“Communications tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring.”

So wrote Clay Shirky (0) in his 2008 book, Here Comes Everybody. He goes on to say that, “It’s when a technology becomes normal, then ubiquitous, and finally so pervasive as to be invisible, that the really profound changes happen.”

According to a 2010 R. R. Bowker study, 764,448 self-published and micro-niche titles came out in 2009. That’s more than twice the number—288,355—of traditional books published that year. And that’s just books. The publishing work of “regular people” can also reasonably be said to encompass some substantial portion of 234 million Web sites, 126 million blogs, 4 billion pictures on Flickr and the 1 billion+ videos served up every day on YouTube. In which case, the technology of personal publishing is now somewhere between “ubiquitous” and “pervasive.”

Get ready for things to get socially interesting.

From newspapers to popular magazines, from scholarly journals to e-books, from smart phones to print-on-demand “vending” machines, publishing is more complicated than it once was. The Internet has created new patterns of using information—both in terms of creating content as well as consuming it. Publishers are blending their print business with new digital brands, adding a new level of engagement. Thousands of individuals, companies, schools and businesses have taken the tools of literary and scholarly production into their own hands.

Creating a blog or Web page, uploading a photo or video … even designing and publishing a print-on-demand book are no longer unusual, niche activities, and anyone can create, or even publish, personal content.

NextSpace (149) asked two leaders from different sides of publishing to comment on the future of publishing and how libraries can fit in.

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