Happy Holidays *Plus* The Future of Publishing

A Christmas video for you... followed by what I think this video means for the future of publishing.



Kind of awesome, yes?

The drummer here is Sean Quigley, a sixteen-year-old from Winnipeg, Manitoba (Canada). And what's remarkable here is not just that he can sing and drum, but that he rewrote all the music himself, played all the instruments, and directed and filmed and edited it (using a simple SLR digital camera). This is a true micro-production. It was made with talent, a standard digital camera, and a home computer.

A) this says something about the kid's talent. 1.3 million views and counting... I don't know how many downloads he's had, but probably a lot. In fact, he probably won't need a paper route or a job at McD's any time soon.

And B), I think this says something about the future of publishing and the digital revolution. I was going to say e-book, but why be limiting? Why think that ebooks are any sort of end point?

We've seen the rise of ebooks over the last few years, and we're still trying to figure out this new world. What is it, and how exactly do we use it? And this video really struck home to me the fact that I probably won't be the one to figure it out, to find a way to fully maximize the digital frontier in the process of making art.

But it might be my children.

I have a feeling that the Ebook (Digital) Overlords will not fully rise until the next generation, from children who grew up in a digital world, who have lived and breathed it and know only this. This video is, yes, a product of talent, but it also strikes me that this is someone utterly familiar with this new world. The technology of creation and editing and streaming and the omnipresence of Youtube's global market.

If I wanted to make a video, I would likely have to Google a bunch of How To explanations. Now, talent (if I happened to have any) and perseverence might, in the end, allow me to create something fine, depending on how well I teach myself the knowledge I need. But I don't think it will ever be the same as someone who has grown up in this, someone for whom these processes are as common as putting bread in the toaster. Toast! Wow! I'm sure, in my parent's generation, there were millions who were offput by computers and microwave ovens. Certainly, many adopted these things, and started to figure out how to use them. But for my generation these things have become second nature.

And now our children have a new digital age to grow up in. It strikes me that, in publishing, we are building something. Something for them. We're exploring the boundaries of this new world, charting and mapping, and settling here and there, trying to carve out a home, a living, a future. But the real future, the phantasmal cities of the imagination, may come from the children of these settlers and explorers.

People who know me will know that I love paper books. Everything about them: their individuality, their distinctness, their feel, their smell, the purity of how they operate in the imagination. And I hope they live in the world forever. But I can't deny that the future will be shared with (and perhaps dominated by) digital books and intertextual digital art. And I'm curious to see what this will look like. I'm curious to see what my children will make of this new world, and what strange new cityscapes will arise from the tapping of their fingertips.

When More Interactive is, Um, Less Interactive

Regularly scheduled programming has recommenced. We are having some technical difficulties, however, and random pictures of cute babies may accidentally be spliced into future posts.

So... the iPad is here. I won't even make name jokes. But its introduction has brought out more of a certain kind of comment that makes me cringe a little. Maybe you've heard it, or something similar...

"I can't wait! Ebooks will make everything more interactive, and there will be links and music and video in my books! It's so supercool that books will be evolving into something even better! Interactive, oh yeah!"

It's not that I'm down on ebooks. They're not really my thing, but if it suits other people, well, that's great. They have my blessings. And it's not even that I'm against books with "interactive" elements. I could see this as a viable and interesting genre. I think of the way graphic novels have blossomed in the last couple decades, and I can see a similar niche for the interative book.

What troubles me is this idea of replacement I hear bandied about... the idea that these interactive books will somehow be superior to the ones we have now, and will thus soon replace them (and writers, I guess, will have to become writers/programmers/video editors). And what will set these new and improved books apart, of course, is this idea of interactivity.

And oh does this vex me a little. The word "interactivity", I think, is misleading, at least in one sense. Yes, the book might be more interactive in a physical sense. A link to click on, a button to push... but are we really getting excited about pushing a button in this day and age? The basic fact is that the more "interactive" a text becomes in this sense the less interactive it actually becomes for the reader.

The true value of literature, I think, is that the reader is the co-creator of the story, for it lives only in a fusion of the writer's words and the reader's imaginative perception. It is interactive on a deeply human level. The written word requires this fusion to make itself real. Music, film, theatre... these exist outside the audience. They are what they are. Yes, there will be slight variances in perception from person to person that will shape these experiences. But for a story... it doesn't really exist until translated within the reader's mind, shaped by each individual's unique consciousness.

Endless studies have shown the difference in brain activity between watching television and reading. The first is passive, the second active... and so when we talk about "interactive" books we are actually talking about books that are being forced into an ever greater passivity, a passivity that is disguised by the "interactivity" of pushing a button or clicking on a link. For every element of interactivity we add, we interrupt what John Gardner called the fictive dream, that seamless sense of the story made real within the mind, the words becoming translucent as the brain creates the story. Interactivity breaks that imaginative fusion between word and thought. The mind resettles itself as observer rather than participant.

Would interactive books draw non-readers in? Perhaps. But if what they wanted was alternate media experiences, wouldn't they just search those out? And would they be drawn to the text or the interactive experiences? And would it be necessary to keep increasing such passive interactivity in order to keep these "readers" coming back? Why keep the text at all?

Again, I'm not entirely against the concept. I believe there's a genre here waiting to happen, a mixed media form that can make use of both forms of interaction. But this idea of evolution or replacement bothers me, for it seems a devolution in many ways.

Anyone else cringing at this idea?

The Thingyness of Books: An Ode to Paper

I've been thinking about something bookish the last few days, and so I thought I'd give it a whirl here on the blog. It started when I read this article, by Alan Kaufman, last Friday (linked by the irrepresible ebooknocrat Nathan Bransford).

Now, I'd have to agree with everyone who said the article was alarmist and overdone - and perhaps rather insensitive, considering some of the comparisons made. And I found this unfortunate because underneath the hyperbolic rhetoric there were some interesting ideas.

I should say, first, that I'm not exactly anti-ebook. It's obvious that it's going to be a major growth market over the next few years, and if it makes some (or many) readers happy, then I'm glad. I saw my first live Kindle the other day. It's a very neat gadget, and I can see why some people like them. My neighbours were certainly thrilled with it. And this shows both its potential (so seductive)... and that the timeline may be a little slower than some people think. I'd never seen one until a few days ago. Never. There's a long way to go, it seems, before we reach market saturation.

But that saturation point may be somewhere around the corner. If and when... that seems pretty uncertain to me. But since the possibility is on the horizon it does make me think about that article. Certainly it would not be the end of culture, of literature and all things human, as Kaufman suggested. That's utterly alarmist. But there is a loss. And perhaps it's an acceptable loss, but loss it still is.

What I think is lost is the particularity and uniqueness of a book. And I don't mean "books", plural and in the abstract. I mean book, singular and concrete. A book is an object. It's something real that you hold in your hands, something unique that exists outside all other things.

This is what we lose with ebooks. Now, yes, there is something egalitarian about ebooks, about everything being reduced to digital coding, a sort of democratic darwinism at play in the shuffle of digital texts as they jockey for the limelight. Stripped down and sleek, reduced only to the essentials, the strings of words that form the backbone of their meaning.

And this is the essential part. The words, the sentences, the stories. And this is why the Kaufman article is so alarmist. The stories will be saved, will still be savoured and shared.

Yet a book is something a little more than its essentials. Perhaps these little trimmings are only of passing interest and shedding them will come at little cost... but I, for one, will miss them. And perhaps we all will, too, when we have a chance to look back from the digital future to a paper-filled past.

A book is a thing. A particular thing. And not just in the sense that Stephen King's Under the Dome is different from Marilynne Robinson's Home, but in the sense that one Home is different from another Home. Hardcover, trade paperback, mass market paperback... yes, yes, but even between one trade paperback and another. Each book is its own entity with its own history. Some fresh out of box or wrapper, others that have been read, that have been handled and dropped and picked up again. Some have been shared, passed from person to person, each new reader leaving a few traces of themselves behind. A few crumbs, or lines underlined, or signatures offered. A pretty boy or girl's phone number scrawled on the inside of a cover in a script loopy with hope and alive with the electricity of the moment's connection.

A little story: I found, once and long ago, a copy of a book in a used bookstore, a book called If On A Winter's Night A Traveler, by Italo Calvino, one of my favourite writers. It's a postmodern sort of book, self-aware and self-referential, knowing itself as a story and sharing that knowingness with its readers. And one of these previous readers had written comments on these intertextual comments, a sort of conversation, inter and outer at the same time. And yet another reader (with yet another penmanship) offered comments on these comments.

And what I had in my hands was a book utterly unique in the world. There was nothing else like it. The meaning of the text had bled outside the words, outside the sentences set on the page.

I regret this loss in ebooks, where stories are reduced to encoded text, a book pared to its essential minimum. Lost is this conversation, the uniqueness of the book as object. I can see ebooks blurring a little at the edges. The unchanging device, the eye that can no longer differentiate between one story and the next. A vagueness creeps in along the borders, like photographs slightly out of focus. Liminal spaces grow, a No Man's Land that swallows a few lines here, a few lines there.

And the thingyness of books is lost. The choice, for a book, between using one kind of paper and the next. The texture of it, the faint pebbling of it against the fingertips, the richness of the colour, the revels of whiteness in a thousand shades. Smooth edge, or rough? I like those rough-edged pages, sort of feathered and soft, the little peaks and valleys running along the edge of the books. (With ebooks there are no edges at all.) The cover art, and the cover itself. The weight of it, the way the pages turn. The binding, loose or tight. It's not a perfect world, I admit. Water damage, spines breaking, bindings loosening until pages drop like leaves in the cold of autumn. Not a perfect world, but a real and particular one. Each leaf, living and dying, unlike the rest.

I think of a future where each leaf is really just a dream, a dream of a leaf in a treeless world, and in this future I find myself a little wistful, a little sad, a little cold. There is just the ether, the wind whistling through, unobstructed, across a grey and featureless plain.