There’s an interesting discussion going on over at if:book about Amazon Author blogs. (Actually, it’s a rather short discussion, but I think the commenter Bowerbird brings up some thought-provoking points in her/his two posts.)

It’s always been fascinating to me that the earliest commercial success on the Internet, Amazon.com, used this new medium as a way to sell old media. Now Amazon is jumping (albeit incompletely) onto the blogging bandwagon as well. But Bowerbird laments the fact that these blogs — and indeed blogs in general — aren’t really much different from old media either. Blogs, for Bowerbird, are “one-way” communication — author to reader, with little interaction.

Less heralded, but more revolutionary, Bowerbird says, are old-fashioned listservs and newfangled wikis. Or are they?

Listservs, like blogs, can be completely one-way. Listservs can restrict who is able to post, just like blogs can disable comments. And listservs are vulnerable to spam — both in the traditional sense of mass-marketing, and equally insidiously, by being overwhelmed with irrelevant comments. And while wikis do much to demote the status of the monolithic author, the face they present to the public is most certainly monolithic: Wikipedia is imitating that crustiest, most elitist form of old media, the encyclopedia.

But let’s assume the blog form is one-way, just like the old media. Is there anything wrong with that? A single voice dominating the mediascape is obviously a problem, but blogs, by their very nature, rely on multiple voices. You can still have a listserv with only one voice, but a blog in its classic form — a record of a user’s wanderings about the Internet — wouldn’t have any appeal if it didn’t have that wider Internet to comment on, link to, and interact with. A blog is a distillation of many voices through the filter of one voice. One blog in isolation may be one-way, but many blogs taken together are not.

More importantly, and perhaps paradoxically, blogs allow the preservation of individual voices on the Internet. E-mail addresses can be spoofed, commenters can post under aliases, even book authors can plagiarize and imitate. Blogs can do most of that, too, and anonymous blogs sometimes become quite popular, but even in their anonymity, the successful anonymous blogs do have distinct voices. The power of a blog comes from the fact that readers come to know who’s behind it. The author is front and center on a blog. In a wiki, locating the author of an article can be a futile archaeological expedition. This isn’t “conversation” — the conversants don’t even know each other and have a difficult time identifying each other. Further, they often erase each other’s speech. On a listserv, individual voices can be identified, but finding all of the comments by a single author is not as easy as it is with a blog. Without knowing the other participants the way bloggers do, a dialog is often reduced to talking back and forth.

This isn’t to say that blogs don’t have problems. Bloggers are at the mercy of their readers; sometimes their best work isn’t noticed. When you post to a listserv, at least you know your intended recipient will get your message (though whether they’ll actually read it is less certain).

But back to the issue of blogs and books. I’ve written several books, both with and without the assistance of blogs. Now that I’m a blogger, I don’t think I’ll write another book without blogging it as I write. This is different from a “blook” (I’m not talking about an online book like the Moby Blook, but the more common use of the term as a print book made out of blog posts), where the decision to create a book follows the decision to blog. Instead, the blog is created in the service of the book — a repository for notes, a way to work through arguments, plotlines, whatever. That’s not to say that the entire book would be online before it’s published — there’s still work to do to synthesize blog posts and comments, to create the connective tissue that makes a continuous text, rather than a chronological list of thoughts. The real advantage of the book blog is the way it enables me to get an instant response from readers — sometimes just my friends and interested colleages, but also people I’ve never met. Though a book blog may be one-way compared to, say, a phone call, or making love, it makes traditional book writing seem as unstimulating as failed masturbation.