Starting today and running for the next month, I’ll be joining a half-dozen other professors in a discussion on the Journal of American History website on the promise and challenges of digital history. It’s great that the JAH is providing this forum and publishing the results in their September 2008 issue. I’m hoping they’ll open up the live discussion to the public, but it seems unlikely since they want to redact the text for publication. I’ll try to mention interesting topics that arise in the discussion in this space.

Having already succumbed to the siren’s song that prodded me narcissistically to create a blog, I had very little resistance left when Amazon.com emailed me to ask if I might like to join the beta of program that allows authors to reach potential buyers and existing owners of their books by writing blog-like posts. Called “Amazon Connect,” this service will soon be made available to the authors of all of the books available for purchase on Amazon. Here are some notes about my experience joining the program (and how you can join if you’re an author), some thoughts about what Amazon Connect might be able to do, and some insider information about their upcoming launch.

First, the inside scoop. As far as I can tell, Amazon Connect began around Thanksgiving 2005 with a pilot that enlisted about a dozen authors. It has been slowly expanding since then but is still in beta, and a quiet beta at that. It’s unlikely you’ve seen an Amazon Connect section on one of their web pages. However, I recently learned from the Amazon Connect team that in early February the service will have its official launch, with a big publicity push.

After that point, each post an author makes will appear on the Amazon.com page for his or her book(s). I found out by writing a post of my own that his feature is actually already enabled, as you can see by looking at the page for Digital History (scroll down the page a bit to see my post).

But the launch will also entail a much more significant change—to the home page of Amazon.com itself, which is of course individualized for each user. Starting in February, on the home page of every Amazon user who has purchased your book(s), your posts will show up immediately. Since it’s unlikely that a purchaser of a book will return to that book’s buy page, this appearance on the Amazon home page is important: Authors will effectively gain the ability to send messages to a sizable number of their readers.

Since generally it has been impossible to compile a decent contact list for those who buy a specific book (unless you’re in the NSA or CIA), Amazon’s idea is intriguing. While Amazon Connect is clearly intended to sell more books, and the writing style they advocate less than academic (”a conversational, first-person tone”), it’s remarkable to think that the author of a scholarly monograph might be able to reach a good portion of their audience this way. Indeed, I suspect that for authors of academic press books that might not sell hundreds of thousands of copies, the proportion of buyers of their book that use Amazon is much higher than for popular books (since those books are sold in a higher percentage at physical Barnes & Noble and Borders stores, and increasingly at Costco and Wal-Mart). Could Amazon Connect foster smaller communities of authors and readers, for more esoteric topics?

If you are an author and would like to join the Amazon Connect beta in time for the February launch, here’s what you need to do:

1) First, you must have an Amazon account. If you already have one, go to the special Amazon Connect website, login, and claim your book(s) using the “Register Your Bibliography” link. This involves listing the contact info for your publisher, editor, publicist, or other third party that can verify that you are actually the author of the book(s) you list. About a week later you’ll get an email confirming that you have been verified.

2) Create a profile. You are required to upload a photo, write a short biography, and provide some other information about yourself (such as your email address) that you can choose to share with your audience (I didn’t fill a lot of this out, such as my favorite movies).

3) Once you’ve been added to the system, you can start writing posts. Good luck saying hello to your readers, and remember Amazon Connect rule #5: “No boring content”!

Like so many others who enjoy the sound of their own voice and the sight of their own words on a printed page—I would estimate this group as a majority of humanity—I have increasingly felt the urge to write a blog. Blogging has obviously emerged as one of the remarkable, unique products of the web, providing for the first time a nearly frictionless way to immediately reach a worldwide audience with your thoughts.

Having written for paper media, I’ve experienced the frustration of the glacial pace of most publications. In academia this problem is particularly acute. For instance, I completed the first draft of a book chapter I wrote on nineteenth-century mathematics in May of 2002; I finally got to see it in print in May of 2005. Even in the best cases (and there are not many), an academic journal article generally takes a full year from the time you have completed most of the work on the article to the time it shows up on the pages of the journal.

On the other hand, maybe there’s not much urgency in seeing the latest on Victorian mathematics. As far as I know, all of the mathematicians I discuss in the book chapter remain dead, or at least oddly unproductive; those who are interested in their lives and work would just as well wait for a considerate, thoughtful, and complete article regardless of how slowly it took to arrive in print. And unlike in the sciences, there is rarely concern about precedent. My book on the larger history of pure mathematics in the Victorian era has taken about full decade between inception and completion, but I haven’t had many sleepless nights worrying that someone else has duplicated my work or theories.

So here’s the rub, and I suspect I’m not alone in this view: while I’m attracted to the instant gratification of publishing to the web, I’ve more often than not found blogs to be dissatisfying. Perhaps it’s absurd elitism or years of reading overly long tomes. But it’s a feeling that’s hard to shake. The ease with which one can post means that it’s often too easy to post the half-baked and the half-written.

So for this blog I’ve tried to set a higher mark for myself (the elitism now unites with an unwise masochism). While my posts may not be daily, I hope that they will function more like well thought out mini-articles, and transfer to this blog’s audience my understanding of the digital humanities in as great a depth as possible.

Stay tuned for posts explaining how to do for yourself experimental digital work (e.g., how to use the Google Maps API to build your own interactive historical map); posts communicating in a plainspoken way some of the more complex topics in computer science in ways that hopefully will spark ideas among humanists; and posts exploring the implications of new technologies and methodologies for teaching, learning, and researching in a digital age.

I hope that you’ll also join the conversation by emailing me at dcohen@gmu.edu if you have any comments or suggestions.