I have a new book coming out in the summer from Ohio University Press , and they’ve already got a nice page set up for it, Out of the Mountains, with a link to this blog, and the opportunity to pre-order– and one of the versions to pre-order, along with a hard cover and a soft cover version, is an electronic file! It’s just a .pdf, at least so far, but that’s a start.
My First Electronic Book…
March 9th, 2010Reading More into the Future of Reading
March 2nd, 2010Riding the train into New York last evening to teach my NYU novel writing class, I was wishing for an e-reader, as I often do (I was already carrying my little Acer netbook so I could check email later). Then– as I even more often do, I drifted into a nap, so I don’t know if the desire for all the books in my library in my hand at every moment was just part of a pleasant dream or a real plan.
The irony of course is the hundreds of people who want to write novels, and are they reading novels? The National Book Critics Circle blog Critical Mass has a nice meditation on the difference between reading blogs and really reading, and Shelley Ettinger pointed me toward an article in the blog on the state of publishing, Moby Lives, about who is actually using e-books at the present time (more men than women, higher income than lower).
She also gave me the link to an article in Poets and Writers magazine about the Espresso Book Machine . This hundred thousand dollar plus machine will print a digitalized book instantly– they’ve been in development for a couple of years, and this article touches on several issues about the future of reading: the instant hard copy books but also e-books (and the fascinating fact that one of the developers of the Espresso is Jason Epstein who was also part of the development of paperback books in the early 1950’s!). I like the possibility of small independent bricks-and-mortar stores around the world that have access to all the books– I’m visualizing a little coffee shop place with only a few hard copy books, but free wifi and one of the Espresso Book Machines, and people reading and writing, and maybe even looking at shelved books. Nice, don’t you think? Or at any rate, not bad.
Universities have been picking up on the possibility of instant books much faster than the dinosaurs I mean the publishing industry, which is busy justifying their high prices as in an article in the March 1, 2010 New York Times. They don’t mention that part of the overhead for their books is not just underpaid editorial staff but also the corporate CEO’s Lear Jet. See my article reviewing The Business of Books.
Poetry Books online: The Perfection of Mozart’s Third Eye
February 20th, 2010Chalk Editions is doing poetry online– you download the books of poems that they publish, or read them online. They have an interesting statement of their reason for doing this here– they aren’t thrilled with the coming crash of physical books, but are determined to move forward. As an example of what they do, see Halvard Johnson’s latest collection of poems, The Perfection of Mozart’s Third Eye and Other Sonnets at Scribd.com– we’re considering at our cooperative press Hamilton Stone Editions how to get into the e-book market, so I’m going to look again at Scribd.com.
Steamboats are Ruining Everything…
February 17th, 2010… is the name of an interesting blog by Caleb Crain that seems to have been originally about the nineteenth century (I found it when looking up information about translations of Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons). He’s interested in a lot of the same issues as I am here, and has published a book of selected blogs with Lulu, available at Steamboats at Lulu. This seems like a great way to use the self-publishing technologies, to make a hard copy of selected blogs.
Lulu, by the way, is a good free-upload publishing place– they produce books for e-downloads or print or photo books, or just about anything– great example of putting the means of production in the writers’ hands, with the question arising next, how to get the products in the hands of readers.
Writer’s Block versus Writer’s Blog
February 16th, 2010It’s nothing new that it’s hard to get started on creative work in the morning, when you have a morning to work. But for a writer who uses a computer, the call of the Internet is a serious Siren’s hiss. I have been aware of this all along– the danger of using the same environment, the same machine, for writing and other activities. So easy to check email, to look on Facebook to see what random people you know who also happen to be on Facebook are doing. To work on a project other than creative work.
I tried hard– I went for years avoiding the Internet (I started using a computer more than twenty years ago), insisted on a black and white (or actually bronze and tan) screen monitor instead of color. But email was too convenient. Having links to my work available online was too wonderful. Experimenting with giving free writing exercises was too empowering.
And, I tell myself, back in the day, there were distractiuons, too, weren’t there? Pencils to sharpen? Coffee to make? And, especially, angst to experience– the high drama of writers’ block! Now, instead of suffering, I answer email.
Or blog.
How I Read at this Moment in Time
February 12th, 2010Here’s how my reading goes these days: I have a book, Victor Navasky’s Naming Names, which I’ll comment on elsewhere or another time, but if you don’t know it, is a history of the Communist Hunting HUAC hearings in Hollywood in the early nineteen fifties. Essentially a grim and depressing story of the multiple ways people can betray each other and argue about it for their rest of their lives.
First, I got the book by trading, online, at the terrific site Paperback Book Swap that allows people to list books and trade.
So, I got the book via an online service, and now I am sitting and reading its small-print crisp yellowing paper. Beside me is my two pound Acer Aspire netbook computer. I read about Dalton Trumbo, who did not name names and did some jail time and wrote many famous movies with a “front” because he was blacklisted. Navasky refers to Trumbo’s cigarette holder and thin moustache. I am intrigued. I open the Acer and google Trumbo images and find a hilarious picture of the old guy with the thin moustache and the cigarette holder, writing on a board while in his bathtub. I look him up on Wikipedia. I return to the paperback book and its appalling and wonderful world of the fifties and sixties. I move back and forth, Internet, book, and back.
I expect this is a time of transition, and I have no idea what we’ll be doing in the future. But this is how I am reading right now.
Hugging Victorians
February 8th, 2010My friend and colleague Shelley Ettinger just sent me a link to an article in the Sunday Times (that’s of London, not New York) that tells about how the British Library is making its nineteenth century novels available free through Amazon’s Kindle.
This may come close to sucking me in. She and I were talking about this last week, about when we were likely to make the move to purchasing an e-reader. We agreed we were waiting for the prices to come down, and I said I was leaning toward maybe asking my husband and son to go in together to get me a reader next holiday season, and furthermore that I’d been leaning toward a Sony because it is easier to get the free stuff off the web from Gutenberg and the rest. I described my dream of walking around with all of George Eliot! the entire works of Dickens! Trollope’s Palliser novels– all all ALL of them! in my arms! It is just mind boggling.
All of the things that are problematic about technology sort of slide away as I imagine hugging all the Victorian novels at once to my bosom. Well, read about the British library’s pride in how they are plunging into the future here.
Do Monks Dream of Parchment?
February 5th, 2010A friend told me last night that she had tried reading a blog of dense literary criticism, and finally gave up. Then she ran across the same material in book form, and loved it. Of course it is possible that the writer cut and polished before the book was published. But long blocks of dense prose– novels, criticism– may be just too much for the eye to deal with in the flickering ambiance of the screen.
We agreed that poetry works well on the web– for example, I know a poet who sends a poem “by someone else” once a week or so to his email list. Sometimes it’s a famous poet, sometimes not, but it’s always a single poem. Flash fiction works well on the screen.
And the word on the street is that reading e-paper (the Kindle, Sony e-readers, etc.) is just like reading tree-pulp paper.
After the Gutenberg Revolution, did monks and priests have nostalgic dreams about the flow of illuminating ink over the crisp surface of parchment?
Note: Here’s the latest from the Authors’ Guild on the Google book scan issue.
The abyss of Commercialism; the Firmament of Democratic Creativity
February 1st, 2010I wrote earlier about how when I was seven or eight I wrote stories, illustrated them, created covers, and manufactured the books with a borrowed stapler. I was aware that you were supposed to have a trademark, and mine was Black Horsey Books, a drawing of the top half of a rearing stallion. A female stallion. Other kids, less bookish and more athletic, pictured themselves as heroes of the basketball court and the world series and also as the fastest gun in the west. That’s one of the wonders of children and childhood: the moment at which you could be anything: professional home run hitter, movie star, gun-slinger and fighter for justice, illustrator, and author.
To some extent, the Web makes it possible for you to do this again. The big gap here is the difference between web structures/places that are professionally developed (you know those web pages: they are gorgeous; they have roll over links and video and music; they are expensive; nine times out of ten, the professional has to be called in to make even the smallest updates) and the ones like my web pages that still use tables to create a boxy, simple, page like structure. See http://www.meredithsuewillis.com and http://www.hamiltonstone.org. It isn’t so much that I am trying to recreate book pages, it’s that this is what I’ve been able to master. I like them, but I especially like that I can add to them, change them at will.
Or at least as long as the gods of cyberspace are favorably disposed.
I can tinker with (not write) html, the code underlying most web pages, I can do a little CSS through Dreamweaver, which means I can change the background colors and fonts easily.
I’m limited, but I’m having a good time.
There are, obviously, points on the continuum between homemade sites like mine and the big flashy professional ones. WordPress, which is here attached to my homemade site, is professionally structured, as is Blogger.com and certainly Facebook. You can get free or very cheap templates that someone else created and to which you can add your own text and pictures.
But what I really enjoy is being able to roll my own, as it were: just as I couldn’t have said when I was making my Black Horsey books if I liked best writing the stories or using the Grown Ups’ stapler, I get very caught up in all the parts of this. I probably spend too much time at it, trying to figure out what went wrong, why the font is too big or too small– it feels, in many ways, like a hobby.
In other ways, it feels like seizing control of the means of production. Which may be exactly where we are, on this ledge, looking down at the abyss of commercialism and time-wasting, and up at a firmament of democratic creativity.
Week-ends on the Web
January 30th, 2010Have you noticed how much less email there is on week-ends? I can’t tell about Facebook, but email, especially messages about setting up meetings for organizations – drops off spectacularly. I hope this means that people are all out cross country skiing, or maybe unplugged from the ‘net, at least metaphorically, while they write poems and stories.
But it does make me wonder how much social networking and organizing of political and social service events happens at work?
I love to think of that, too, that poems are being written and mass movements organized on corporate nickels.