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I often get asked what I think about "the future of the book", which is such a complicated question, and so shot through with hidden assumptions, that it is impossible to answer in a few words. It is an important question, though, so I want to try to answer it in a lot of words.

First things first. In these conversations, "the book" is an overstuffed metonym, standing in for everything from the physical object to the viability of independent book stores to that one time when you were reading in the college library and the late afternoon light was streaming in and everything was just perfect. And the only coherent answer that can be given about the future of all those things and more is "It depends." The economic logic of the age is unbundling, and nothing is being unbundled from its traditional context faster than the written word. And once the unbundling happens, different parts of the system will have different fates.

Once you stop thinking of "the book" as both an object and a reference to the current system, it becomes clear that books qua books do some things well and others badly, and the question becomes how to keep the good bits while transforming everything else.

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The media landscape is changing, not in one big way but in several ways at once. Here are three of the most important ones:

1. Publication is often the default choice.

The current rationale for editorial judgment comes, at base, from the economic risk publishers run of spending time and effort producing unpopular material. Those economic limitations to publication are now gone on the internet; the question every amateur creator asks themselves every day isn't "Why publish this?" but "Why not?" If a funny photo will amuse even two of my friends, there's little reason not to make it globally available.

There will be more data, and more kinds of data, produced and published by users every year. The balance of production will shift from the professionals to the amateurs, and as this happens, and an increasing number of companies will make their mark not as producers or even hosts of content, but as filterers and interpreters. Delicious creates remarkable value simply by aggregating individual labels; Ning provides a site for communities to form, from purely social groups through communities of practice devoted to improving their skills; MySpace and Facebook only exist as aggregators -- they offer no services of any use to the isolated individual, the opposite of the broadcast model.

Increasingly, the creation of value will shift from proprietary control of unique data to include the ability to combine that data with other, external sources, and even, in some cases (as with Technorati or NetVibes) to build value only with external sources.

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Imagine a technology that, from its inception, threatens to throw intellectual society into chaos, a technology that radically democratizes both production and consumption of media while creating countless new forms of expression. Now imagine that while some of the new material produced is of lasting value, most is evanescent at best, and that the resulting flood of material weakens traditional institutions, eroding their special place in society by making the functions they provide seem irrelevant to young people.

Imagine, in other words, that this technology creates a stark choice between preserving the current state of society vs. embracing the new, even given the destruction of of traditional values and institutions. Which side would you be on?

I don't have to ask, because if you are reading a Penguin blog, you have already identified yourself as one of the revolutionaries, an embracer of the most intellectually radical technology the world has ever seen: the printing press.

It is impossible to be pro-book and anti-revolution -- the printed word is revolution incarnate, responsible for a greater alteration of the intellectual landscape than anything since the alphabet itself. Movable type so thoroughly remade European culture that the 17th century has more in common with the 21st century than it did with the 15th.

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Clay Shirky is our guest blogger during the week of March 10th. If you have any questions for Clay Shirky, add a comment to any of his posts. Here is some brief information about Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organzing Without Organizing:

A handful of kite hobbyists scattered around the world find each other online and collaborate on the most radical improvement in kite design in decades. A midwestern professor of Middle Eastern history starts a blog after 9/11 that becomes essential reading for journalists covering the Iraq war. Activists use the Internet and e-mail to bring offensive comments made by Trent Lott and Don Imus to a wide public and hound them from their positions. A few people find that a world-class online encyclopedia created entirely by volunteers and open for editing by anyone, a wiki, is not an impractical idea. Jihadi groups trade inspiration and instruction and showcase terrorist atrocities to the world, entirely online. A wide group of unrelated people swarms to a Web site about the theft of a cell phone and ultimately goads the New York City police to take action, leading to the culprit's arrest.

With accelerating velocity, our age's new technologies of social networking are evolving, and evolving us, into new groups doing new things in new ways, and old and new groups alike doing the old things better and more easily. You don't have to have a MySpace page to know that the times they are a changin'. Hierarchical structures that exist to manage the work of groups are seeing their raisons d'tre swiftly eroded by the rising technological tide. Business models are being destroyed, transformed, born at dizzying speeds, and the larger social impact is profound.

One of the culture's wisest observers of the transformational power of the new forms of tech-enabled social interaction is Clay Shirky, and Here Comes Everybody is his marvelous reckoning with the ramifications of all this on what we do and who we are. Like Lawrence Lessig on the effect of new technology on regimes of cultural creation, Shirky's assessment of the impact of new technology on the nature and use of groups is marvelously broad minded, lucid, and penetrating; it integrates the views of a number of other thinkers across a broad range of disciplines with his own pioneering work to provide a holistic framework for understanding the opportunities and the threats to the existing order that these new, spontaneous networks of social interaction represent. Wikinomics, yes, but also wikigovernment, wikiculture, wikievery imaginable interest group, including the far from savory. A revolution in social organization has commenced, and Clay Shirky is its brilliant chronicler.