Before Jacques Derrida died, he used to teach a yearly seminar for grad students at New York University, which I managed to sit in on in the late 90’s.  It was completely over my head, but it was an intellectual roller-coaster that I will never forget.  I could barely remember where I lived after listening to him for a while.  One of his later books, Paper Machine, deals largely with paper and  books.

Included in the book is an interview, where he was asked to what extent paper functions as multimedia, and how paper has influenced his work.  Derrida responds:

Seeing all these questions emerging on paper, I have the impression (the impression!–what a word, already) that I have never had any other subject:  basically paper, paper , paper.  It could be demonstrated, with supporting documentation and quotations, “on paper”: I have always written, and even spoken, on paper: on the subject of paper, an actual paper, and with paper in mind.  Support, subject, surface, mark, trace, written mark, inscription, fold–these were also themes that gripped me by a tenacious certainty, which goes back forever but has been more and more justified and confirmed, that the history of this “thing,” this thing that can be felt, seen and touched, and thus contingent, paper, will have been a brief one.  Paper is evidently the limited “subject ” of a domain circumscribed in the time and space of a hegemony that marks out a period in the history of a technology and in the history of humanity. (p. 41)

Although he wrote this in 2001, it is remarkable how prescient he was, given the recent revolution in ebook readers: the Sony reader, the Kindle and the Nook.

Derrida, Jacques. Paper Machine. Trans. Rachel Bowlby. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005.

• Want to self publish? How about Harlequin?
  Harlequin is starting a a package service for self publishing. This is pretty cool move to be making by a large publishing house, especially when a lot of budding authors are self-publishing because the internet and eBooks make it so easy to distribute. Harlequin is one of the few books publishers doing well in the digital age of the book industry.
  (tags: books)
• SB Sarah on the New York Times talk of the iPod Touch vs Kindle
  SB Sarah from Smart Bitches Trashy Books talks about the iPod Touch and iPhone as Reading devices when compared to most eReading devices. Some of the complaints include the fact the eReader is a unitask device just for reading while the iPhone and the Touch do more. I think besides color, this may be one of the reasons why the mythical iTablet is so anticipated in the eReading market.
  (tags: technology books)
• Twitter, Facebook, Last.fm for Xbox 360 Go Live
  The unitask days of gaming consoles are coming to an end. You can also stream movies from Netflix on the xBox 360 (and the PS3) as well. While the Wii has cool function capabilities that continue to bring in new casual gamers I think the xBox 360 and PS3 and becoming less of a tool for gaming and more of an entertainment system.
  (tags: technology)
• iTablet Gains OLED Display, Delayed Until End of 2010
  It’s funny you keep hearing about the iTablet and not even Apple has actually announced that it will come into fruition. What’s funny is that this was announced by component distributors who I would think wouldn’t actually be allowed by Apple to announce something like this.

  Beloved Quote:”But until it is officially announced, the only place to get one will be in the Atlantis Apple Store, which is staffed by unicorns.”

  (tags: technology)
• Isn’t it romantic? Lingerie from Brazilian line LindeLucy comes equipped with GPS tracking device
  A Bit of the beaten path in terms of new technology, but do we really need underwear with GPS.
  Quote: “‘This collection … is a wink to women and a challenge to men because, even if she gives him the password to her GPS, she can always turn it off,’ Iorio told AFP. “She can be found only if she wants to [be].” It’s Kinky but in a bad way.
  (tags: technology fashion)

Sherwin Siy has a post that helpfully updates us all on the latest twists and turns in Google’s attempts to license the entirety of printed publishing (or as close as it can get to that, anyway).

Late on Friday, a federal court in New York received a new version of the Google Book Search settlement. As with the old version, the new one was drafted jointly by Google and its erstwhile litigation opponents: the publishers and authors who sued Google for scanning their books without permission.

Substantively, the new settlement bears a great resemblance to the old one. There’s a large number of changes (which are conveniently marked up in a downloadable file available from the settlement site here), but while they chip away at some of the rough edges of the earlier proposed settlement, the core of our antitrust concerns seems to remain.

Why is this? Orphan works and the ability of other  players to license and sell works online remains the big issue.

That main concern is that Google should not be the sole entity able to license the display of orphan and unclaimed works.

Nothing in the new settlement agreement seems to change that dynamic.

Siy continues,, explaining that:

Sure, other outlets might be able to embed a sort of Google Book reader into their web pages and act as resellers of the Google database, but that doesn’t create actual competition, especially if it’s Google-controlled information and software at the back end. All that the reseller would be doing is providing different window dressing and customer support.

Bottom line:

In the end, it’s still just Google alone in that market, and that’s something that is a real cause for concern.

Elsewhere: The Googlization of Everything

Below are links to six articles; I’ve assigned one person to each article. There’s no particular significance to which article was assigned to whom–I just went alphabetically by last name.

The articles themselves are short, so I’d like you to read all of them, but you will be responsible for doing a little bit of extra work on the one to which you are assigned. Because one of the things that we’ll be talking about is the effect of digital technology on reading and writing, and because these are all electronic sources, consider the way in which your article is presented. Follow links and read comments (if available). How does the format affect or inform your reading of the text? I’d also like you to be prepared to talk a bit about “your” article: what it’s arguing, how it picks up on issues from earlier in the course and/or the readings for Tuesday, and what you think of its argument.

Thus, then:

• “Libraries of the Future,” from Inside Higher Ed: Emily
• “Bookless Libraries?“, from Inside Higher Ed: Laura
• Mark Prensky, “Digital Natives“: Kaleigh
• “Drop that BlackBerry!“, from CNN.com:  Chris
• Adam Begly’s “Colossus among Critics: Harold Bloom,” from the New York Times: Kristine (If the link takes you to a log-in page, just Google the title and the full article will come up.)
• “Silence the Snobs!“, from Salon.com: Ben

These articles deal with three issues that are relevant for our purposes: the first two concern the effects of digitization on libraries and traditional book holdings; the second two articles (Prensky and CNN) are about the effects of digitization on individuals, and how this affects issues like education; and the last two are about the changing shape of the literary landscape (Harold Bloom famously defends the Western canon and decries many more recent trends in literary studies and theory).

Please let me know right away if any of the links don’t work.

Philip Roth. Image from The Guardian / Orjan F Ellingvag / Dagbladet / Corbis.

Philip Roth is not my favourite writer, but he is surely a good one. One of the post-war American giants – the generation of Bellow, Updike,  Pynchon and Morrison – Roth has given Tina Brown a wide-ranging and exclusive interview on the future of books and literature. He’s in full “Lion in Winter” mode, but perhaps that’s not surprising.

To read a novel requires a certain amount of concentration, focus, devotion to the reading. If you read a novel in more than two weeks you don’t read the novel really. So I think that kind of concentration and focus and attentiveness is hard to come by – it’s hard to find huge numbers of people, large numbers of people, significant numbers of people, who have those qualities.

Nor will the Kindle rescue the form.

The book can’t compete with the screen. It couldn’t compete [in the] beginning with the movie screen. It couldn’t compete with the television screen, and it can’t compete with the computer screen. Now we have all those screens, so against all those screens a book couldn’t measure up.

I think Roth is dead wrong. Cultural pessimism often is (the pessimists of 1930’s Europe are an important exception). Technologies come and go, and so do artistic genres and movements with them. But who’s to say that what replaces them is not just as good, if not perhaps better, than what went before? The advent of the novel polished off the epic poem within a generation, but also paved the way for the great era of 19th Century novelists like Balzac and Dickens. In our time, the success of long-form television drama like The Wire and Mad Men shows that audiences still have a hunger for complex, difficult, detailed stories – as Benjamin Schwarz notes in his masterful critical dissection of the first two series of Mad Men in the Atlantic.

The full interview is here.

Now that most of my research on the future of books is done, it time to start thinking about an effective visual representation of the information. My goal is to do something that will not only be nice to look at but offers useful information that when people visit, they can continue to use it as a reference. Based on readings that I’ve been doing in books like The Information Design Handbook, I know it needs to be something that simple to understand and enhances the information that I’m trying to convey.

What I’m having trouble with is making the visual representation something that is fun and beautiful as well as informative. I don’t want to do just boring stats that move a little, but something that is visually stunning.

This is difficult to do since most of my paper revolves around boring statistics and charts.

Here is an example of what I mean by a visual apply online piece that’s informative and fun.

What is a Print?

I like What is a Print? not only because of it’s interactivity, but because it’s something that is basically informative and doesn’t need constant update. This is what I want, I just need to figure out what information I want to work with as well as how it will look.

QUOTE OF THE DAY
“Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new after all.”  ~Abraham Lincoln

The good folk at QLD Writers Centre have set sail on a blog tour from October to December this year, stopping by a number of sites and asking the people behind them a few questions about what makes them tick. So here’s what this Lost Shark had to say when they came knocking.

Where do your words come from?

Quite literally, all over the place. I often think of myself walking the streets of Brisbane (or wherever I am) with a net, trawling through the multitude of images in search of the ones that will have a lasting impact. I am also hugely influenced by music. I have quite a large instrumental music collection – everything from the sprawling post rock of Godspeed You! Black Emperor to the more delicate sounds of Seaworthy. The way these musicians create narrative and visual images through patterns of sound really fascinates me. More often than not, I have music on while I am writing. Sometimes it stays in the background, other times it drives the creation of the poem. And while I am talking about music, I have to mention how much my work with Sheish Money influences what I do. He, more than anyone, has helped me find the music in my writing. My other major well of words are the conversations, stories and snippets of life that are shared between friends, family and loved ones. But most of all, the words come with their share of sweat. Capturing the idea is often the easy part, shaping it is where the real work is.

Where did you grow up and where do you live now?

Well I grew up in Mt Gravatt and live in Mt. Gravatt. In fact, I (unashamedly) live five streets away from our family home. My wife often says my history is contained in five streets. And that is true in many ways… I did however, spend several years in rural QLD in the mid-nineties and really loved it. My four years in the little township of Jimna (north-west of Kilcoy) was when I really started to develop a serious interest in writing. All that solitude, fresh air and leafy surroundings really centred me and gave me the time to work on my craft… and to read. There are times when I miss that slower lifestyle, but Brisbane is such  an amazing city to live in and I love having family close by. I was really honoured when Samuel Wagan Watson dedicated the poem Tigerland (from Smoke Encrypted Whispers) to me. Mt. Gravatt (or Tigerland as it is affectionately known) is where I grew up and where I truly feel at home.

What’s the first sentence/line of your latest work?

I make a fish from an alphabet

What piece of writing do you wish you had written?

Dionysus & the Fire by Steven Heighton.

It opens with the Irish Proverb – Never arm a man who can’t dance.

Tonight
Dubrovnik burning
& one time Lhasa, London in the blitz
& last year in the Gardens of Babylon, just wilted
women’s shawls
widowed with ash, with atoms of a daughter, son
fresh-weaned from this breast of a planet
left hanging

  & the war?
the war is as good as won
  & the brain?
the brain is a smart bomb
  dance

The words of this long poem bristle with energy (this is just the first stanza above). It is a poem I often read at open mics or as part of a live set. It’s the poem I read when I need a kick in the pants or I think the audience needs one.

What are you currently working towards?

I am working on putting together a new collection of poems titled Ocean Hearted. I have had this in the pipeline for a while now, but put it to one side to complete work on the CD The Stillest Hour this year. I guess like most writers… I am working toward having more time to write, although I think I do okay.

Complete this sentence… the future of the book is…

Safe. The sensory hit of holding a book is something that I firmly believe will continue to mesmerise us for eternity.

To follow the tour, visit Queensland Writers Centre’s blog The Empty Page.

The recent announcement by Amazon that it will release an international version of the Kindle has taken few by surprise. According to PC World, Amazon is already taking orders.

Retro models of the Kindle were somewhat larger

But now the revolution is upon us, commentators are starting to realise the scale of the change it will unleash. In today’s Crikey, for instance, Jeff Sparrow examines the state of the local industry and thinks it will be in for a bumpy ride:

Times are not great for literary publishing. The GFC arrived as the industry already struggled with the collapse of a reviewing culture, declining print runs. and a general crisis about literature’s role in contemporary society. Hence the hope, in some quarters at least, that the Kindle – or something like it – will bring sexy back to reading, that, fortified by e-books, literature will let its hair down and take off its glasses, and the reading public will say, ‘My God, literary novel – you are beautiful!’

Now that’s probably not going to happen. But e-books are not going away, and the industry’s going to have to adapt. It may be a bumpy ride.

Sparrow is right. The publishing industry is way behind where it needs to be in terms of porting its business model from the boutique manufacture of literary artefacts to pure content businesses whose survival will depend on the brand power and audience reach of their authors’ lists – and nothing else.

But many trade publishers soon might be

Perhaps this is why, as Sparrow notes, “at most writers’ festivals, the whole digital thing often sparks far more revulsion than enthusiasm.”

For every Wired fan gushing over a new Gutenberg revolution, there’s a dozen pundits explaining — either mournfully or combatively, depending on temperament  — how they take tactile pleasure in turning printed pages, that ink and paper smell nice, and that the transformation of the bound volumes on their study shelves into ones and zeroes existing only in cyberspace fills them with equal parts horror and disgust.

It is this book-loving culture that is ironically going to be the biggest challenge for publishing houses. The beauty of the printed and bound codex will endure. Many publishers will not.

The New York Times is reporting that the Google book settlement has been delayed by the judge, perhaps sensibly given the scale of the objections raised against it.

While most readers of this blog will be well acquainted with what Google proposes to do (scan everything it can and pay copyright holders a royalty), it’s worth quoting Miguel Helft’s article and the judge’s comments:

“The current settlement agreement raises significant issues, as demonstrated not only by the number of objections, but also by the fact that the objectors include countries, states, nonprofit organizations, and prominent authors and law professors,” Judge Chin wrote. “Clearly, fair concerns have been raised.”

But Judge Chin also echoed comments made by the Justice Department last week that the settlement, if properly revised, could offer great benefits, most notably, by providing broad access to to millions of out-of-print books that are largely locked up in a small group of university libraries.

“The settlement would offer many benefits to society, as recognized by supporters of the settlement as well as D.O.J.,” he wrote, referring to the Department of Justice, which filed its own brief in the case last week. “It would appear that if a fair and reasonable settlement can be struck, the public would benefit.”

This suggests that the case has a good chance of success if it can negotiate the various objections raised to it, offering a potentially dazzling new vista for literary collection agencies and the possibility of real money for authors of long out-of-print books – but also, of course, the threat of the Googlization of Everything.

“The current settlement agreement raises significant issues, as demonstrated not only by the number of objections, but also by the fact that the objectors include countries, states, nonprofit organizations, and prominent authors and law professors,” Judge Chin wrote. “Clearly, fair concerns have been raised.”

But Judge Chin also echoed comments made by the Justice Department last week that the settlement, if properly revised, could offer great benefits, most notably, by providing broad access to to millions of out-of-print books that are largely locked up in a small group of university libraries.

“The settlement would offer many benefits to society, as recognized by supporters of the settlement as well as D.O.J.,” he wrote, referring to the Department of Justice, which filed its own brief in the case last week. “It would appear that if a fair and reasonable settlement can be struck, the public would benefit.

If you’ve every read The End of Books by Robert Coover, you know that in the essay Coover talks about the change that’s going to come from the use of hypertext. That in the near future people will be able to click on any word and it becomes a link to another part of the story within a book. This creates an interactive story that is created not only by the author, but by the audience as well. What’s interesting and important about Coover’s idea is that while hypertext is vastly popular with mediums such as blogs, it’s not mainstream enough for books. I think in a lot of ways ereaders and ereading devices could change that.

One of the more interesting features I love about ebooks is that when it’s in a certain format, it allows for linking within the text. Most of the time those links are used in the table of contents to reach a chapter faster, but I can imagine more interactive ways of using those links within the text. In The End of Books, Coover wasn’t saying that we should get rid of the book, but rather reimagined what the books could do for the reader. Through my research I’ve learned that many studies are being done about how people learn and that in many ways the nonlinear approach that Coover suggest is actually the best method for receiving information and that each individual carries a personal organization system for learning. It keeps coming back to the individual.

I think ebook readers can open up Coover’s idea of hypertext and interactive story telling to new light. Giving authors new freedoms and approaches to how they create their stories. Instead of readers getting a self contained book, the author can instead constantly update the story with new links to different kinds of thoughts and ideas within the character. For instance, often when I write, I create mini stories in my head for my characters. Stories that would never make it to the page, but help me solidify the personality of that character. What if my readers were able to go off into those mini-stories within the main story and read them, so that they could understand my characters on the same level. Much like a soap opera is constantly building on itself, the same could be done with novels.

Quote of the Day
“Hypertext is truly a new and unique environment. Artists who work there must be read there. And they will probably be judged there as well: criticism, like fiction, is moving off the page and on line, and it is itself susceptible to continuous changes of mind and text. Fluidity, contingency, indeterminacy, plurality, discontinuity are the hypertext buzzwords of the day, and they seem to be fast becoming principles, in the same way that relativity not so long ago displaced the falling apple.” ~ Robert Coover The End of Books

Do you own a Sony Reader…or Cooler…or any ebook reader besides a Kindle?! And you want to read Groundswellby Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff as an ebook?
Well guess what…fat chance.

When I was buying my books for class, I noticed that Groundswell wasn’t categorized as a textbook. I thought this was wonderful since I would easily be able to find the book as an ebook (ebooks are so popular right now). Was I wrong…oh so wrong. When I checked  Amazon I found it for Kindle. Normally when a shop I use Amazon and then buy at the Sony Store because I like the interface better and I’m comfortable with browsing there. When I moved over to the Sony store, Groundswellwas nowhere to be found. No Charlene Li and no Josh Bernoff either.

This bothered me to no end because when I was reading the first couple of chapters, it seemed Groundswellwas all about warning against the streisand effect. The streisand effect happens when information is censored but then that information starts to crop up at a uncontrolable rate on webpages and filesharing sites. I think that limitation of information can also lead to the streisand effect since when someone doesn’t make content widely available, it starts to show up in file sharing sites anyway.

So why people of Forresters, producers of Groundswell would you think it was a good idea to only offer the book to Amazon?

The same Amazon that locks up it’s books with DRM and special file formats that you have to pay to convert to PDF. The same Amazon that’s forcing books to be sold at that coveted $9.99 price tag that’s acting like a giant sea squid on the sinking ship known as publishing. Trust me, I’m not a fan of Amazon’s quest for a dictatorship, so why would Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff be?

In the world of ebooks and ebook readers the groundswell is pretty massive. I’m bothered by the fact that Forresters would just ignore that when setting up ebook deals.

4 Things to know about me and books….
1. I have hundreds books in my personal library, and this is after I went through the process of separating out books that could be sold or donated in order to make space.

2. In the span of six months (January to June this year) I’ve accumulated over 60 books in electronic format. (I’ve read at least 40).

3. No one wants to go shopping at the bookstore with me…no one. I think has something to do with me walking around aimlessly for hours.

4. Next week I plan on buying Diana Gabaldon’s An Echo in the Bone.

~*~

The reason I’m saying all of this is because if I’m going to research something, I need to first explain why it’s important to me (also to warn everyone that I’ll be caught up in reading the massive Gabaldon tome next week).

I haven’t always been an avid reader, I didn’t enjoy it at an early age and I can tell you the exact “ah ha” moment I had when I picked up a book I enjoyed and wanted to read more like it. What’s interesting about books and reading for me is not only the thought of going to different places, but the feeling of being intrusted with a precious idea. Any author whether it’s Jane Austen or Danny Wallace have something they want to share and through books we get a chance to see where they’re coming from.

What’s worth exploring, is how the electronic format has changed our approach to reading and the book. In the a lot of ways, reading is a ritual and every person has a different way dealing with that ritual beyond the standard beginning to end. With interactivity and the digital age, I wonder if mainstream authors will be thinking more about how their readers are reading their books. Author Meg Cabot is continuously in touch with her audience through her blog which gives her the opportunity to answer questions directly and to know her audience better. But could more be done by the author beyond websites, blogs and forums?

I’m interested in the dynamics of what’s going on in publishing because in a lot of ways something that’s been around for centuries is going to have to suddenly adapt to the changes we’re seeing in the reader.

Quote of the Day
“When I get a little money, I buy books; and if any is left, I buy food and clothes.” ~ Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus, Dutch Renaissance Humanist (1466-1536)

In Fairfax’s relaunched National Times, Guy Rundle has a perceptive essay on the unsustainability of parallel importation restrictions (often abbreviated to PIR) for Australian books:

Though the chief opponents of PIR have been the large book chains and their tame flacks, the main game in terms of radically cheapening and improving the flow of information and culture should be the abolition of territorial controls altogether.

History shows new and wider modes of circulating knowledge, debate and information are the means by which entrenched power and unquestioned authority is challenged. Just as the printing press destroyed the monasteries, and made possible the Reformation.

This seems genuinely liberatory, so why are so many of the cultural left against it? In Australia, it’s because the cultural left has long seen progress as a coalition between left-liberal intellectuals, the state, and regulation and subsidy. In a backward postwar society that was accurate enough. Not only has technology changed our relationship to the world, but state regulation has become the barrier to wider cultural growth. In the meantime, a left-liberal clique have come to control the cultural institutions now being threatened – and find themselves in the position of defending a system that retains no logical basis whatsoever. Their progressivism has become the conservative status quo, linked to their cultural power.

It’s a valid point, and as always with Rundle, argued with his cutomary flair and elan. It’s true that the executives and cultural managers running Australia’s cultural institutions – and I’m guessing here that Rundle means the big cultural businesses and organisations such as the ABC, Fairfax, the major performing arts companies, state-funded libraries and art galleries and so on – are predominantly “left-liberal” in their political outlook, if only by a kind of default owing to neo-liberal assault on non-market cultural institutions and expressions and the general perspective of many conservatives and economic libertarians that state support for the arts is unjustifiable.

But has state regulation reallly come at the expense of “wider cultural growth” in Australia? On the whole, it’s difficult to argue that it has, especially at a time when many of the most vibrant organisations in Australia’s mixed cultural economy are the state-owned or funded ones, like the ABC and the big city cultural festivals.

Of course, the heavy hand of state regulation is certainly felt in copyright law, where western legislatures (including Australia’s) have enthusiastically enclosed the cultural commons at the bidding of multi-national music and movie industries – not to mention Communications Minister Stephen Conroy’s quixotic tilt at internet regulation .

But does this mean Australia’s comparitively low trade barriers and liberal publishing regulations are really holding back Australian publishing? The evidence from the sector says they are not. In fact, if anything, Australian publishing appears to be thriving under present conditions. This may mean that the industry is healthy enough to survive in a liberalised trade environment. Or it may mean, as the Productivity Commission report on the subject suggests, that the meagre trade protection afforded by parallel importation restrictions has provided a small but valuable cross-subsidy, particularly to the sorts of smaller publishers that support interesting Australian novelists and non-fiction writers. If that is so, then why unilaterally liberalise PIR?

It’s interesting that Rundle finds himself to the right of the Productivity Commission (which ironicallly recommended a public subsidy as a more “efficient” solution to retain the “positive cultural externalities” provided by PIR) on this issue. He is normally quite suspicious of neo-liberal solecisms like the “left-liberal clique” or the “stone-cold absurdity” of cultural protection, and in other contexts, Rundle has railed against the damage wrought on the American middle classes by pro-market, deregulatory policies. Perhaps in this case, his cultural libertarianism is trumping his far more collectivist and radical views on economics.

As for the monastaries, political action by the state was far more influential in their decline than the printing press.

General Thoughts: It would be hard to believe a couple of years ago that you would be able to predict the future of the publishing world as something more exciting then declining sales. Reading wasn’t considered cool and on a lot of levels publishing was having a difficult time bring in younger readers. Who would have thought that the book publishing world would be having an epic battle of not only technology, but of what’s going to happen next? eReaders and the ebook format in general are changing the way people look at books and while there are still heavy value of regular paper over e-paper it’s not difficult to see with companies like that of Amazon and Sony that the digital format is solidifying itself as a publishing product of both fiction and nonfiction.

So the real question isn’t necessarily what’s going to happen next, but rather what’s going to happen now? A lot of questions about electronic reading still remain unanswered and while the technology moves ahead and becomes faster and more user friendly there are a lot questions and boundaries that need to take place. If one were to look at the cycle of technology, ereading would be at the commercial phase and more than ready to move into the regulatory phase by next year. Why is this? Above I mentioned epic battle of the ereader devices and I wasn’t kidding, much like Mac or PC, many people in the know are asking questions like Kindle or Sony, but even that question could open up to Kindle/Sony/Cooler? With the electronic format anything could happen within the next couple of years.

But what about the prevailing paper format. While there is an interesting battle going on inside our electronic devices the bookstore as whole remains relatively unchanged from a couple of year ago. A lot of publishers rely on the confidence of their ability to make money in the store to even be bothered with the electronic devices leaving those who have fully moved into ereading solely very cold.

The purpose of my paper is to understand the current situation and predict the outcome of the electronic reading format and its effect on reading/books as a whole.

Topics of Discussion:

            The History of the Book: a brief look at the history of the book and publishing up to 2006 when Sony released its first ereading device. A more in-depth look from 2006 to today in terms of the growth of the format. Discussing terminology (do we really need to place “e” in front of everything?) Also answering questions of what is a book and what is its main purpose?

            The eBook Format: Looking at the several formats both DRM and nonDRM and discussing the prevailing format and what makes it best all around.

            The eReader Device: Understanding the epic battle and predicting who will come out on top.

            The Paperback: Looking at paper format books, the bookstores, and the changes that may happen because of the validation of the ebook.

            What Needs to Happen Next: Looking at what could make the ereading experience better for the overall use of the book, including academic study, artist books, and the study of the book. Who is thinking about this the most?

Geoffrey Nunberg thinks so. Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, he points out the many appalling errors to be found in the book search engine, in part attributable to Google’s sketchy handling of publishing meta-data:

Start with publication dates. To take Google’s word for it, 1899 was a literary annus mirabilis,which saw the publication of Raymond Chandler’s Killer in the Rain, The Portable Dorothy Parker, André Malraux’s La Condition Humaine, Stephen King’s Christine, The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf, Raymond Williams’s Culture and Society 1780-1950, and Robert Shelton’s biography of Bob Dylan, to name just a few. And while there may be particular reasons why 1899 comes up so often, such misdatings are spread out across the centuries. A book on Peter F. Drucker is dated 1905, four years before the management consultant was even born; a book of Virginia Woolf’s letters is dated 1900, when she would have been 8 years old. Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities is dated 1888, and an edition of Henry James’s What Maisie Knew is dated 1848.

But it gets worse:

Then there are the classification errors, which taken together can make for a kind of absurdist poetry. H.L. Mencken’s The American Language is classified as Family & Relationships. A French edition of Hamlet and a Japanese edition of Madame Bovary are both classified as Antiques and Collectibles (a 1930 English edition of Flaubert’s novel is classified under Physicians, which I suppose makes a bit more sense.) An edition of Moby Dick is labeled Computers; The Cat Lover’s Book of Fascinating Facts falls under Technology & Engineering. And a catalog of copyright entries from the Library of Congress is listed under Drama (for a moment I wondered if maybe that one was just Google’s little joke).

Nunberg makes some good points. As Google continues to take-over the traditional functions of bibliographic referencing, the temptations for shoddy scholars to crib from its inaccuracies will multiply.

In today’s Australian newspaper, Susan Hayes from the Literature Board of the Australia Council for the Arts weighs on Bob Stein’s visit and the future of digital publishing. I don’t think she’s totally across it, but then again, who is? It’s good to see the Australia Council is at last taking an interest in digital artforms:

When US digital guru Bob Stein and I sat down at the Melbourne Writers Festival last month to discuss the future of the book, we were searching for common ground. Bob is one of those guys who calls books user-driven media. I’m one of those women of a certain age who belongs to a book club and can’t get on a plane without at least one novel in my hand luggage.

Nevertheless, while Bob and I may disagree about the sanctity of an author’s work and certain aspects of copyright, we were certainly on the same page in acknowledging that the paper book, as we know it, will gradually disappear from our shelves over the next 10 years.

I welcome the day when I can ditch that heavy book and download a dozen titles on to my lightweight e-reader before I fasten my seatbelt.

The full article is here.

Last Thursday, my sister (Kate Eltham of Electric Alphabet) moderated a whole day of sessions about digital publishing at the Melbourne Writers Festival.

It was a fascinating series of sessions which included some very interesting comments from the Institute for the Future of the Book’s Bob Stein.  While I didn’t record or transcribe his comments at the festival, I was able to chat to him on Friday night, which was brief but very rewarding. I’m going to attempt a brief precis of some of the things he said, in the sessions I saw.

Bob thinks that the changes transforming book publishing are both lesser and greater than often made out.  Pointing out that it took  centuries to elapse from the invention of the printing press to the first publication of a novel (I believe his candidate is Richardson’s Pamela – though many would contest this by pointing to Bunyan or Cervantes), he argues that it may similarly take some time for what future  posterity might consider to be the “classic” or “definitive” form of the new publishing to emerge. But, in response to another question, Stein also argued that the threat posed to the trade publishing industry by digital technologies could be worse than that which has confronted the music publishing industry in the past decade. He also points out that silent reading in private is a comparatively recent social phenomenon. It’s a very thoughtful and nuanced view, which he explored in this piece for The Age earlier this July:

Reading and writing have always been social activities, but the fact tends to be obscured by the way we engage with the medium of print. We grew up with images of the solitary reader curled up in a chair or under a tree and the writer alone in a garret.

The most important thing my colleagues and I have learned over the past few years from a series of experiments with “networked books” is that as discourse moves off the page onto the network, the social aspects are revealed with sometimes startling clarity. These exchanges move from background to foreground, a transition that has dramatic implications.

[...]

Traditionally, authors have made a commitment to engage with a subject matter on behalf of future readers, with whom they would have no particular contact. In the new paradigm, I think, an author’s commitment will be to engage with readers in the context of a subject matter.

Essentially, authors are about to learn what musicians have grasped during the past 10 years – that they get paid to show up. For musicians, this means live performances account for an increasingly significant percentage of their income in contrast to ever-shrinking royalties from sales. With books, as we redefine content to include the conversation that grows up around the text, the author will increasingly be expected to be part of that ongoing conversation and, of course, expect to be paid for that effort.

Stein concludes with an interestingly political point that in some ways echoes Walter Benjamin’s closing remarks in his essay on the artwork in the age of mechanical reproducibility:

Smart experimenting and careful listening to users/readers/authors will be very important. How we make this shift has critical long-term implications for society.

Been doing a bit of thinking about e-books of late.  With e-books, there is the tendency to see them as merely books in electronic form. But that is futile because they’re not.  Although at present they are just that – books in electronic form, their potential is far beyond that.  They are, to a degree, the Internet “reading” experience in “book” form.

This experience is one of logging on, reading something, perhaps linking from there to another page, or going back to the original page and linking from there to elsewhere.  It is also multi-media – from a news story to a youtube video to a search via an engine on the toolbar etc etc until the thread on the reader’s interest runs dry.  However, there is a crucial difference to this reading experience from the “book” reading experience, and that is narrative.

The internet reading experience is based on an internal narrative going on inside the reader’s mind that is not externally obvious to any other reader.  There is no possibility of a shared story.  For it to become a shared story, a clear narrative of sorts is required.  The links need to be signposted within the framework of a story narrative.   Thus while it is all very well to say that the potential for e-books is that the possibilities for e-books include “books with scored soundtracks and video inserts“, unless these things are added within the framework of a narrative, they can only be add-ons like  DVD extras.  I think that the great potential for e-books will be their ability to imitate the internet “reading” experience with the added bonus of narrative.

Went to the British Library exhibition called the Future of the Book. I have not, as a rule, gone to many exhibitions in museums, libraries, galleries. I think that I associate these type of experiences with school and “having” to be there. I love art, literature, plays etc, but I just feel a bit stressed out and hemmed in when I’m in formal environments.

But this was an opportunity to try out three e-readers, including the iLiad which allows users to annotate the texts. I was quite excited  by this, as all my books are covered with my scrawlings.

The press release described the exhibition as follows: “Situated on the 1st floor of the Library’s flagship building at St Pancras, the e-reader display will give visitors the chance to familiarise themselves with these new devices and to freely explore the possible recreational and research benefits of the e-book revolution.”

Please bear in mind that I got up early on a Saturday morning for this, again another rare occurence.

On arrival I found that there was a tiny table in the corridor on the first floor. One e-reader sat on the table, broken. The other two were missing, apparently removed because they too were broken.

I hope that the Future of the Book is looking brighter than this exhibition at the BL!

This blog tends to delve into the academic literature of cultural policy a fair bit, so it’s occassionally useful to zoom out and look at the big picture issues that are shaping our culture and lives.

Chris Anderson’s Long Tail theory continues to be one of the most influential descriptions of these issues and tredns, while Malcolm Gladwell continues to be one of the greatest communicators in non-fiction in any genre today. So Gladwell reviewing Anderson is something of a tech-trend-big issue detah match:

“Free” is essentially an extended elaboration of Stewart Brand’s famous declaration that “information wants to be free.” The digital age, Anderson argues, is exerting an inexorable downward pressure on the prices of all things “made of ideas.” Anderson does not consider this a passing trend. Rather, he seems to think of it as an iron law: “In the digital realm you can try to keep Free at bay with laws and locks, but eventually the force of economic gravity will win.” To musicians who believe that their music is being pirated, Anderson is blunt. They should stop complaining, and capitalize on the added exposure that piracy provides by making money through touring, merchandise sales, and “yes, the sale of some of [their] music to people who still want CDs or prefer to buy their music online.” To the Dallas Morning News, he would say the same thing. Newspapers need to accept that content is never again going to be worth what they want it to be worth, and reinvent their business. “Out of the bloodbath will come a new role for professional journalists,” he predicts.

You can read the rest of the review at The New Yorker.

You have probably come across many of these already, but here goes:

Cory Doctorow’s awesome book of essays, Content.

Jay Rosen’s flying seminar on the future of news. This is the best recent collection of resources on this issue I could find. Fantastic post.

Webilus’ beautiful graphical essay on the internet in 2008, from New Scientist.

The Project for Excellence in Journalism’s The New Washington Press Corps

Mark Pesce on The Power of Sharing

A few articles recently on the future of publishing have caught my attention:  John Sutherland’s Long live the codex in the London Review of Books; Colin Robinson’s  (recently redundant editor) Diary from the same worthy journal; and In Defense of Readers from A List Apart.

What struck me about the first two of these articles is how the publishing industry has been caught up and swept away in the debt bubble against perhaps its own better judgement.  But the sheer scale of changes that were foisted upon the financial institutions of the world were the same changes that arrived for the publishing world.  There is only a small step from the innovation of new financial instruments promoting investment banking over traditional banks to the innovations publishing instruments giving  Amazon and major booksellers power over publishers.  It is little wonder then that after the failed sustainability of these financial instruments, Jason Epstein in his book Publishing Past, Present and Future predicts the unsustainability of the Amazon business model:

‘the structural problems of online retailers . . . are intrinsic and cannot be outgrown. Online commerce rewards unmediated transactions between producer and consumer. It abhors middlemen, a vestige of earlier and obsolete technologies, and devours their cash.’

He forsees publishers eventually taking over the retailing side of the books business, acting as brokers of literary value between readers and authors.

What has also struck me about the publishing industry’s suction into the financial bubble is that much like the earlier dot.com bubble, eyes have been taken off the ball and lifted to above long on where an imaginary ball sails for six. In this case, the imaginary ball is imaginary profits arising from new publishing innovations given to booksellers; the ball is the audience – the readers – for whom publishers are meant to finding for their products – those trusty codexes more commonly called books.  The booksellers however have to a degree forced publishers eyes off the ball.Now there is coming the sickening dead clunk of the ball striking the wickets.  Colin Robinson writes

“A visit to a chain bookstore these days is often depressing. The deep stock and intelligent service of just a few years ago are increasingly giving way to display areas that look more like ‘Books and Mags’ emporia, with dump bins of assorted bargains and jarring juxtapositions of titles. Promoting books overwhelmingly on the basis of reduced price is never going to bolster their perceived value…In order to cope with their frail position, the chains are reducing stock levels and ‘passing’ on – i.e. failing to order – an ever widening range of new titles, even from large publishing houses. This will accentuate an already marked feature of the business, the so-called ‘crisis of the mid-list’, with the paring away to practically nothing of promotion expenditure on all books except the lead titles.”

Robinson very aptly notes that an industry “that spends all its money on bookseller discounts and very little on finding an audience is getting things the wrong way round.” Fortunately in a cricket team there are eleven batsmen, and in a good old fashioned test match, two innings. So there is a chance again for the publishing industry to refocus its eyes on the ball by utilising developments in technologies that perhaps benefit them better than they do booksellers.

Surely there is encouragement for publishers to be found in a website for website designers advancing the virtues of readers.  Mandy Brown writes:

“Despite the ubiquity of reading on the web, readers remain a neglected audience. Much of our talk about web design revolves around a sense of movement: users are thought to be finding, searching, skimming, looking. We measure how frequently they click but not how long they stay on the page. We concern ourselves with their travel and participation—how they move from page to page, who they talk to when they get there—but forget the needs of those whose purpose is to be still. Readers flourish when they have space—some distance from the hubbub of the crowds—and as web designers, there is yet much we can do to help them carve out that space.”

If website designers are beginning to think along these lines, it is encouraging indeed.