that mean?

Tim O’Reilly: Everybody wants to foster entrepreneurship, but we have to think about the preconditions for entrepreneurship. You grow great crops in great soil. And the soil is the commons. Increasingly, we have monopolistic companies that try to take as much as they can for themselves. And we have a patent and copyright regime that makes sure that nothing goes back into the commons unless by an extraordinary act of generosity. This is not fertile soil for innovation.

So many technologies start out with a burst of idealism, democratization, and opportunity, and over time they close down and become less friendly to entrepreneurship, to innovation, to new ideas. Over time the companies that become dominant take more out of the ecosystem than they put back in. We saw this happen with Microsoft. It started out with a big vision: How do we get a PC on every desk and in every home? It was profoundly democratizing. But when Microsoft got on top, it slowly started choking off the pathways to success for everybody else. It stopped creating more value than it captured.

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Wired: You’re a publisher and big reader as well as a technologist. What is the future for books?

O’Reilly: Well, what kind of book do you mean? Because there are many, many things that were put into codices that have no particular reason to be books. Things like paper maps and atlases are just gone. Online dictionaries and online encyclopedias have killed printed dictionaries and encyclopedias. I collect how-to books of various kinds just because I want to have them. And certainly if there were a major disaster, a book could be a useful thing to have. But I don’t really give a shit if literary novels go away. They’re an elitist pursuit. And they’re relatively recent. The most popular author in the 1850s in the US wasn’t Herman Melville writing Moby-Dick, you know, or Nathaniel Hawthorne writing The House of the Seven Gables. It was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow writing long narrative poems that were meant to be read aloud. So the novel as we know it today is only a 200-year-old construct. And now we’re getting new forms of entertainment, new forms of popular culture.

Wired: What about the argument that the Internet shortens attention spans and will kill the demand for long books?

O’Reilly: I do think that there are pieces of sustained argument that deserve to be in books, but most extended-argument books are inflated. You know, there are an awful lot of books that are pretty lousy, and I don’t think we need to be pissing and moaning because there are fewer of them. On the other hand, I’m listening now to a wonderful audiobook, The Swerve, about the rediscovery of Lucretius. It’s erudite, it’s well written, and I’m hanging on every word. So I think what will happen to long books is that people will have to get better at writing them.