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Another Perspective
Contra Fabrizio: A Paean to My Book…and to the Future of E-Books
Books are great — and e-books will be too.
(Page 2 of 2)
Again, you wouldn’t have to read the pop-up annotations — which, remember, are prompted by cursor movements. You might decide to ignore the cursor and read the e-book as you would a standard paperback. But Sloth is a novel about wordplay and allusion as much as character and plot, a winking tour of the traditional canon of dead white males as well a satire of postmodern notions such as the death of the author, the de-centered self and the destabilized text. (Yeats, for example, was a practitioner of “automatic writing” in which the text doesn’t derive from the author’s conscious mind; in the case of Sloth, it may be that Zezel’s interruptions are only manifestations of the narrator’s subconscious. Yet the narrator courts the exercise girl by pretending to be Zezel… who writes newspaper columns under the pen name “Mark Goldblatt.”) An electronic version of the book — currently in production — that also served, in effect, as an annotated edition would make Sloth more enjoyable, or at least more accessible, to readers who don’t happen to be literature professors, graduate students or writers themselves. The electronic edition, in short, opens up the book’s target audience from classics junkies to anyone with a fondness for cheap laughs and a passing acquaintance with the Norton Anthology.
Cursor-prompted annotations are one of many changes on the e-book horizon — and perhaps the least dramatic. These changes will necessarily alter the entire calculus that goes into a book’s creation. Consider: We now live in a world in which, for the first time, there are two distinct ways to read: 1) with your eyes alone, and 2) with a cursor. The two ways to read point to two very different reading experiences… and that difference will affect not only how books are acquired and published but also how they are imagined and executed.
The experiential possibilities of an e-book are not limited to the words on the screen. With inevitable hardware advances, there will eventually be suspense novels, for example, with creepy background music and momentary visual effects. As the heroine steps inside the seemingly deserted house, a bass line will pulse through your headset. As you scroll across the words, “She heard a sudden rustling of wind through the tattered curtains,” you’ll hear a rustling. Then, as your pulse quickens, when the villain leaps out from behind the curtains, an animated graphic will emerge from behind the words on the screen to menace you for a split second, then recede.
As unsettling as such innovations may seem, they needn’t encroach on the experience of traditional readers — not even those seduced by the siren song of a Nook, Kindle or iPad. The option of sight reading, of scanning down the page line by line, without using the cursor, will always remain. But the range of new possibilities is sure to impact how writers write; many will write with an e-book specifically in mind. They will become orchestrators as well as wordsmiths — deciding, in the case of Sloth, what to annotate, but, in the future, deciding what to score, what to illustrate and what to animate. The results will be hybrids… not unlike the way today’s graphic novels are hybrids of traditional novels and comic books.
The existence of such hybrid forms will, in turn, drastically affect what gets published. Acquisition editors will have to factor into their decisions not only familiar literary criteria — the words on the page — but also, in the case of e-books, the totality of the experience created by the writer. As a result, commercial publishing houses will have to hire effects editors as well as text editors. It will be a brave new world for book marketers as well. How many potential book buyers have been siphoned off by movies, television and the Internet over the last half century? Marketing departments will perhaps reclaim a portion of those lost audiences with an enhanced sensory experience.
The power of books has always been their intimacy, the exquisite closeness of a story playing itself out inside your head. But the price of that intimacy is cultural literacy and heightened concentration — a price fewer and fewer people have been willing or able to pay. That is the reality. But with pop-up annotations, sounds and sights, the price drops precipitously.
More people will become book lovers. They’ll just love their books in different ways than book lovers did before.
Letter to the Editor View all comments (9) | Leave a comment
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Appleby| 7.30.10 @ 7:00AM
Yep, e-readers are great stuff for people who like to read about sex or cannibalism or particularly egregious murders. That way nobody can really tell what you are reading by looking at the cover.
On the other hand, no conversations will be started by people who might comment on the cover of a book they have also recently read or are reading, or ask you about the book they think might be interesting ... or even that you might be interesting.
I will not be reading your book in any autograph; I like books about normal people doing normal things, the kind of people I can imagine living on when the book is closed. I have had many great conversations about The Cat Who series that have been started by people who saw the cover of the current volume.
Alice Moore| 7.30.10 @ 7:19AM
Appleby, again I will comment on EReaders, Kindles, and the Nook.
It is a Godsend to those who have space considerations. I consider my Barnes & Noble Nook to be an augment to my reading collection.
My son and his friends in the US Armed Forces love devices such as the Kindle. Space management is mandatory in all branches of the military.
EReaders are not going to eliminate books! There will always be a copy of a family Bible and Shakespeare. The EReader format also isn't friendly to textbook reading. Often you have to reference a sub paragraph of chapter 21..you get the picture. Then there are those hold out authors like Rowling who will not release He Harry Potter series to the eBook format.
BTW the annotation feature Mr. Goldblatt mentioned sounds like it will be helpful to professional and amateur scholars.
DonDuke | 7.30.10 @ 9:26AM
I agree Ms. Moore. A interesting anecdote; I sell printing for a living and each year I print a very expensive book for a small client who would love to devote that money to something else. Each year, the client surveys his membership asking if they would rather have a CD of this tabular information. Each year, by margins of upwards of 70%, the membership responds that they want a book. I agree that e-books will never entirely supplant printed books. But you know, there's just something about them that makes me uncomfortable. Is it that I have bookcases galore stuffed with tomes? Is it me being resistant to changing something that I am so very comfortable with and that has given me such joy? I don't know but it sure is an interesting topic. Maybe one I could write a book about! :)
scotchieguy| 7.31.10 @ 4:29AM
Good point. Kind of like getting rid of my vast record/CD collection, and putting it all onto MP3 format...
Thomas| 7.30.10 @ 10:16AM
Let me put e-publishing into perspective.
First, is the matter of availability. A traditional publishing house has to sell a minimum number of volumes at a minimum price to even break even on the set-up and printing costs. Then there is the distribution network involved in the placing the book into the hands of the consumer. This adds additional cost to the individual volume that must be recouped in the final sale price. With epub, all of the paper, ink, binding and most of the printing is removed from the cost equation; as is much of the distribution system. This drives the cost of a volume, to the reader, down from $20 - $25 for hard cover and $7 - $12 for a paperback to $1 - $3 for the same volume. And because of the increased ease of obtaining the electronic version of the text, you dramatically increase the volume of your sales. Add to that the ability to offer previews and even entire works for free, for the purpose of stimulating interest in the book, and you have a recipe for phenomenal success.
There is a massive upside for authors as well. The vast majority of people submitting manuscripts never get published. It is not because their work is without merit [well, sometimes it is], but because publishers have to judge the work on what they consider its marketability. They have to sell books because they have a large initial outlay for simply printing the book. With ebooks, a publisher can afford to take chances on a marginal work, that he simply can not take on a printed work. And it is absolutely amazing what can become an overnight cult classic or strike a sympathetic nerve with the reading public. Then there is self publishing. With electronic media, it is possible for the writer to directly market his work to the public, via a personal website on the internet. Payment can be handled through various agencies, such as Paypal. And, if simply being read, rather than being paid, is the writers goal, the cost of posting a work online are negligible. And, for those that like the feel of a printed page in their hand, end user printing can put that book into your hands for about the same price as buying a printed one would.
Printed tomes will never disappear. They have a number of advantages over emedia; they won't run out of power at a critical point in the novel, they are not easily damaged, they have a solidity that e-readers lack and there is a certain sense of intellectual gratification to be gained from standing in a room surrounded by one's favorite books. And just as radio theater and movies did not destroy the stage; and just as movies survived television; and the family unit was not destroyed by the internet; ebooks will not kill the printed tome. But, e-publishing expands the universe of the printed word significantly.
Petronius| 7.30.10 @ 11:00AM
Mark Goldblatt takes a baby step on the path trod by Jonathan Franzen in that he holds the integrity of his work above the interest of those who would sell it. Even though the scenario is different, Price's 1st Law of Marketing applies to publishing like no other industry. "If everybody doesn't want it, nobody gets it." This is an anticedent of the 4 words which dominate our polity: "I don't like it."
Such is the Berlin Wall in the clash of creativity and commerce. If E readers can be used to undermine the authority of bean counters and the standard bearers of mass appeal then the monster of mediocrity can be driven back into it's cave.
There is a parallel here. In the early days of television there was Culture and Intellect on every channel. Mass appeal crowded them out with the expanse of ownership. Now with subscription viewing these are available again.
If Mark cannot get his book on the shelves, then I say Yea to E Editions. In any case, don't say no to Oprah like Mr. Franzen did and infuriate your publishers; even though you write literature and don't want the vacuum heads who watch her to read your work.
Mark| 7.31.10 @ 9:51AM
I would suggest that you read the book, "The Shallows" (still have not figured out how to italicize text on websites). Studies show that text with links or annotations may actually lessen comprehension.
Adult toys | 7.4.11 @ 3:34AM
l like the space.support.
thank you.