WIKILEAKS - "WE STILL NEED BOOKS TO MAKE SENSE OF WIKILEAKS"

We still need books to make sense of Wikileaks

Up to the minute it may be, but Julian Assange's new media sensation will need traditional print to come into clear focus

·

o

o Share21

o

o

· Comments (27)

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange talks to the media. Photograph: Chris Radburn/PA

Anyone who thinks the book (ie the codex) is dead and buried in the Age of Amagoogle should reflect on the bizarre and improbable, but enthralling, story of Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks. This Australian computer hacker turned cyber-anarchist has exploited the opportunities afforded by underground digital publishing to create a latterday samizdat that has generated a worldwide nervous breakdown among diplomats, journalists, and international copyright lawyers. Now wanted dead or alive more or less everywhere, Assange has flourished in the Wild West of the IT revolution.

Paradoxically, the more his profile (and influence) has been expanded by the new media, the more Assange has turned to the old media of print journalism and – as of this week – the book. In its opening chapters, the Assange story was emblematic of the age. First, it was extreme, and it was viral. The mass of secret data released by Wikileaks was on an unprecedented scale. The Pentagon Papers of 1971 numbered some 2.5m words. Wikileaks has exposed some 300m, most of them still largely unmediated or fully digested. The world's response was extreme, too. To some he is a cyber Messiah. To others, especially in the US, conservatives like Sarah Palin, he is a traitor who should be tried and executed.

Assange, secondly, is a zeitgeist figure in another way, too. He is truly – and astonishingly – global: constantly on the move, flitting from time zone to time zone, he is the McCavity of the laptop, always a nanosecond away from a screen, protected by a phalanx of international lawyers. Third, another paradox: this public phenomenon is obsessively, even comically, secretive. He is a fierce advocate of "transparency", but will threaten to sue the press on whom he has depended when faced with any loss of independence or control.

But lately – and this is where the Assange story gets interesting – he is appearing in the pages of books.

In Germany, there is Wikileaks: Enemy of the State. At the same time, another disgruntled former Wikileaks associate, Daniel Domscheit Berg, will launch his inside story on 11 February. In Paris, where Le Monde named Assange man of the year, French publishers are also jumping on the bandwagon. Meanwhile, a new transatlantic print-on-demand publisher, OR Books, is promising Wikileaks and the Age of Transparency by Micah L Sifry, later this month. It will be published in a trade edition by Yale in due course.

Most intriguing of all, both the Guardian and the New York Times, prime movers in the global howl inspired by Wikileaks, have just released "instant paperbacks" (respectively, Wikileaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy, and Open Secrets: Wikileaks, War and American Diplomacy, with an introduction by Bill Keller).

To anyone who has memories of the Penguin Specials of the 1960s or theSunday Times's Insight books (on, for example, the Thalidomide scandal), these titles will provoke a sharp attack of déja vu. Both represent an extraordinary feat of writing and publishing, but of the two, only the NYT title is appearing as an ebook.

It's a nice irony that this helps to put Assange's achievement into a better perspective. Without the Guardian and the New York Times (or their European newspaper partners), Wikileaks might have remained just another marginal cyber-rant known chiefly to geeky conspiracy theorists and paranoid nerds. The new technology certainly made Wikileaks possible, but it was two dinstinguished international newspapers that made Assange's message revolutionary.

Similarly, it will be the Guardian book, superbly narrated by David Leigh and Luke Harding, with an introduction from editor Alan Rusbridger, that will start to give substance, in the mind of the ordinary reading public, to Assange, the elfin figure on our TV screens.

Wikileaks is unputdownable. The Leigh/Harding narrative reads like Stieg Larsson out of Joseph Conrad by Peter Carey. And it is – another small victory for old style publishing – a scoop that will give pause to the senior executives of Knopf (in the US) and Canongate (in the UK) who forked over $1m for Assange's story, a book that was supposed to come out in spring 2011.

However, I hear that while Assange can dance across a keyboard to liberate secret data, this does not make him a great writer. The publishers have approached several writers to ghost the complete Wikileaks Versus the World: My Story, and a new round of negotiations has begun about the text. The author is said to be pining for Australia. Knopf/Canongate might be advised to make overtures for special rates with Qantas.

One person who will certainly come up smiling from all this is the film director Paul Greengrass. He has been negotiating to turn Assange's life into a secret-agent thriller. "Soon To Be A Major Motion Picture". Now where, I wonder, have we read that before?

On the cover of a book, of course.

Posted byRobert McCrumWednesday 2 February 2011 14.38 GMTguardian.co.uk