Melville House to Publish CIA Torture Report: An Interview with Publisher Dennis Johnson by Jonathon Sturgeon.
From the post:
In what must be considered a watershed moment in contemporary publishing, Brooklyn-based independent publisher Melville House will release the Senate Intelligence Committee’s executive summary of a government report — “Study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program” — that is said to detail the monstrous torture methods employed by the Central Intelligence Agency in its counter-terrorism efforts.
Melville House’s co-publisher and co-founder Dennis Johnson has called the report “probably the most important government document of our generation, even one of the most significant in the history of our democracy.”
Melville House’s press release confirms that they are releasing both print and digital editions on December 30, 2014.
As of December 30, 2014, I can read and mark my copy, print or digital and you can mark your copy, print or digital, but no collaboration on the torture report.
For the “…most significant [document] in the history of our democracy” that seems rather sad. That is that each of us is going to be limited to whatever we know or can find out when we are reading our copies of the same report.
If there was ever a report (and there have been others) that merited a collaborative reading/annotation, the CIA Torture Report would be one of them.
Given the large number of people who worked on this report and the diverse knowledge required to evaluate it, that sounds like bad publishing choices. Or at least that there are better publishing choices available.
What about casting the entire report into the form of wiki pages, broken down by paragraphs? Once proofed, the original text can be locked and comments only allowed on the text. Free to view but $fee to comment.
What do you think? Viable way to present such a text? Other ways to host the text?
PS: Unlike other significant government reports, major publishing houses did not receive incentives to print the report. Jerry attributes that to Dianne Feinstein not wanting to favor any particular publisher. That’s one explanation. Another would be that if published in hard copy at all, a small press will mean it fades more quickly from public view. Your call.