Who is going to implement these aspects of the processed book? Authors? Their agents? Or is there hope for publishers, those benighted organizations that steal the souls of authors?
The answer is, All of the above and more. The processed book is not one thing, nor will it be implemented as a single coherent system whenever a new book is written or published. The processing of the book will be organic. Authors will pitch in, as will their readers, critics, publishers, librarians, and anyone else who touches a book. There is obviously a place here for software vendors as well, and the telecommunications companies that ship this content around will benefit regardless of what a particular node of the network is about. Not all processed books are created equal. Books that lend themselves to linkages to other texts will be processed more. There will be a new quantitative measure: a book is equal to the sum of things that can be linked to it and through it.
Authors will process their own books in the act of writing; indeed they have been doing so for some years now, as word-processing is an aspect of the processed book. They will increasingly write with the processed potential in mind, changing the nature of their texts, as reflected in their style, choice of topic, etc. As they help to bring their books to the attention of others, they will process their books further, perhaps by creating Weblogs (see, for example, www.andrewsullivan.com), which can help promote a book and encourage others to add new layers of processing to it. They will choose their agents and publishers in part for how much processing they can bring to the task, just as they now inquire into who has the best relationships with television talk show producers.
Will they self-publish and disintermediate publishers entirely? Some will, but disintermediation is overblown. Publishers are in a better position than individual authors to develop the network of essential processed relationships. It is hard to build and maintain a single Web site, but it is trivial to build and maintain a thousand. The scale of a publishing house will benefit all the authors, books, and nodes that connect to it. Publishers will acquire software tools for all their titles that can be brought to bear for any individual author, tools to create portals and platforms, for books to be made self-referencing and to be converted into machine components, and ultimately to take their positions as nodes on the network. These tools will be distributed to others in the value chain, to readers and critics, who will add new links to each text. We can see the beginnings of this on Amazon.com, where each title is surrounded by copy provided by publishers and reviews by amateurs and professionals. Because of the cost to create the processed book, size matters: the processed book will contribute to the ongoing consolidation of the publishing industry, as fewer but bigger houses take a larger share of the market.
In the final indignity to authors, it seems likely that the creators of books will begin to lose control of the editorial entity. This has always been true to some extent, of course, as bad or misguided reviews have influenced the reception of many books over the years. With the processed book, however, matters change in both degree and kind. A book can find itself overwhelmed with linked commentary, and if the commentary is irresponsible, how does one correct that except by overlaying even more commentary? Worse (or better, depending on one's bias), multiple versions of a work can circulate independently, each developing its own network around it; and if one or more of these versions do not precisely represent the author's original intention, well, who is to say? What is to stop someone from making some changes in the original work (I never did like Desdemona's eyes) before forwarding the revised text to the next person, and the next person, to everyone, and forever? Or perhaps, by virtue of the sheer accessibility of all texts at all times, with all their relationships mapped in exquisite and excruciating detail, there is an Invisible Hand in critical commentary that ensures that over time the "right" text and the "right" interpretation will prevail.