Week 12: Guest Lecture from Kate Pullinger

Is Literature Evolving? Kate Pullinger


Publishing is changing rapidly, and writing, reading and bookselling are changing with it, as is the book itself: there is no escaping this fact. While writers are urged by their publishers to engage with social media in order to market their books, storytelling itself is evolving with the new technologies.

I’ve been writing books – novels and short stories – for more than twenty years now, and writing digital fiction for a decade. In 2001 I was asked to teach a creative writing course online which, in turn, led to a year-long AHRB research fellowship at NTU, looking at new forms of narrative online. I began to experiment with hybrid forms of literature during that year – writing stories that combine image, video, animation, sound, music, etc. with words on the screen – and since then I’ve continued to write both books and digital fiction.

Moving online had as profound an effect on me as a writer as publishing my first book did. Beginning to create works of digital fiction forced me to consider the future of publishing, indeed, the future of writing and reading itself, much more deeply than I could ever have anticipated.

A bound book is a technology for reading, created by a printing press, moved from warehouse to retailer to reader via a network of transport technology, conveying the writer’s words to you in a manner to which you are completely accustomed; a technology you were taught to use on your mother’s knee, most likely. But many people are deeply attached to books, myself included, for reasons much more complex than the simple statement ‘I like to read’ could ever convey. The book-lined room is a status symbol as potent as the most expensive hand-printed wallpaper; the desk surrounded by books is as significant an image of intellect as that photograph of Einstein with his hair standing on end. The positions of The Book and The Writer in our culture are laden with layers of meaning, and digitization disrupts and transforms both these things.

As a fiction writer, I’m not really interested in the technological platform itself, be that bound book, e-reader, or web browser. What I am interested in is writing. What I am interested in is language; words, crafted, precise and beautiful; and the way that the right words in the right order can create mental pictures as indelible as the greatest film or photograph or painting. I am interested in what happens when words are liberated from the book – what happens to language, what happens to reading? What does it mean to put text on a screen, to use text combined with other forms of media?

Pundits bemoan the fact that young people are reading fewer books - though actual research on the effect of the internet on reading is in its infancy - but for the under-twenties, the born-digital generation, the acts of reading and writing have been fundamentally altered by the digital age already. With this in mind, it could be argued that the novel, as defined as a single work by a single author aimed at the solitary reader published on paper using fixed print type – or an electronic replica of that - is a relic of a cultural moment, a moment that lasted more than two hundred and fifty years or so but – as all you scholars of the history of literature know - in the context of humanity’s immense shared history of story-telling, a moment nonetheless. The new technologies enable the integration of story and community, writer and reader, media and text; they provide a platform for interactivity and response that we’ve only just begun to explore. It’s the hybrid forms that are now emerging that interest me, as both a writer and a reader. Literature is evolving.




What do you think a Literature of The Future will look like?




http://www.katepullinger.com

Week 12: Writers and Publishing

What does it mean to publish in the web 2.0 world?

Some key terms we will discuss during this  session:

• digital storytelling
• affordances
• new media platforms
• audience
• open source
• print on demand
• self-publishing
• e-readers

Open Publishing

When thinking of “open publishing” the first things to probably springs to mind are people like Lawrence Lessig, Cory Doctorow and Tom Reynolds who have all persuaded their publisher to allow them to release electronic versions of their books at the same time as the physical dead-tree version. (More on those three later.) In all cases, this seems to have been to the benefit of the book, but to give your book away at the same time as you put it up for sale is a bit of a leap of faith. Why would you take that risk? It’s far from being a proven economic or promotional strategy.

I think Chris Saad gets to the heart of this very quickly, when he asks, Am I being heard? He says there is:

“A fundamental human need that I think podcasting, blogging and all forms of social/citizen journalism speaks to… the need to be heard. People just want to feel connected and understood.”

~http://www.touchstonelive.com/blog/2006/04/am-i-being-heard.html

At a very basic level, Larry, Cory and Tom share in common with me, you, and pretty much everyone else a desire to be heard, to be read, to have the things that we’ve laboured over appreciated.

Chris Anderson, editor of Wired and author of The Long Tail, also confesses that he just wants to be heard (although he doesn’t seem to have published an ebook version of his book):

Anderson, however, tangles up a few threads in his piece, the first is a discussion of equivalence: ebooks are assumed not to be equivalent to books; digital audiobooks are assumed to be equivalent to CDs.

Reading an ebook isn’t currently a great experience (the iPad however might be the game-changer). Specialised e-book readers are expensive, and most people don’t like reading on-screen, so the ebook is seen as not equivalent for a paper book, i.e. people are more likely to go and buy the paper version if they like the ebook. Thus it is beneficial to release a free ebook so that you can reach as wide an audience as possible, as you stand a good chance of converting ebook downloads to paper book sales.

Conversely, it doesn’t really matter whether you have an unlawfully downloaded copy of an audiobook, or the real thing, whether bought as a download or as a CD, because either way you are probably going to listen to it on your iPod, computer or other MP3 playing device. The assumption is that giving away ebooks encourages sales of paper books, but giving away audiobooks, or allowing unauthorised downloads, will cannibalise the sales of the legitimate ebook. This is exactly the same logic as used by the RIAA and BPI for suing file-sharers, and the rest of the music industry for attempting to slap DRM onto everything in sight. It’s a very compelling and sensible looking argument, but it’s based on unproven assumptions behind the motivations of the downloader/buyer.

Right now, there are more questions than answers. The publishing industry is being pushed into experimentation in a way that the music and movie industries are not (one example is  the Million Penguins wiki-novel). Authors are forcing publishers to do things that might seem counterintuitive, and we’re slowly starting to figure out, through trial and error, what all this means. Still lots to find out, though, about this open publishing idea.

Update Nov. 2010: Lawrence Lessig responds to the “outrage” about his talk on a panel at Vimeo's Festival+Awards. The title of the panel was "Know your digital rights." See Lessig’s response in the 17^th Nov. 2010 Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lawrence-lessig/the-imbecile-moron-respon_b_764725.html