The Future of the Book

[tamaranth]

"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?

Comments

[tanais.livejournal.com]

I am still waiting for the hardware to come close to being usable. I'm not sure I can read an eBook on a PDA or a Mobile phone -- the form factor doesn't seem right. Existing technologies all seem to thick, too heavy 5mm. When they get it right though I know I shall read a lot more in the same way Music going digital and TV shows going to files has made me listen and watch a lot more.

Nice write up. Thanks for that.

[ladymoonray.livejournal.com]

Isn't it interesting how we remember different things! In my defence, I was doing the "separating argument from evidence" thing I've been struggling with, and I made notes afterwards rather than during (hence no direct quotes). But still; we must have split the braincell!

[tamaranth.livejournal.com]

I read a great deal of text on my PDA -- and the Palm TX, with dark text on white screen, is a lot easier on my eyes than the monochrome Handspring Visor was. (Though I still use the latter in situations where loss or damage is a possibility, e.g. travelling.) I like being able to carry the entire Baroque Cycle in my pocket -- and my PDA weighs appreciably less than the 300pp novel I'm reading at present.

On the other hand, I started reading on the PDA because I was 'stuck' on real books, and found that reading black print on white paper gave me headaches. Back in the bad old days of migraines etc!

[tamaranth.livejournal.com]

I think I was mainly going for note-taking in lieu of 100% attention ... and of course hoping that one of 'em would come out with a really neat soundbite!

[dalmeny]

That sounds remarkably disappointing and frustrating.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

I always wonder why this debate is presented in a polarised fashion, as it seems to me likely that the two formats (digital & print) can and should coexist, in the way that manuscripts and print have and still do. (Yes, the number of mss decreases over time but -- as a medieval historian -- they still hold their importance in some circumstances).

[ajshepherd.livejournal.com]

I tried reading books on a Handspring once (probably the same one as I sold it to you!) and while it was better than nothing I wouldn't want to read much that way.

While the displays are improving all the time the concern is still likely to be durability (if I drop a book from the top bookshelf to the floor some of the pages may get a bit dog-eared, but it won't break) and battery life. I don't want the batteries on my book to run out when I'm just about to turn to the last page!
With reduction in power usage (say, 'smart paper' which doesn't need power to maintain the page display) it should be possible to extend the battery life. Maybe some kind of kinetic device like in a watch could be used to top the battery while you carry the book around. The interface would need to be good too. The nearer it gets to acting like a real book the better - say, moving a finger or thumb across the bottom in a page-turning motion.

Bound to get there in the end, but not yet, I think.

But what's going to happen to Fandom? Will the saying of the future be 'The one who dies with the most content on their storage device wins'?

[korintomichi]

You're right - the Palm TX is so much easier to read than the Visor, which was hard work. We tend to read a lot of relatively "disposable" material on the PDA -subscriptions to newspapers/journals etc. Would find it hard to manage whole book, mainly because of the scrolling factor. But it's great to have several books in your pocket...

[marypcb.livejournal.com]

you can do ruler reading on a PC; it needs to be a tablet PC with a swivelling screen and if I was still editing anything it's how I'd do it.