The failure to renew was an empirical, market signal about the value that copyright owners themselves placed on copyright. The renewal rates also showed a consistent difference in renewal rates for classes of works. The lowest renewal rates (0.4 percent) were for technical drawings, lectures, sermons, and other oral works. The highest renewal rate was for motion pictures (74 percent). Music was 48 percent and books only 7 percent. Our current one-size-fits-all approach ignores this significant data about how copyright owners have themselves valued copyright. Based on this evidence, the correct term of copyright should vary depending on the type of material being protected, with books getting a shorter term than motion pictures.

Even with a term of copyright of only fourteen years (the original term in the States), most books would not be renewed, because most books are no longer worth much after that period of time. Failing to let them come into the public domain only makes them inaccessible—that is, invisible. A book can have an immense cultural value for centuries past the point at which it's already anemic financial value has passed. The obscene copyright term now in place serves no financial gain, and yet manages to rob us nonetheless.

The most damaging consequence of the movement to turn culture into private property is the largely successful change in attitude toward creativity and copying. Creative people are supposedly those who do not copy or imitate others. As we just saw, this is false; creative people must copy and must imitate others. Treating transformative copying as theft, as laziness, or as being non-creative is counter to human nature. All learning is social; copying is an essential form of social learning. Our copyright laws must be changed to reflect this fact.

Emphasis mine; this is perhaps the most distressing part of the conversations around SOPA and PIPA and similar bills put forth by the entertainment industry. It is inconceivable that a group of people whose primary livelihood depends on remakes could misunderstand this most basic element of creativity. More likely that they recognize the value that such a ruling could infer on their own back catalog. Put another way: copying in order to make anew is not lazy. But relying on revenue from copies of your own work most certainly is.

I worked for many years on textbooks—big books with several authors each, lots of moving parts, technical editors working alongside designers and manuscript editors and illustrators. I recall an evening when a group of us were reviewing changes to proofs for an especially complex science book—changes that really ought not to have been happening that close to the pub date. At one point, the production manager (who'd been working on books like this for the better part of three decades) leaned over to me and said, "I wish we could go back to the day when every change weighed several pounds."

His point was that the process needed an external constraint; something that would force us to just ship the damn thing. But the weight analogy sticks: we talk of edits to a text as being either "heavy" or "light," recalling the lead type that was once necessary to make them. The physical weight may be gone—displaced by word processors and infinitely light pixels—but that mental heaviness persists.

As does the idea of a fixed, crystallized, final work. Even our digital systems mimic the immutableness of ink on paper. Typos and egregious errors are routinely repaired in online texts, but rarely are "heavier" changes made. Ebooks can be updated, but only dumbly: a new file will wipe out annotations made to an earlier version, and no useful convention yet exists for communicating what was changed and why. Our content management systems know of only two states—draft and published—either privately in progress or publicly neglected. Nowhere is there a third state—in the world, but still evolving.

But perhaps there should be. What kept us working late on that science textbook (and often in the case of books like this) was new science: a discovery, which—if verified—would render the book out of date even before it went to print. But verification would take time, and the Fall semester loomed around the corner. We couldn't wait to send the book to print; nor could we blindly make changes based on the results of a single study.

I don't recall exactly what compromise we came to that night; I think we inserted a brief caveat and moved on, since few other options presented themselves. But what if it could have been different? What if the book we released were entirely digital, making the expense of a print run obsolete? And what if we could push updates to students and professors as the science happened, rather than waiting for the seemingly interminable two- or three-year editions cycle to pass. And—perhaps most interestingly—what if students could read the text and dive into these changes. Rather than learning from a (literally and figuratively) dead-tree text, they could learn from a living document.

Science writing very obviously benefits from this approach, but I don't think it's the only case. How many times have you written something, published it, and then realized in retrospect that what you thought you said was not in fact what came through? (Even if you've never done this yourself, you've certainly witnessed it in others.) What if you could revise a work after publishing it, and release it again, making clear the relationship between the first version and the new one. What if you could publish iteratively, bit by bit, at each step gathering feedback from your readers and refining the text. Would our writing be better?

Iteration in public is a principle of nearly all good product design; you release a version, then see how people use it, then revise and release again. With tangible products (hardware, furniture, appliances, etc.), that release cycle is long, just as with books. But when the product is weightless, the time between one release and the next can be reduced from months or years to days or even hours. The faster the release cycle, the more opportunities for revision—and, often, the better the product itself.

Writing has (so far) not generally benefited from this kind of process; but now that the text has been fully liberated from the tyranny of the printing press, we are presented with an opportunity: to deploy texts, instead of merely publishing them.

What does this mean in practice? It means working as close to the text as possible (the markup) so as to revise quickly and efficiently. It means designing systems for communicating a document's history in a way that's illustrative rather than overwhelming. It means building tools that permit us to evolve a text over time, adding bits of metadata that illuminate the process along the way.

And it means letting go of that weight, which now lives solely in our heads. Instead of weight, let's think of depth: revisions that are either deep or shallow, measured in time and effort rather than pounds. And furthermore, let's think about the reading experience as one of depth as well: superficial (only the latest version) or exhaustive (all the way down). In doing so we not only improve our own writing, and provide a richer reading experience; we also expose the craft of writing and editing for others to learn from.

Of course, we lose some things, too. Permanence, stability. What Elizabeth Eisenstein, in The printing press as an agent of change, called typographical fixity. But where fixity enabled us to become better readers, can iteration make us better writers? If a text is never finished, does it demand our contribution? Fixity is important if you deem the text the end; but perhaps instead the text is now a means—to our own writing, our own thinking. Perhaps it is time for the margins to swell to the same size as the text.

In the second part of my Contents article, I argued content people (editors in particular) need to know markup. If you've been designing or developing websites for a while, then you're already familiar with web standards' key tenet: the separation of content from presentation. If you are coming from other fields (say, journalism or old-school publishing), let me explain.

In print, the designer has a certain tyranny over the page. She sets the text, and the reader has no choice but to accept that design. The content (i.e., the text) and its presentation (the typefaces and layout) are inextricably linked.

On the web, the designer again sets the text, but this time her choices are not immutable. The reader (or his device) can modify those designs as needed. For example, he can set the font size to be larger in his browser, or he can specify a font that he feels is more comfortable. He can load the page on an iPhone where the text is reformatted for a smaller screen; or he can use a screenreader to read the words aloud, ignoring the visual styles entirely. The content and its presentation are related, but that relationship is tenuous, easy to break.

This is what we might call a very, very good thing. It means the text is more accessible—to different devices and (most importantly) different kinds of people. It means the reader has more power over the text than the designer has (as it should be). And it confers a great deal of flexibility on the text itself: freed from presentational concerns, it can be read in any number of contexts or devices. The design can change, and the content will continue to work as intended.

This marks a shift in what an editor's markup does: because a lot of pen-on-paper markup was presentational. Noting wrong fonts, inserting hair spaces, setting in bold, etc., were common reasons to markup a text when working in print. Now that content and presentation are separate, however, markup takes on another dimension: not instructions for style, but defining the underlying semantic meaning of the text, such that any number of visual styles can be intelligently devised.

What does this mean in practice? It means instead of noting that a heading should be larger, you mark it as an <h2>--a second-level heading in the article's hierarchy. Instead of requesting that some text be indented, you mark it as a <blockquote>, indicating the text is an excerpt. And so on: in every case, you concern yourself with the meaning of the text, not how it looks.

Think about that for just a minute, and it becomes clear that this is a much better way of doing things. Visual styles (as important as they are) are always in service to the meaning of the text. Working with markup on the web brings you closer to that meaning.

Alas, many of the tools we use to author content for the web continue to reflect the old, print-based perspective. WYSIWYG ("what you see is what you get") document editors impose a presentational view of the text, with little regard for its meaning. Worse, they frequently produce sloppy or incorrect markup (often hiding this dirty work from you), preferring the facade of visual styles to the underlying reality.

It's time content people of all stripes recognized the WYSIWYG editor for what it really is: not a convenient shortcut, but a dangerous obstacle placed between you and the actual content. Because content on the web is going to be marked up one way or another: you either take control of it or you cede it to the software, but you can't avoid it. WYSIWYG editors are fine for amateurs, but if you are an editor, or copywriter, or journalist, or any number of the kinds of people who work with content on the web, you cannot afford to be an amateur.

Fortunately, there's a plus side to all this: HTML is easy to learn. Even if you never peeked at the source for a website, never so much as authored an anchor tag, you already know most of the principles behind it, because they emerged from the texts themselves. You do need to learn a new syntax—a new way of expressing what the text means. But syntax is where editors excel.

One of the principles of HTML's development as a language is "pave the cowpaths"; meaning, look at how people are already doing things, and adopt those methods, rather than trying something wholly new. Many of HTML's original cowpaths were paved by writers and editors, long before the web arrived. Paragraphs, headings, blockquotes, articles, ordered and unordered lists, and so on, all emerged from age-old ways of working with text. Now new cowpaths are being paved on the web itself, and we need the people who love the text the most to get involved in where we go. We need you.

In the first part of my essay in Contents, I argued that to be a publisher today you must belong to a community. It's through the act of belonging that you can understand how your readers think and what they want (and need) to read. And, just as importantly, it allows you to connect with your readers in a way that transcends any particular platform or business model; a valuable stance at a time when the business of content is in the midst of a transition, and none of us can predict what's on the other side.

But there's a point just a few steps beyond belonging that is perhaps even more important: advocating. Belonging to a community means participating, observing, and generally being in attendance (either physically or virtually). But being an advocate requires stepping forward and helping to articulate that community's needs, or advance their interests, or—when necessary—protect their rights. You need to both amplify and clarify the values of a community, not merely share them.

In practice, this means identifying what your community needs to prosper, and either providing that directly or advocating for its provisioning. There are many ways to do this. You can lobby for changes the community needs (e.g., by publishing content illustrating those needs and defining how change should happen); you can facilitate discussions (e.g., by hosting and supporting safe, productive forums); you can challenge the status quo (e.g., by bringing in ideas from outside the community and fostering discussion); and so on. It means acknowledging that your content is a means to an end, and making sure the ends are good ones.

It also means making hard choices, because advocacy isn't always in the interest of your business. Especially in today's SEO and ad-laden world, publishing only that which serves your community is unlikely to be the fastest way to a dollar. Content that is superficially sensational or contrary (but actively harmful) can bring more pageviews; while content that smartly challenges the ideas or values of a community (i.e., encourages rigor) can draw ire. You have to be able to look past the short-term risks to see what years of trust and support are worth.

More importantly, advocacy is one of the ways in which a publisher remains relevant in a world where the only obstacles to publishing are a reasonably fast internet connection and skill with a keyboard. By filtering and developing the best content—with an eye to how it benefits your readers—a publisher can simultaneously spread ideas both within and without a community. You can strengthen your readers' ties with one another, and improve their lot in the rest of the world all at once. Think about that, and you can begin to see a much more compelling vision of the publisher of the future: not a gateway, but a representative.

In view of the conceptual changes that are taking place it is hardly helpful to continue using in connection with housing problems words that are firmly anchored in the cultures of days gone by; they can only mislead us in our present search for better solutions. "Apartments," "row houses," "single-family houses," "yard," "garden," "garbage," "parking lot," "living room," "kitchen," "dining room," "bedroom," "bathroom," are all heavily loaded words that make ay number of irrelevant images spring to mind. Designer and user alike may imagine that these words stand for something immutable, though in fact they are just names for the familiar.

Until one stops using popular or generalized words to describe specific objects and events, one will continue to be deceived by the associations with them and will fail to arrive at the essential functional aspect of things and places that is the planner's actual concern in problem-analysis and design.

I start nearly every design project with words. Words define the problem and its scope, and they pave the way towards a solution. Names are especially important, as what you call things will prescribe how you approach them. One trick I've found that often works is to look to vocabulary from another domain; so, if you're designing a bedroom, use words from landscape architecture; or if you're designing a book, use cooking words. The end result may or may not be useful, but the exploration itself is often illustrative.

This is the crucial question in any design process, for countless different views of the problem are possible. The most fruitful aspects to consider, can we but identify them, are those most deeply related to the structure of the problem. The sense in which the structure given by the grouping of parts can help us solve a problem is illustrated beautifully in the words of Chuangtzu, who lived at the time of Plato, put into the mouth of a Taoist butcher:

"A good cook changes his chopper once a year—because he cuts. An ordinary cook, once a month, because he hacks. But I have had this chopper nineteen years, and although I have cut up many thousand bullocks, its edge is as if fresh from the whetstone. For at the joints there are always interstices, and the edge of a chopper being without thickness, it remains only to insert that which is without thickness into such an interstice. By this means the interstice will be enlarged, and the blade will find plenty of room."

I love this. Think about the problems you are trying to solve. Look closely—look at how all the pieces fit together, and then see where there is room for you to insert your blade.

Zinsser writes that "the product that any writer has to sell is not the subject being written about, but who he or she is." Meaning, the best writing is an expression of the writer's self, a peek into their obsessions or fears. This is why an article on a topic for which you care little can be engrossing; what you are drawn to is not the subject matter, but the person telling the story.

And this is just as true of so-called frivolous writing on the web as it is of more crafted writing, including the offhand writing of a tweet or status update. The content of a particular tweet isn't what's valuable or interesting; it's the person it reveals. Some deride this as false intimacy—as creating the sense that you know someone when in fact you do not. But I think that's a mistake. It is not a complete intimacy, but it is a true one.