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