I have been exploring Eric Harvey interesting The Social History of the MP inPitchfork on conversations and wondered how it could be applied to photographic books in a digital age.

Harvey concludes his article with the comment that the first step in this process of music-making.-- the establishment of new infrastructures and technologies-- has already happened.The second step is much tougher: using these new tools to push against the illogical constraints of those who think the old model is still viable, and set about redefining music's value.

If we rewrite his conclusion in terms of photographic books we have this:

We've been conditioned for the past century to think about music [photographic books] as a commodity. While in good faith ("support the artists"), this way of thinking only propagates the most fundamental ideal of capitalism: getting the most stuff for the least money. Otherwise known as "downloading." Artists need to make money for their music [photographic books] (if they want to), and they need a set of flexible legal and technological guarantees to ensure this. But these guarantees need to be flexible enough to allow the fans themselves to use their collective intelligence and passion to help the artists themselves, without being exploited, or written into a script fit for retired actors.

If the networked public sphere shaped by mp3s [photographic books] could collaboratively re-imagine itself not as an audience or a market but as members of a civil society, who feel that they deserve a stake in its own culture, then the rules going forward, and our appreciation of music's [photography's] social and affective values, might emerge like mp3s [photographic books] themselves: from the bottom up. We've long since figured out how to grab and recirculate music [photography]. Now, let's make something with it.