![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
The Future of the Book
"What is the future of the book? Authors Margaret Atwood, Andrew O'Hagan and Erica Wagner [also reviews ed. of the Sunday Times] and publisher Stephen Page, Chief Executive of Faber & Faber, discuss the brave new world of authors, readers and publishers in the age of new technology." -- Queen Elizabeth Hall, 17.04.07, 19:30
This is pretty much just a transcript of my notes (apart from the stabby stabby remarks and some asides about mealtimes in C17 England). I've retained my more pertinent observations, in italics.
I came away with the sense that none of the panellists was really addressing the question -- and that they were each talking about something quite different. Also that Ma is a bit of a Luddite, and almost certainly unaware of such technologies as the PDA, mobile internet, etc, and possibly does not know how to switch off spellchuck and gramarye in her WP package of choice. (MS Word. She likes the Assistant. I rest my case.)
AH:
- Quoting Edith Wharton, "'A writer's keen sense of copyright is the nearest she has to an emotion.'"
- "Democratisation without control is a disaster for culture."
- Copy and paste is bad! Literature online can be reduced to "just a parade of text".
This man does not talk in sentences.
- Having everything out there for consumption sounds cool, but someone's first short story is not equivalent to Shakespeare. There's no editing and no quality control. This is not a great liberation. If the material's not selected, edited and presented then it's useless.
SP:
- technophiles try to reduce the debate to 'holding onto an idea that's dead'
- 'what we call books and they call content' actually I call it text
- "The majority of blogs have relieved publishers of an enormous burden." ♥ ♥ ♥
MA:
- 2000 years ago we'd have been bemoaning the death of the scroll
help we are surrounded by people who laugh at MA's witticisms!!!
- 'you don't neurologically assimilate the text off the computer in the same was as you do with a book' grrr
- "I'm glad we're not talking about the death of the author!"
EW:
- the test of a book-replacement is, can you drop it in the bath?
- there are 100,000 books published each year in the UK (what %age are fiction?)
- books are lovely as objects, and publishers can fight the rise of e-reading by making books into lovely, sensory things
MA:
- on why editing by hand is better than 'the green line and the red line' which are 'frequently wrong' and are doing something quite different anyway)
- the key tool: a ruler, to aid reading line-by-line and spotting repetition etc, which 'you can't do with a computer' slight paraphrase
- she still edits on the page so do I, still uses Tippex
Audience
- The internet and e-publishing opens up books in terms of accessibility -- to poor, visually impaired etc -- DRM slams that door shut
SP: once something's [purchased from a publisher and] downloaded it'll be possible to have it in whatever format is desired
- refers approvingly to EW's 'book fetishism'
- the cost of making the different formats available is the key point
- e-bokos and print-on-demand are cheaper to produce
AO
- it's quite hard to make an argument for keeping, say, Louis McNiece in print -- a commercial market would kill Louis McNiece
MA
- [picking up on someone else's analogy between popular books and supermarket baked beans] 'there's a very wide range of publishers, some doing beans, some doing truffles'
the panel in general
- decry the rise of Richard and Judy, celebrity ghostwritten things, etc etc
SP
- "We need Da Vinci Code returns -- by which I mean the profits it made rather than all the copies coming back from the bookshops"
MA
- reviewing is essentially gossip: criticism is exegisis, a work of understanding
Audience
- a publisher of e-books mentions The Long Tail and asks 'aren't we really discussing what stays in print and what goes online?'
at which point I had to step out, and just made it back in time for a punchline and the close.
---
The question I would have liked to ask:
Do you feel that the rise of self-publishing on the internet has devalued traditionally-published literature?
This is pretty much just a transcript of my notes (apart from the stabby stabby remarks and some asides about mealtimes in C17 England). I've retained my more pertinent observations, in italics.
I came away with the sense that none of the panellists was really addressing the question -- and that they were each talking about something quite different. Also that Ma is a bit of a Luddite, and almost certainly unaware of such technologies as the PDA, mobile internet, etc, and possibly does not know how to switch off spellchuck and gramarye in her WP package of choice. (MS Word. She likes the Assistant. I rest my case.)
AH:
- Quoting Edith Wharton, "'A writer's keen sense of copyright is the nearest she has to an emotion.'"
- "Democratisation without control is a disaster for culture."
- Copy and paste is bad! Literature online can be reduced to "just a parade of text".
This man does not talk in sentences.
- Having everything out there for consumption sounds cool, but someone's first short story is not equivalent to Shakespeare. There's no editing and no quality control. This is not a great liberation. If the material's not selected, edited and presented then it's useless.
SP:
- technophiles try to reduce the debate to 'holding onto an idea that's dead'
- 'what we call books and they call content' actually I call it text
- "The majority of blogs have relieved publishers of an enormous burden." ♥ ♥ ♥
MA:
- 2000 years ago we'd have been bemoaning the death of the scroll
help we are surrounded by people who laugh at MA's witticisms!!!
- 'you don't neurologically assimilate the text off the computer in the same was as you do with a book' grrr
- "I'm glad we're not talking about the death of the author!"
EW:
- the test of a book-replacement is, can you drop it in the bath?
- there are 100,000 books published each year in the UK (what %age are fiction?)
- books are lovely as objects, and publishers can fight the rise of e-reading by making books into lovely, sensory things
MA:
- on why editing by hand is better than 'the green line and the red line' which are 'frequently wrong' and are doing something quite different anyway)
- the key tool: a ruler, to aid reading line-by-line and spotting repetition etc, which 'you can't do with a computer' slight paraphrase
- she still edits on the page so do I, still uses Tippex
Audience
- The internet and e-publishing opens up books in terms of accessibility -- to poor, visually impaired etc -- DRM slams that door shut
SP: once something's [purchased from a publisher and] downloaded it'll be possible to have it in whatever format is desired
- refers approvingly to EW's 'book fetishism'
- the cost of making the different formats available is the key point
- e-bokos and print-on-demand are cheaper to produce
AO
- it's quite hard to make an argument for keeping, say, Louis McNiece in print -- a commercial market would kill Louis McNiece
MA
- [picking up on someone else's analogy between popular books and supermarket baked beans] 'there's a very wide range of publishers, some doing beans, some doing truffles'
the panel in general
- decry the rise of Richard and Judy, celebrity ghostwritten things, etc etc
SP
- "We need Da Vinci Code returns -- by which I mean the profits it made rather than all the copies coming back from the bookshops"
MA
- reviewing is essentially gossip: criticism is exegisis, a work of understanding
Audience
- a publisher of e-books mentions The Long Tail and asks 'aren't we really discussing what stays in print and what goes online?'
at which point I had to step out, and just made it back in time for a punchline and the close.
---
The question I would have liked to ask:
Do you feel that the rise of self-publishing on the internet has devalued traditionally-published literature?