Yesterday my paperback copy of Snarkmarket’s New Liberal Arts arrived in the mail, and I’m afraid it’s more interesting for the method of production than the actual content.

The book itself - which you can read for free in PDF form - attempts to catalogue the possible “new liberal arts” that we could find in the modern age: every discipline that would help us to live better no matter our occupation or place in life. The listing of topics includes everything from attention economics to video literacy, and each is accompanied by a short blog-posty explanation of what exactly they mean.

The 80-page count is generous, as the book is very very spaced out with quite a few facing blank pages. The whole thing is pretty voiceless and blandly written, with a lot more telling than showing in each entry. And the biggest crime is that they amount to theoretical toe-dipping, with none of the pieces really evoking the Big Questions in the same way traditional liberal arts tend to. From reading this book, you’d think that all those liberal art credits in college were mainly exercises in trendy analog lifehacking.

But more interesting is the production model, which married a limited run of 200 traditional paperbacks with a free release of the PDF once all 200 physical copies were sold. It’s a neat incentive structure designed to lure in bibliophiles, early-adopters, and other demographics who are traditionally willing to shell out more money for stuff. And hey, they got me to put out $$ for it so there’s a little bit of proof in the pudding.

This is a really neat step in the direction of micropublishing, which I think holds a lot of potential as we acclimate to being a society of voices. Blogs and the internet are nice, but there’s a certain rhetorical effect of books that can’t be copied online. The BLDGBLOG Book (which I reviewed earlier) is a great example of how some blogs make fantastic books, especially when freed from the tyranny of timestamps. Having a big list of posts from most-recent to least-recent is the dominant organization scheme in internet self-publishing, but it’s incredibly poor way of telling any sort of story. We haven’t found any better way online (outside of incredibly fragile tagging schemes), but books have had that stuff down for centuries.

So in conclusion, we all need to do our part and coerce Mills, Ragbag, Kyle Bingman, and some other Tumblrs to arrange their posts into some sort of grand book that we can buy and dig into away from computer screens. Because New Liberal Arts only hints at how awesome this aggregation method could be.