Literary Chicago

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Film Row Cinema is packed, so much so that Randall Albers instructs members of the audience, twice, to squeeze together more closely to allow others to sit. The chairperson of the Fiction Writing Department at Columbia College, founder of Story Week Festival of Writers, and host of today’s Story Week panel discussion, “The Future of Publishing,” Albers has to get the crowd ready for the big fight. After all, at the center of any discussion about the future of publishing lies the “great debate” between print and digital media—and few topics can ruffle the feathers of academic types more than the possible extinction of The Book as We Know It.

Book reviewer Donna Seaman (Booklist) and book artist/designer Craig Jobson (A Field Guide to Urban Fowl) both seem ready to defend the endangered animal, while Dan Sinker seems poised to attack, having created a “mobile storytelling initiative” called CellStories.net and, more recently, become famous for impersonating Rahm Emanuel in a Twitter account. But the positions of the other panelists are not quite so easy to guess at. Joe Meno (The Great Perhaps) and Steve May (One Chance) are both award-winning fiction writers and playwrights, the former having once regularly contributed to Sinker’s influential underground culture magazine, Punk Planet. So which side of the great debate will they support? And will the gloves come off after positions are declared?

“We are in the midst of a revolution,” says Albers. This year’s Story Week Festival is a particularly appropriate place for the word “revolution” to come up, not simply because of changes in publishing, but also because of the fact that the festival’s theme is “Class Acts.” In the program’s letter of introduction, Albers writes:

In an age when it has become increasingly difficult for Americans to think of themselves as living in a classless society where upward mobility is a possibility—even a right—for all people, when the income disparity between the rich and poor has widened to staggering proportions, and when education, race, culture, gender, and other factors interact with class in such a way as to harden boundaries rather than erase them, we might well ask what insights writers have to offer about such a world.

Needless to say, whispers of revolution have always accompanied drastic polarization of the rich and poor. But the way we think about revolution and the way we conduct revolution, actual government-takeover revolution, seems to be changing. In Egypt, revolutionary whispers were exchanged in an unprecedented manner, via Facebook posts, and the very technology that has come to threaten the printed word has served to liberate an entire nation. My theory is this: we fear revolution, or change, until we need it, whether in technology or in social, political, and economic life.

Returning to Albers’ statement, that “we are in the midst of a revolution,” the question for the panel becomes: Do we need this revolution?

That answer depends, of course, on who we mean when we say “we.”

Karen Schmidt approaches two of our panelists in a program article entitled “E-Readers vs. Books: The Great Debate”—Seaman advocating for the printed word and Sinker for the electronic form. Seaman argues that

Print books involve the skill, conviction, and effort of many different people beyond the writing and editorial work. The art of book design is a lustrous tradition, from fonts to layout to paper selection, trim size, and, of course, those all-important covers. On to everyone involved in manufacturing, from the making of paper and ink to printing, binding, boxing, on to warehousing, transportation, and distribution. Think of all the jobs.

There is no denying that all those who make their living creating and distributing printed publications would be devastated by their elimination, and they are not alone. During the debate, Seaman goes on to express her concern for those who may not have access to computers and other digital technology, or the training needed to use them, saying, “What I’m concerned with has to do with class. When I started out in art school, I found that I could write. All I needed was a BIC pen. The more technology we have, the more we have to wonder who has access to it . . . I don’t think the future of publishing should leave anyone out.” According to the National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL), twenty-two percent of adults already read below the “basic” level of quantitative literacy and one child in four grows up not learning how to read. To what extent would these numbers increase if a portion of the population had neither books nor e-readers? What effect would that have on society at large? Should we care about this “we” that’s harmed by the digital revolution?

These are all important questions, and I’m tempted to root for Seaman’s underdogs, especially since Steve May also talks about how there are publicists out there, professional bloggers, who are pretending to be specific authors for the sake of sales. But we still haven’t considered the other side of the debate. We haven’t thought about those who benefit from electronic books. Surprisingly, the most compelling arguments for the advancement of digital publishing come not from Sinker but from Jobson, the artist/designer whose recent work consists of a 64-page, fully illustrated, three-color letterpress, printed abecedarian that required over 13,000 pressings—in other words, someone who really, really loves the bound book. Even more surprisingly, those who are benefited by electronic books are bigger underdogs that those who are harmed by them. In Jobson’s opinion, the greatest beneficiary of this revolution is the third world. Jobson invites us to imagine that we live in a place where even the most basic necessities like food, water, and shelter are in short supply, saying, “Someone comes up to you and says, ‘Here’s this book’—that’s great. But when someone says, ‘Here’s this device that has 13,000 books. Which one do you want?’ That’s something.” Comedian Stephen Colbert interviewed just such a person last October, a man named Nicholas Negroponte, who has made it his mission to provide children in third-world countries with durable, low-maintenance laptops. (Click here to view the video clip.)

In a sense, it seems as though history is repeating itself. Before the Gutenberg press was invented 571 years ago, books were either copied out by hand on scrolls and paper or they were printed from hand-carved wooden blocks. The woodwork was extremely time-consuming; carved blocks were very fragile and, over time, damaged beyond usefulness by ink. Only the wealthiest of people could afford to purchase books printed in this fashion. Thankfully, with his replaceable/moveable letters, Gutenberg opened a door to the first revolution in publishing and communication, making books available to the masses of the first world. Today, digital technology promises to open that door even wider, expanding accessibility to the third world—and if laptops crammed with libraries can make it to Ethiopia, Rwanda, and Afghanistan, then, surely, they can also make it to those who struggle financially in the United States and other first-world countries. These are the people who really need the revolution.

Digital technology isn’t only beneficial to readers, either. Writers suddenly have instant, direct access to their readers. They can create their own blogs and websites, get immediate feedback in the form of comments, and make connections using Facebook. While establishing a solid readership is by no means easy, it’s possible—one no longer need wait on a literary agent or publisher for validation and support. Sinker began his fake Rahm Emanuel account one night, anonymously, as a way to make some friends laugh and, by the next morning, he had 1,000 followers. Coincidentally, like the guy who wants to distribute laptops in third-world countries, Sinker was also interviewed by Colbert. (Click here to view the video clip.)

This is an unusual accomplishment, to be sure, but Sinker points out that, in Japan, five of the ten bestselling books of 2006 were originally written on cell phones by teenage girls who also started out by simply trying to entertain their friends. For the first time in history, writers can truly circumvent major publishers. As Sinker puts it, “You can scratch that itch and not be told all your life that you can’t do that.”

Still, we humans are creatures of habit and, as I mentioned earlier, afraid of change. Although Seaman nods at the mention of the third world, as do all the panelists, she continues to worry about the effect e-readers will have on the reading experience itself, on the atmosphere of a home, and on the process of “hunting and gathering” in a library or bookstore:

Gadgets make a person hurry. Devices breed impatience, restlessness. You don’t pause and gaze up thoughtfully from a screen, you keep scrolling and clicking. Gadgets instill a craving for movement rather than concentration . . . Books allow one to slow down. Time is stilled; story is all. Printed language has presence, weight, and timbre. It is the sentences that move, not your fingers . . . Books are sensuous, and their physicality—the texture of paper, the hardness or pliability of covers, their good smell and gentle displacement of air when pages turn, their heft and solidity, all deepen the reading experience.

In the end, she arrives at a conclusion that seems to please everyone. “There needs to be a sorting process,” she says. “Some books need to be digital and some need to be print.” Perhaps, as technologies become more stable and familiar, authors will come to regard them as simply alternative media with which to present stories—one that has its own specific techniques, implications, limitations, and possibilities. In addition to making decisions about form and genre, they will also consider whether or not each of their stories works best in the print or digital realm, or in both. Moreover, it is possible that once e-readers become more common, a paper book’s physicality will seem all the more pronounced, and the arts of designing and binding them will be elevated as a result—experimentation in these forms more supported by readers and publishers alike.

All of these will become moot points, of course, if the printed word ceases to exist altogether. But Jobson assures us this is not what the future of publishing holds. He explains that digital technology has actually made the printing of “real” books easier and more affordable, by way of machines that are “euphemistically called digital offset printers.” Before recent advancements, book printers, like computers, were gigantic and elaborate machines that could only be funded and housed by wealthy institutions (computers were reserved for the military and printers for large publishing houses). So Jobson was thrilled when he discovered that Thumbs and Knuckles/Dreaded Biscuits, a literary journal that publishes “flash fiction,” or mini-stories, at Columbia College, purchased one of these machines and no longer had to rely on out-of-house printers—especially since it took over a month for the most affordable printers, being in China, to deliver. It stands to reason that, just as personal computers become more common, so, too, will these smaller, more affordable printers, once would-be independent presses get wind of them. Maybe, thumbing their noses at the commercially-driven major publishing houses, they’ll print their own paper books on their digital offset printers and work on promoting and distributing them on the Internet. As the title of last year’s Printer’s Ball insisted, “Print Loves Digital.” Or, if it doesn’t love it yet, it thinks it’s really cute and is taking it out for dinner and a movie.

Related Article:
McSweeney’s: Some Good News From the World of Books (2/7/2011)

EVENT: THE FUTURE OF PUBLISHING PANEL DISCUSSION | WEDNESDAY, MARCH 16, 2011 AT 2:30PM | FILM ROW CINEMA | AN EVENT OF COLUMBIA COLLEGE CHICAGO’S STORY WEEK FESTIVAL OF WRITERS