E-publishing – Week 5

On-line Journals and the effects of e-publishing

A two-part lecture this week, although the theme that ran through it could be said to be looking at the effects of e-publishing. Firstly, we looked at on-line journals and how access to on-line news has changed the traditional news cycle. Then, in an interesting spin to the lecture, we used systems thinking to look at a system used for e-publishing.

1. On-line journals
2. News on-line
3. A ‘systems thinking’ approach to looking at a disruptive technology


On-line journals

Journals and magazines have been a popular way of writing for particular target audiences for hundreds of years, whether as political soapbox, literary endeavour, or social entertainment. Daniel Defoe, for example, established The Review, one of Britain’s first periodicals, primarily as a means to comment on the political relationship between England and France (http://www.defoereview.org/?page_id=116). Charles Dickens and Anthony Trollope published the majority of their works in serial form (http://www.pbs.org/wnet/dickens/life_publication.html). Today we have magazines on just about any subject you can imagine.

According to Art Kleiner, editor-in-chief of strategy+business magazine, “every magazine…reflects the taste and character of a community of people who create and read it. Taken as a blurred whole, magazines reflect the personality of our culture.” (http://www.well.com/~art/maghist01.html)
(hmmm…I wonder what the preponderance of celebrity, gossip and ‘true-life’(!) story magazines on supermarket shelves today says about our culture?)

I mention all this because Eben made a comment in this week’s lecture about how we have to look at a business like publishing not just as a money-making entity, but as a part of our society and culture. It made me think about the effect that the shift towards on-line technology has already had and might have in the future on publishing in its broadest sense.

With on-line journals, for example, the shift to on-line technology means that the costs of producing and distributing a magazine or journal can be minimal. It’s now possible for anyone with an interest in a subject to set up a journal or magazine and attract both subscribers and content.

This means much greater choice for the consumer, which I guess is both a good and bad thing. Good in that we get access to things that traditional publishers may never have distributed, bad in that we have to wade through so much more dross to find the nuggets of worth.

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News on-line

In class we spoke about the traditional life cycle of a news item – from headline story and editorial, perhaps to follow up article/s, to readers’ letters and comments, through to its final demise.

On-line news changes that cycle, and the possibilities for reporting news.

Firstly, on-line technology offers immediate access to the latest news, pretty much wherever you are and whatever time of day or night. We now get the news as it’s happening. This in itself has a few implications, for example:

· we hear of breaking news without any details or real information being known. Commentators are invited to speculate and in the absence of facts their speculation can become ‘the truth’.

· with a need to fill a vast space with ‘news’, things that may not in the past have been deemed newsworthy now get aired. To make them newsworthy, the issues have to be ‘hyped up’

Secondly, we read differently on-line than we do in print, especially when reading for information rather than pleasure (see, for example, Michael Agger’s article http://www.slate.com/toolbar.aspx?action=read&id=2193552).

We scan and surf for information, and if our eyes don’t quickly find something of value, we click away. (Although, I suppose, we’ve probably always read newspapers and magazines like that, haven’t we?)

Perhaps, with tools like hypertext, the web actually ameliorates this, since it offers the possibility of multiple levels of reading, with short sharp articles for nibblers and grazers and more in-depth information just a click away for those that need something more substantial to digest.

Which brings me (quite neatly, if I do say so myself) to the third point. On-line tools such as hypertext, video and audio links allow for much fuller coverage of a news item than was possible in print. We can get background information, find similar stories, see different points of view, etc. The only caveat, I suppose, is that all the links are provided by the same source as the original story and will, therefore, be subject to the same editorial slant or point of view.

Fourthly (and finally, you’ll be glad to hear), on-line news archives extend the ‘shelf-life’ of a story almost indefinitely. As long as it’s well tagged, it’s just a search query string away! A bit different than the days of having to go to the library to find an article on microfiche, as I remember doing.

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A ‘systems-thinking’ approach

And speaking of libraries, they’re a good example of another institution that’s having to reinvent itself because of the ‘disruptive’ effect of digital technology. In class, we used a basic systems approach to analyse the on-line publishing technology used by ‘Lulu’ and its potential effect on the environment in which it operates. We saw that it’s potential effects reach wider than the immediate publishing environment.

This same approach could, perhaps, be applied to libraries, who are having to change their view of themselves in our digital age. According to a website called ‘The Disruptive Library Technology Jester’, this is, in part, “the difference between the management of content that is ‘done’, versus the management of content that is being created.” (in an article called ‘Riding the Waves of Content and Change’ at the aforementioned link), meaning that library services might evolve, for example, by being involved during the creation of acadamic works, offering links to similar or relevant works, potential collaborators, tools for backup and version control and ease of final publishing into institutional repositories.

Finally, for this blog, no conversation that includes a reference to systems thinking, no matter how brief, would be complete for me without mention of the work of Peter Senge, who saw systems thinking as one of the cornerstones of his ideal ‘learning organisation’. In his book, ‘The Fifth Discipline’, Senge discusses how viewing an organisation (or industry, or society) as a system, as both a whole and a set of inter-related parts with complex and dynamic relationships between them, helps us to understand it better. He also discusses how little we usually understand the long-term implications of our actions and that our actions very often have unintended consequences – all very valid comments when it comes to the world of e-publishing.

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E-publishing – Week 4

Blogging

So – this week it’s to be a blog about blogging! As someone who until recently thought that ‘twitter’ was something that the birds did in the trees, it’s a little ironic, not to say ambitious, to be attempting a blog about the art of blogging. Still, here goes.

In class this week we explored:

1. what is a ‘blog’?
2. why do people blog?
3. positives and negatives of blogging
4. commenting on others’ blogs

What is a ‘blog’?

According to Robin Good, “a blog is a form of personal expression that is characterized by:
A list of dated news items, listed in reverse chronological order, authored by one or more individuals.The tone is informal and the blogger speaks generally in her own natural voice and tone.”

So a blog is a kind of on-line diary, or journal. In a way, it’s a bit egocentric, isn’t it? I mean, people have always kept diaries to record thoughts and feelings. It used to be, though, that we kept them secret, often, in fact, literally under lock and key so that no-one could read them. Now we apparently believe that everyone should be interested in what we have to say!

I think the thing that struck me most about the idea of a blog, though, is its possibilities for turning on-line communication into ‘conversations’. Where a newspaper or TV programme or website is pretty much one-way communication, the blog allows for easy, immediate comment, visible to all. That feedback then becomes part of the communication, creating a kind of dialogue.

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Why do people blog?

I saw two bits of news about blogs recently that brought home the potential influence of blogging.
The first is that, apparently, Sarah Brown, wife of Prime Minister Gordon Brown, has five times the number of followers on Twitter that there are members of the Labour Party! (Mail on-line article dated 29 September 2009).

The second was a story on SkyNews.com about how a storm of Twitter protests had forced a climbdown by Trafigura lawyers over a ‘super-injunction’ on the Guardian newspaper, preventing the paper from publishing details of a question to be tabled in parliament. Within hours of the Guardian publishing the fact that they couldn’t publish details (a bit like newspapers in Germany in the build up to the 2nd world war leaving blanks in the papers to show where censored items would have been!), details of the company, the MP, the question and the case that underpinned it were all over the blogosphere and the injunction was no longer enforceable.

Now, Sarah Brown is an ex-public relations guru and, presumably, understands very well how to influence public opinion. Equally, the Guardian presumably knew exactly what it was doing when it let everyone know that it couldn’t publish something. So the potential influence of blogs and their like is recognised by powerful, influential people in politics, in PR and in the communications industry itself.

In addition, a blog is a communication direct from the author to the reader. There are no filters - no editors to decide which 'soundbites' they'll print, no risk of someone misquoting or misrepresenting what you've said, and the only person trying to 'spin' your words is yourself.

Why should we wonder, therefore, that everyone from Barak Obama to Barry ‘Obson (my mum’s next door neighbour in Yorkshire, Hi Barry) is blogging?

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Positives and negatives

But just because everyone’s doing something, does that necessarily make it a good thing? Old politicians blogging to try to appeal to a younger demographic is a bit like your dad dancing with your best friend at a wedding – embarrassing to watch but strangely compelling.

In class we touched on what might be called the ‘ethics’ of blogging. If enough people say something, eventually it becomes a kind of ‘received truth’ (hence, I guess, the number of sites devoted to various conspiracy theories) – everybody’s saying it, so it must be true. The problem is, there’s no check on what’s written in a blog. There’s no editor, no reviewer, no publishing company libel lawyers waiting in the wings. And, as Eben pointed out, by the time ‘the blogosphere’ has picked up on something, it’s almost impossible to trace a story back to its source.

On the positive side, though, the ‘conversational’ nature of blogs means that truly public discussion and debate are possible, possibly for the first time. That, combined with the speed of communication now possible, should mean that important issues can be subject to invigorating debate, with competing opinions aired and commented on in their turn.

So, an attempt to manipulate the way we think, or the opportunity to ensure that everyone gets their say? You decide. Me, I’ll just keep blogging (even though probably no-one’s listening!)

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Commenting on blogs

I don’t know how everyone else found it, but I think the most difficult thing that Eben’s asked us to do so far has been to comment on other class members’ blogs! It felt so presumptuous, somehow, to be saying what I thought about these blogs – why should anyone care what I think! Why should it have been more difficult than leaving a comment on a stranger’s blog? Don’t know, but it was!

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E-publishing – Week 3

Creating an e-book

This week, Eben’s asked us to speculate on publishing an e-book through Lulu as a potential assignment topic for the module, and specifically on what the responses to the following issues might need to encompass for the project to be a success:

1. The problem
2. The context/state-of-the-art
3. The method
4. The outcomes
5. The conclusion


The Problem

I can see at least two ways to approach this:

Firstly, to look at the process of publishing a book on Lulu and compare it to traditional publishing. This would consider e-publishing as a ‘disruptive technology’ with the potential to disintermediate traditional publishing at difference stages in the publishing cycle. The research problem would be something like:

‘What effect might e-publishing in the form of individual publishing via a technology such as Lulu have on the traditional publishing life cycle?’

The second approach would be to look at what’s involved in either writing or sourcing a story or piece of work to be published and distributed via Lulu. This would look at the question more from the viewpoint of the target audience and ask how you would identify the niche, target the design, add value to the product, and raise awareness amongst the target audience. This approach could also, perhaps, usefully look at the differences between this method of getting the finished product to its intended target audience and traditional publishing methods. The research problem would, therefore, be something like:

“How do you successfully publish an e-book via a technology such as Lulu and how might the possibilities that this offers affect traditional publishing methods.”

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The context/state-of-the-art

To set the context, this section could potentially include the following:

a) Definition and exploration of the terms used, such as ‘e-publishing’, ‘e-books’, ‘disruptive technology’, ‘traditional publishing’ and ‘publishing life cycle’, as well as specific terms such as ‘Lulu’.

b) An exploration of the changes that have already taken place in publishing as a result of electronic technology, in, for example, typesetting and editing, as well as looking at the various possibilities for e-publishing that currently exist and the size/scope of the existing e-book market.

c) Since the product is to be a book, issues of copyright could also be germane.

d) If the assignment includes producing a book for a specific target market, then the nature of the relationship between author, publisher and reader could usefully be explored – issues of ‘gatekeeper’, of what the audience is looking for and how they choose what to buy, etc

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The Method

This section would outline the process used to create the e-book on Lulu. It could include:

a) choices made in terms of source of material (if self-written, who’s the story aimed at, if using out-of-copyright existing material, again who’s the target market, but also what you plan to do to add value to the material for the new target market)

b) research into target market and what you need to do to make your book appealing to them

c) choices in terms of design – overall style, illustrations, fonts, jacket, endorsements, book size, binding, etc, as well as the cost vs quality trade-off decisions

d) decisions on pricing and how to publicise the book to its intended target market

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The Outcomes

Obviously this section would depend on what happens when you actually do all the above, but I can see it including:

a) an evaluation of the final product, especially in relation to its intended target audience

b) an evaluation of the ease or difficulty of the process of creating the e-book and any particular problems experienced.

c) any differences between what was anticipated and what actually happened

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The Conclusions

Although these would again depend on the foregoing sections, I anticipate that they could include such things as:

a) digital technology has already fundamentally changed the publishing industry and has the potential to become a truly disruptive technology

b) without the traditional publisher as ‘gatekeeper’ of what should be published, readers will seek other ways of narrowing down their choices. ‘Word of mouth’ via electronic social networks and trusted reviewers will be important mechanisms

c) without the vast resources of the traditional publishing corporations to fall back on, publishing via technology such as ‘Lulu’ will revert somewhat to being a ‘cottage industry’ (as outlined by Jason Epstein in The Rattle of Pebbles, an article which first appeared on April 27, 2000 in The New York Review of Books, sourced here via http://www.bookvirtual.com/ on 29 September 2009), with individuals or small groups producing works they believe in for smaller, more targeted audiences.

d) it would be difficult for an individual author wanting to publish and distribute his or her books via a technology such as ‘Lulu’ actually to reach a global audience, although the technology theoretically makes this possible.

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E-Publishing Blog – Week 1

Do we really need another blog!
What is ‘e-publishing’?
Are books the only thing that will disappear in the ‘digital revolution’?
Work in progress


Do we really need another blog!

So, this is a blog – my first foray into on-line publishing. If Sarah Brown can become the most influential woman in Britain through ‘twittering’ about the NHS, then who knows what wonders may lie ahead for me as I take my plunge into the vast unknown.

Mind you, at the moment we have no internet access, so I’m writing this in Word with a view to uploading it to my spanking new, pristine (does it even really exist, if I haven’t been there yet?), personal (although potentially shared with millions!) space on blogger.com when our router problems are fixed. So I guess technically, this isn’t a blog yet. At most, it’s a wannabe-blog! Which means that writing for an on-line audience doesn’t yet feel any different from any other kind of writing. It is, though, if what I’ve read this week is correct. Different, that is. But more of that later.

This blog is part of an MA in creative writing that I’m currently doing at Bangor University. As part of an e-publishing module, we have to do a weekly blog of reflections on class discussions, readings and our own work. I should say upfront that this is my first blog (for this course and ever!), in the first week of the course, so it’s possible that I’ll change my mind about everything I write today as the weeks go on!

It’s an interesting experience, this first blog. It’s a bit like writing a diary, obviously, so I’m tempted just to splurge onto the paper my every last thought. Yet, at the same time, there’s a part of me that’s conscious that someone else might read what I’m writing. Does that change what I write? Does it affect the way I write? Does the way you read it change because it’s a blog, as opposed to, say, an entry you’ve found in a hand-written journal? Yes, I think. That’s something we touched on during the first class. Does it matter whether you read something in a book or whether you read it on-line? Aren’t the words the same, no matter how they appear before us? It’s a question that exercises Sven Birkerts’ mind in ‘The Gutenberg Elegies’[1]. He argues in ‘Into the Electronic Millennium’ that an all-electronic future would lead to language erosion, a flattening of historical perspectives and the waning of the private self. While his view seems to me to be quite pessimistic, it does make me realise that writing for an on-line audience, and reading (or perhaps interacting with would be a better phrase) fiction on line does create a different relationship between the author and the reader than that which exists with traditional publishing. The medium affects not only the way we read, and, therefore, the overall reading experience, but also the way we must write, which has already changed what I thought I was going to do as the course work for this module (see ‘work in progress’).

The first question to ponder though, in a blog on e-publishing, is, inevitably:

What is e-publishing?

It seems such a simple question, with an obvious answer. Yet, we had difficulty arriving at a definition in class. Perhaps because the topic is new to us, and we were looking too hard for a ‘right’ answer? Or perhaps because we were a bit ‘overawed’ by trying to pin down something that itself appears still to be evolving? Whatever the reason, I don’t think our definitions were too successful. They made ‘e-publishing’ seem a philosophical concept covering pretty much anything we can access via a digital screen. For me, though, that’s a bit too big to get my head around. I quite liked the slightly more limited definition that our group came up with, of, I think, ‘digital transmission of work intended for a public audience’ (I say ‘I think’ because I didn’t write it down – note to self: making notes of group discussions is a good thing!), but even that is pretty all-encompassing, so here are a few more thoughts on it.

The phrase ‘e-publishing’ is made up of two parts – ‘e’ and ‘publishing’, so any attempt at definition has to take account of both. The ‘e’ part seems, on the face of it, straightforward: ‘electronic’, as opposed to other, more traditional, forms of publishing. In today’s world of technology, ‘e’ probably implies ‘digital’ and ‘via the world-wide-web’, rather than simply ‘by electronic means’. The ‘publishing’ part seemed a bit more problematic. In ‘Books in the Digital Age’ (p3), John Thompson refers to a 1982 study by Coser, Kadushin and Powell in which they define the traditional role of the publisher as a ‘gatekeeper’.[2] This seems to me to be quite an apt way of thinking about it. A ‘publisher’ is someone (or something) who decides which of the multitude of potential books gets printed and distributed to the public, or which of the multitude of potential stories gets printed in a newspaper or magazine. When we talk of the ‘publishing value chain’, we mean the series of activities that connects authors and readers via the printed word or image. So, typically, we speak of ‘publishing’ books, magazines or newspapers, whereas we speak of ‘producing’ TV and film. At its most basic, then, e-publishing is the digital transmission of what would previously have been distributed in printed form.

But its implications, its potential, and indeed its current status, don’t really seem to be encapsulated by those few stark words, do they? Perhaps that’s why the phrase ‘digital revolution’ has become so prevalent, and why ‘the persistent rumors of the death of the book’[3] continue.

Is the book the only thing that will disappear in the ‘digital revolution’?

It’s easy to see why so many predict that, eventually, the printed text will virtually disappear (no pun intended!). As new technologies improve and gain ground, so they supersede old technologies. If we can access texts on-line, as we need them, without leaving home, perhaps download them to personal readers for later use, perhaps have the facility to make electronic notes in electronic margins, why do we need the printed book?

Don’t get me wrong, I love books. I love the smell of them, the look of them, individually and in collections, and the feel of them, from the first time you open the cover of a new book to the 100th time you thumb through an old, worn copy of a well-loved friend. I don’t like reading on-screen, so I still tend to print out things I’ve accessed electronically, so that I can highlight them and scribble on them and compare them and browse through them later. I can’t ever see the day when I’ll prefer to read a novel via the screen rather than from the printed page. And I’m sure there are lots of people just like me. But even so, it would be hard to ignore the fact that we are in the middle of a shift from print to digital media, and wrong to pretend that that won’t have profound implications.

Eben (Eben Muse, our lecturer) spoke of ‘disruptive technologies’ – ones that have such a profound effect that society is not the same after their introduction. Digital technology quite clearly falls into this category, creating sea changes at all stages of the publishing value chain.

The most obvious changes are, perhaps, in the way we purchase books and in the role of the publisher.

Firstly, the emergence of Amazon.com and other on-line book retailers has forever changed the retail book trade. As well as giving us immense choice from the comfort of our homes, it has also, arguably, helped the demise of local, independent book stores and thus accelerated the concentration of power in the hands of a few, large book retailing chains.

Secondly, the world wide web has made it possible for authors who cannot get their books, stories and articles published, marketed and distributed through traditional channels to do it themselves, reaching their intended audience, in theory, without, or in spite of, the traditional ‘gatekeeper’.

It seems to me, though, that there are less obvious changes afoot that we need to be aware of, particularly as we move into the realms of hypertext fiction. Hypertext, according to Robert Coover[4], is “a generic term, coined a quarter of a century ago by a computer populist named Ted Nelson to describe the writing done in the nonlinear or nonsequential space made possible by the computer.” Hypertext fiction, written specifically to exploit the possibilities of web technology, combines text, images, sound and anything else the author can think of to provide networks of potential routes through a story that the reader may, or may not, explore at will. As Coover again puts it, “the traditional narrative time line vanishes into a geographical landscape or exitless maze…as paragraphs, chapters and other conventional text divisions are replaced by evenly empowered and equally ephemeral window-sized blocks of text and graphics”. Although this was written over 15 years ago, it’s possibly only now that we are beginning to see a significant body of work written in this way, but it’s an immensely exciting concept, I think.

Such fiction challenges the very concept of the novel, with its defined plot and sub-plots, structure and unfolding story line revealed by the author to the reader, and through which the reader is content to be led in linear fashion from beginning to end of the story. It also challenges the traditional relationship between author and reader. If the story is, in a sense, created anew every time it is accessed, then the reader becomes a more active co-creator, empowered to organise the elements of the story in a way that suits them, rather than as the author necessarily intended.

These thoughts have already altered the work I intended to do for the course.

Work in progress

I had intended to write a fantasy story for children in the 8-12 age group, called ‘The Witch’s Pony’, as normal, and then to create some kind of on-line experience around it – perhaps extra information about the characters, or explanations of the myths and legends that feature in the story, maybe a blog by one or more of the characters, revealing extra information or insight, perhaps even the option for readers to choose different endings for the story. Now though, I’m thinking two things:

1. It’s probably not possible to take a story written for print and simply put it on-line with a few graphics. We read on-line differently than we read in print, and both the structure and content need to reflect that.

2. The possibilities of hypertext are so much wider than just adding a few graphics or links, although I’ll be severely limited, at least initially, by my technical ability!

I think, therefore, that I’ll carry on writing ‘The Witch’s Pony’ as if it were a normal short story, and then see how different it needs to be to work on-line. More details next week, hopefully. Until then …. happy writing, and happy reading.




[1] Sven Birkerts: The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age, 11 Hypertext: of Mouse and Man. Boston, London: Faber and Faber, 1994. Accessed on-line via http://archives.obs-us.com/obs/english/books/nn/bdbirk.htm on 30 September 2009
[2] John B Thompson: Books in the Digital Age. Cambridge: Polity Press Ltd, 2008
[3] David Finkelstein: An Introduction to Book History. Hoboken: Routledge, 2005, Ch7, p188
[4] Robert Coover: ‘The End of Books’. The New York Times, 21 June, 1992, accessed via http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/09/27/specials/coover-end.html on 2 October 2009