There’s another round of “science blogs will make traditional journalism obsolete!” going on in connection with last week’s World Conference of Science Journalists— see Mad Mike, for example. This wouldn’t be interesting except that it happened to collide with my reading Unscientific America, and it struck me that the book is, in many ways, one of the best arguments you could construct for the superiority of the traditional publishing process to doing everything with blogs.
As I said in my review of the book, there’s really nothing in Unscientific America that will come as a surprise to anyone who has read Chris and Cheril’s blog for the last few years. All the arguments they make, and all the examples they use have appeared on the blog at one time or another.
What’s striking about the book, though, is how much more coherent and powerful the argument seems when the whole thing is laid out at once in the book. The final product benefits from being presented as a single whole, rather than drawn out over a series of posts spread over days and weeks, if not years. It has also clearly been honed in discussion with several people other than the authors, and edited in a way that you don’t get online.
The end result is something vastly superior to anything you get on a blog. For one thing, it’s much longer– even Bora doesn’t write 200-page blog posts (150, tops)– but there’s a benefit to being presented in a single, sustained argument that goes beyond the length. If you printed out the full run of The Intersection it would probably end up being longer than the book, but it would be a jumbled mess. You could piece together the same argument as the book, but the effort you would need to put in to do that would rob it of a lot of its power.
Blogging offers a lot of nice features, but it’s not a replacement for a book. If you thing that the existing apparatus of conventional publishing– editors, publishers, and all the rest– is something that will inevitably be swept away by Web 2.0, compare the book to the blog. It’s a nice way to see that there really is value added by the editing and publishing process.
(See also Heads in the Sand by Matt Yglesias, for which you can add “fixing all the goddamn typos” to the list of benefits provided by the conventional publishing process.)