I’m delighted to be joining the team at the Institute. I’m not an academic but a deviser and manager of projects to promote creative reading, so thinking and doing go together for me. As Director of Booktrust for seven years and of the Poetry Society before that, I’ve been particularly interested in finding new ways to bring readers and writers together. At the Poetry Society we ran a scheme that put poets to work in community settings, opening up access to their work but also providing each writer with new networks of communication, communities of readers and sources of inspiration. Booktrust runs the amazing Bookstart scheme which gives books to babies and small children, seeding a love of words and pictures before literacy blooms. The web has become a vital tool in promoting all kinds of reading and one Booktrust site well worth exploring is STORY, the campaign to keep short fiction alive and thriving; it’s an ideal form to read online.
But I’ve been struck recently by how so much reading promotion cuts literature off from other media, as if anyone still lives solely in a ‘world of books’. We all exist in a multiculture now, and there’s a need to look much harder at how we connect ideas gleaned from tv, websites, books and real life conversations to patch together our personal stances and narratives.
Conventional publishers and their authors wonder how they’ll survive as industries converge and users generate. Working with if:book I’m keen to look hard at different means to bring quality writing – and in particular fiction – to new audiences, so that writers can afford to eat and readers can savour genuinely compelling writing on-line.
When I’ve told colleagues about my move from Booktrust to exploring the future of the book, I’ve had howls of outrage and alarm from some unexpected sources. People who spend their days at a computer and evenings watching TV screens are horrified that I might be out to deprive them of the pleasure of their paperbacks. Readers cling on tight to their tomes as if literature and stationary were inseparable; meanwhile the digital world has stretched the definition of book to include laptops and social networks. So in the era of MacBooks and FaceBook, what does the (paper)book represent to people? It’s a constant in the flux of change; something worth concentrating on and keeping afterwards. Of course plenty of fiction and non-fiction published is transient crap, but research shows that people find it hard to throw away a piece of print if it’s perfect bound.
So a future book should be using all the opportunities that new media affords, but without breathlessness. The kind of pointless interactivity that the BBC’s Jeremy Paxman complained about at this year’s Edinburgh TV Festival really isn’t good enough. Whether we consume it via an e-reader, a mobile, laptop or a document printed on demand, a future book will need to be worth sticking with, the product of some serious thought and time, a carefully constructed whole. It will be rendered using the extended palette of multimedia possibilities open to makers, may be a team effort or the work of a solo author, may incorporate space for reader response and links to other sites, may use a range of delivery methods, be porous and evolving, but if it doesn’t have the integrity and quality we expect from literature then something far more important than the nostalgic musty smell of old paperbacks will have been lost.
Where do literature and stories fit in our lives? That’s the question I’ve always been most interested in. The answer changes all the time, and that’s why the work of the Institute for the Future of the Book seems to me so important.