The arrival of e-book readers such as the Kindle and the Sony Reader has triggered a lot of discussion in the media and among bloggers about the future of the book and the ‘interesting’ state of the publishing industry. Reading a book on an electronic handheld device is a utilitarian act: I need something to read, but I don’t want to carry a hunking great hardback book around with me. Oddly enough, that was partly the thinking behind the invention of the paperback. I’m not convinced (yet) that one of these techno-readers will become my primary reading device any time soon, but I believe they are already changing the way publishers do business and I think in the long run mid-range paperbacks are an endangered species. It no longer works simply to ship any old atoms to sell bytes; they have to be the right kind of atoms and they have to be flying in the right formation.

Penguin’s recent release of leather-bound editions of books from the Penguin Classics range suggests the company is changing the formation of the atoms it ships and making an effort to move into a more tactile and emotive market. In fact they are selling the book itself rather than its content. These editions, at £50 each, look very lovely indeed, but they are not really the kind of thing you might sit down and actually read. They also have a whiff of good economic times past about them, which makes the inclusion of The Great Gatsby in the list rather more interesting. Fitzgerald’s role as the chronicler of a society heading for destruction has to some extent turned his books into historical curiosities. We wouldn’t be so stupid as to make those mistakes again, would we?

As with closets full of shirts, so there has always been room for boutique books. But I doubt Abigail’s Party is the image Penguin is looking for. In a world where day-to-day reading is increasingly done on a screen of some kind, real readers may well be prepared to pay more for high quality editions to read at home. But they will have to be robust and usable. Lower down the scale Everyman’s Library has been doing ‘value quality’ for over a century and may be about to issue the most patient ‘I told you so’ in publishing history. Penguin revolutionised publishing with its paperbacks in the 1930s. These catwalk classics are strictly for for the display cabinet.

Note: there was a server problem while this post was being edited so it originally appeared in a slightly different form. This may explain why email subscribers have received the post twice.

Posted by Chris Routledge

On November 10th, The Institute for the Future of the Book kicks off an experiment in close reading. Seven women will read Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook and carry on a conversation in the margins. The idea for the project arose out of my experience re-reading the novel in the summer of 2007 just before Lessing won the Nobel Prize for literature. The Golden Notebook was one of the two or three most influential books of my youth and I decided I wanted to “try it on” again after so many years. It turned out to be one of the most interesting reading experiences of my life. With an interval of thirty-seven years the lens of perception was so different; things that stood out the first-time around were now of lesser importance, and entire themes I missed the first time came front and center. When I told my younger colleagues what I was reading, I was surprised that not one of them had read it, not even the ones with degrees in English literature.  It occurred to me that it would be very interesting to eavesdrop on a conversation between two readers, one under thirty, one over fifty or sixty, in which they react to the book and to each other’s reactions. And then of course I realized that we now actually have the technology to do just that. Thanks to the efforts of Chris Meade, my colleague and director of if:book London, the Arts Council England enthusiastically and generously agreed to fund the project. Chris was also the link to Doris Lessing who through her publisher HarperCollins signed on with the rights to putting the entire text of the novel online.

Fundamentally this is an experiment in how the web might be used as a space for collaborative close-reading. We don’t yet understand how to model a complex conversation in the web’s two-dimensional environment and we’re hoping this experiment will help us learn what’s necessary to make this sort of collaboration work as well as possible. In addition to making comments in the margin, we expect that the readers will also record their reactions to the process in a group blog. In the public forum, everyone who is reading along and following the conversation can post their comments on the book and the process itself.

Here’s the link again to The Golden Notebook.

Posted by Chris Routledge

Literary magazines have been fairly slow to adapt to the online world. The economics of running them have never been good and those with the longest histories have always been well supported by grants, donations, or gifts. In some ways they have been isolated from the pressures of having to reach a large readership because nobody ever expected them to be read by millions. But good writing needs to be read by as many people as possible and this is one area of publishing that could benefit enormously from the shift online. The Reader magazine will continue to be offered as a high quality printed volume, but earlier this year we began publishing a free full-content download edition, which can be found at scribd to read online and also as a downloadable pdf for you to keep.

For new magazines the choice to go online is much easier. The cost of producing a paper publication is high in proportion to the likely readership and for a magazine starting from scratch it makes very little sense to chase after a hard-to-reach small market rather than an easy-to-reach big one. In recent weeks three new online-only literary magazines have caught my eye:

Hamish Hamilton, UK publisher of McSweeney’s, has just published issue two of Five Dials, which is free to download in pdf format and is intended for printing out. I find it works well on my iPod Touch.

Taking a more web-based approach Salt Publishing has revived the title Horizon, a ’small magazine’ originally published by Cyril Connolly in the 1930s. Editor Jane Holland says:

As a reader, my ideal literary magazine is one where ideas and style matter equally, where the creative dynamics are allowed to shift from issue to issue, keeping readers entertained, informed, and provoked. As an editor, I want to stretch and challenge contributors as much as readers, to give writers considerably more scope for daring and ingenuity than they might get from a print magazine.

Of course publishers have ready access to established writers as well as to hopefuls wanting to impress, which makes these two extremely promising prospects.

The most recent of this new crop of online magazines is The Manchester Review, based at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester. Edited by John McAuliffe and Ian McGuire, the Manchester Review has big ambitions:

The Manchester Review … uses online media to show and sponsor the interplay of poetry, fiction, music, visual art and essays by new and established practitioners. We hope that it will find new readers and audiences for exciting and innovative creative work, which is steeped in traditional virtues.

Those are sentiments we heartily endorse. As online publishing becomes easier and more respectable the future for literary magazines and for high quality writing, on page and on screen, looks brighter than ever.

Get The Reader magazine free in pdf format or click the banner below to subscribe to the magazine.

Posted by Chris Routledge

Here’s the link again to feedbooks.com. Thanks for the tip to Merlin Mann on the Macbreak Weekly podcast.

I felt sick. I felt panic. Everything was going to change again. Bang. Those butterflies exploded into a fluttering frenzy inside my stomach. Fright. They needed to escape. I didn’t open my mouth. I feared they would flurry out of my throat. They would attack Rita. I would be in trouble. I kept my mouth shut. Tight. Tight. Tight.

For Jude, the world outside doesn’t really exist. She blocks it off because her experiences have proved that it’s too painful. So she is a solitary figure, alone in a world that wants to punish her for reasons unknown. Any external experiences are manifested internally and eat away at her self-esteem: “Whirling. Swirling. Round and round. Twirling secrets round and round.” After her mother’s suicide, it begins to feel like Jude takes responsibility for her dead mother’s ‘crime’. There is a strong message in the novel that our human need to blame and ridicule leads to the suffering of the next generation. Children are pure, but only until they are tainted by the malice of accusatory adults, imposing their opinions of others upon the child. In Search of Adam explains this with compassion and shocking power. Jude’s search for Adam is ultimately a search for untainted and innocent life.

By Jen Tomkins

___

Caroline Smailes’ novella Disraeli Avenue will be available as a free to download ebook from February 18th, 2008 is now available as a free to download ebook from here. It is about the street that is the backdrop to In Search of Adam. You are encouraged to donate whatever you can to the charity One in Four, which provides counselling services for adults who were abused as children. Read about Disraeli Avenue here. We covered this project earlier here.

Smailes decided to find a way to give something back to those whose lives have been touched by abuse and has written a novella, to be published as an ebook, asking only for donations to the charity One in Four in return. The charity offers support for people who have experienced sexual abuse and sexual violence. As a small organisation it desperately needs funds to continue its work. The novella is called Disraeli Avenue after the street in which In Search of Adam is set, and is a collection of short insights into the lives of the people living there.

Caroline’s publisher, The Friday Project is in full support. MD and Publishing Director Clare Christian said “This is a fantastic idea which will raise money for a very important cause and which will give fans of Caroline’s writing much pleasure at the same time.”

The Disraeli Avenue eBook will be available mid-February 2008 and can be downloaded from The Friday Project or from Caroline Smailes’s own website. Here is the link to the charity One In Four again.

___

Caroline Smailes was born in Newcastle in 1973. She moved to the North West to study English Literature at Liverpool University before going on to specialise in Linguistics. A chance remark on a daytime chat show caused Caroline to reconsider her life. She enrolled on an MA in Creative Writing in September 2005 and began to write her first novel, In Search of Adam, which was published by The Friday Project in 2007. Her second novel, Black Boxes, will be published in July 2008.

Powered by Qumana

There is more required nowadays to make a single wise man than formerly to make Seven Sages, and more is needed nowadays to deal with a single person than was required with a whole people in former times.

Here’s the link to The Art of Worldly Wisdom again.

Posted by Chris Routledge. Powered by Qumana

It’s an old and reassuring story: bookish boy or girl enters the cool, dark library and discovers loneliness and freedom. For the past ten years or so, however, the cities of the book have been anything but quiet. The computer and the Internet have transformed reading more dramatically than any technology since the printing press, and for the past five years Google has been at work on an ambitious project, Google Book Search. Google’s self-described aim is to “build a comprehensive index of all the books in the world,” one that would enable readers to search the list of books it contains and to see full texts of those not covered by copyright.

Still, despite the pace of the digitization process the experience of screen reading and paper reading are different and it seems to me that the real revolution is not going to be one in which pixels replace print, but a working out what each does best. If I want to search, then Google, Yahoo and the rest have pushed old-fashioned indexes off a cliff; if I want to read in the bath, I’ll take a paperback. And that is to say nothing of the feel of old books, the quality of digital copies, or of serendipity, a library’s greatest asset.

More responses to this article at Language Hat and Kenyon Review. Here’s the link to the article again.

Posted by Chris Routledge Powered by Qumana

What may come as a surprise to those who saw Derrida and his peers as impractical critics is that technology has made the deconstructionist world view eminently real. Hyperlinking, collaborative projects such as Wikipedia, the Free Software movement, are all examples outside the literary world. Until relatively recently books were exempt from all this because as physical objects they were fixed, unconnected, remote. That is no longer true. While Project Gutenberg has been working on digitizing out of print books and is now a wonderfully huge, searchable, free resource, progress has been slow. What has really transformed the landscape is Google’s attempt to scan and put online the contents of the world’s major libraries.

On Thursday Google announced new booksearch services that will take it even further. In a blog post entitled “Dive into the meme pool” researchers Bill Schilit and Okan Kolak explain:

With the full text of millions of books digitized, we started thinking about how people quote and build on each other’s ideas. Like Bartlett putting together the Familiar, the Google Book Search team has been uncovering a vox populi of passages that authors have deemed worth repeating. Take, for example, Eleanor Roosevelt’s book, You Learn by Living, in which she describes how her experiences helped shape her personal philosophy. On the “About this Book” page, you’ll see it has 10 Popular Passages. One of them, “You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience,” appears in over a hundred books in the index. Wow.

Of course, hypertext researchers like Ted Nelson also have a history of connecting texts using links. Following in that tradition, we use links to highlight popular ideas in a book, or to lead readers to Schopenhauer when they’re struggling with Kant. We hope that this new feature inspires you …

Suddenly we find ourselves in a world of argument and interaction, discovering links between ideas that have never been found before. And of course, where would this technology take us if you couldn’t share and enjoy your discoveries?

Here’s the link to Google Books Search.

Posted by Chris Routledge Powered by Qumana

In the years between 1907 and 1957 America changed radically–it became a world power and developed a full-blown mass culture–and those social and cultural changes are reflected in these two books. The Road depicts an industrial America in which hobos and tramps are an integral part of the system–”a reserve army of the unemployed,” as Marxists have called it–who help keep wages down. On the Road describes a postindustrial America in which cars are everywhere, almost everyone can afford a car, a radio and a television, and the mass media shape the lives of American citizens.

You can read a free ebook of The Road by Jack London here and another with pictures here. The link to the article in The Nation is here.

Thanks Angie.