The Times yesterday ran a pretty decent article, “Digital Publishing Is Scrambling the Industry’s Rules”, discussing some recent experiments in book publishing online. One we’ve discussed here previously, Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks, which is available as both a hefty 500-page brick from Yale University Press and in free PDF chapter downloads. There’s also a corresponding readers’ wiki for collective annotation and discussion of the text online. It was an adventurous move for an academic press, though they could have done a better job of integrating the text with the discussion (it would have been fantastic to do something like GAM3R 7H30RY with Benkler’s book).
Also discussed is the new Mark Danielewski novel. His first book, House of Leaves, was published by Pantheon in 2000 after circulating informally on the web among a growing cult readership. His sophmore effort, due out in September, has also racked up some pre-publication mileage, but in a more controlled experiment. According to the Times, the book “will include hundreds of margin notes listing moments in history suggested online by fans of his work who have added hundreds of annotations, some of which are to be published in the physical book’s margins.” Annotations were submitted through an online forum on Danielewski’s web site, a forum that does not include a version of the text (though apparently 60 “digital galleys” were distributed to an inner circle of devoted readers).
The Times piece ends with an interesting quote from Danielewski, who, despite his roots in networked samizdat, is still ultimately focused on the book as a carefully crafted physical reading experience:
Mr. Danielewski said that the physical book would persist as long as authors figure out ways to stretch the format in new ways. “Only Revolutions,” he pointed out, tracks the experiences of two intersecting characters, whose narratives begin at different ends of the book, requiring readers to turn it upside down every eight pages to get both of their stories. “As excited as I am by technology, I’m ultimately creating a book that can’t exist online,” he said. “The experience of starting at either end of the book and feeling the space close between the characters until you’re exactly at the halfway point is not something you could experience online. I think that’s the bar that the Internet is driving towards: how to further emphasize what is different and exceptional about books.”
Fragmented as our reading habits (and lives) have become, there’s a persistent impulse, especially in fiction, toward the linear. Danielewski is probably right that the new networked modes of reading and writing might serve to buttress rather than unravel the old ways. Playing with the straight line (twisting it, braiding it, chopping it) is the writer’s art, and a front-to-end vessel like the book is a compelling restraint in which to work. This made me think of Anna Karenina, which is practically two novels braided together, the central characters, Anna and Levin, meeting just once, and then only glancingly.
I prefer to think of the networked book not as a replacement for print but as a parallel. What’s particularly interesting is how the two can inform one another, how a physical book can end up being changed and charged by its journey through a networked process. This certainly will be the case for the two books in progress the Institute is currently hosting, Mitch Stephens’ history of atheism and Ken Wark’s critical theory of video games. Though the books will eventually be “cooked” by a print publisher — Carroll & Graf, in Mitch’s case, and a university press (possibly Harvard or MIT), in Ken’s — they will almost certainly end up different for their having been networkshopped. Situating the book’s formative phase in the network can further boost the voltage between the covers.
An analogy. The more we learn about the evolution of biological life, the more we understand that the origin of species seldom follows a linear path. There’s a good deal of hybridization, random mutation, and general mixing. A paper recently published in Nature hypothesizes that the genetic link between humans and chimpanzees is at least a million years more recent than had previously been thought based on fossil evidence. The implication is that, for millennia, proto-chimps and proto-humans were interbreeding in a torrid cross-species affair.
Eventually, species become distinct (or extinct), but for long stretches it’s a story of hybridity. And so with media. Things are not necessarily replaced, but rather changed. Photography unleashed Impressionism from the paint brush; television, as Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s new book argues, acted as a foil for the postmodern American novel. The blog and the news aggregator may not kill the newspaper, but they will undoubtedly change it. And so the book. You see that glint in the chimp’s eye? A period of interbreeding has commenced.
Very informative post!
The Times piece does get at many of the transformations taking place, but it is hard to hold conversations without scaling back the concerns or conclusions. So, I like the way that you are viewing the experiments you are working on in terms of the book production model–focuses the conversation on the writing process and the role of authorship.
Similarly, I like the use of hybridity to think about formats. First there is the coexistence that will take place between bound books and their electronic components that will make up many projects for the forseeable future–we can talk about them in terms of one another and begin to sort out the characteristics of the emerging forms. I recently saw a Spanish language e-text that exactly replicated the print book, ala PDF style. This was something I always thought missed the mark for e-texts, but it actually worked because the print book had so many references to audio exercises that could be actualized on the electronic page–not reallly a revolutionary scrambling, but a nice extension to the familiar.
Eventually, species become distinct (or extinct), but for long stretches it’s a story of hybridity. And so with media. Things are not necessarily replaced, but rather changed. Photography unleashed Impressionism from the paint brush; television, as Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s new book argues, acted as a foil for the postmodern American novel. The blog and the news aggregator may not kill the newspaper, but they will undoubtedly change it. And so the book. You see that glint in the chimp’s eye? A period of interbreeding has commenced.
Print media have already made the leap so has radio. And this goes beyond contents. When we read newspapers on line we find tons of searchable metadata; lists of most e-mailed, blogged and/or searched articles, lists of related articles, audio slide shows, the possibility to customize headlines. Or in the case of radio, lists of most popular transcripts, discussion boards, book excerpts, and of course, blogs. Not to talk about the advertisements bombarding the reader with enticing moving images. We can check the credentials of journalists, read articles published or broadcasted in the past. We read as listeners and listen as readers, all in richly linked texts. And we can add our own voice here and there. The (r)evolution has burst the old Communication Triangle. The boundaries between writer/speaker, reader/listener and message/text are disappearing; they are going where the theorists in journalism school told us the ideal message should. And yes, platitude aside, the medium has done it, the Canadian pop icon was right, “the future isn’t what it used to be.”
Although there is a long tradition of animal husbandry aimed at creating mules, beefaloes and so on, I am sure that for the proto-humans and proto-chimps, the product of interbreeding was far less interesting than the process. In our attention to the Networked Book, a key question for me is how to write in this new environment?
This month I am wrapping up two books that emerged on the network (AUDC’s Blue Monday and the Annenberg Center for Communication’s Networked Publics Book). Last fall I co-wrote an article with Marc Tuters on locative media. It’s perhaps a blend of accident, opportunity, coercion, and desire that led me to these hybrids, but for whatever reason I have done exactly the opposite of what I was told to do in my training as a historian. In graduate school, I was always tought that writing was a solitary task and that collaborative works were fun but useless for academic advancement.
This attitude, still pervasive in the humanities, not only has to change, but inevitably will change. The process of online collaboration is a tremendously different experience from writing for yourself and rewarding for any writer to explore. In both of the books, we had very “wired” individuals involved who balked at collaboration and were unable to continue in the collaborative process. I am not terribly surprised, the process is quite threatening to one’s sense of self. The key to successful collaborative writing is not to maintain one’s ideas like a schnauzer holding on to a bone but to give up to a process of revision. One author sketches out an idea, the other comes in and fleshes it out, then it’s back to the first author for revisions, at which point the second comes through again and the process goes on and on until the text reaches a point at which all the writers are comfortable with it. If a good collaborator finds a section of text that he or she feels strongly about has been edited, the appropriate reaction is not to roll the text back to the original, but rather to make the effort to synthesize a new position. Being able to do this is immensely rewarding intellectually (and even emotionally, as you gain an outside perspective on your thoughts), but difficult for many to do.
In Writely and MediaWiki, the collaborative environments we used, it is relatively easy to find out what changes the other author made, but since the changes are not displayed directly on top of the document (as might be the case with the markup tools in Word), you soon stop keeping track of who did what. As a result, during the revision process you become aware not only of the other author’s irritating quirks, but also your own irritating quirks as well. What results is a hybrid voice. In each collaborative project I took on the voice that resulted is not mine, but also not my collaborator’s.
A decade and a half ago post-structuralism swept the academy, with its ideas of the death of the author and intertextuality (the idea that every text is thoroughly made up of other texts). As happens so often in history, that moment only foreshadowed the changes of our own.