Right Content, Right Medium

Throughout the term, we have been discussing literacy and transliteracy revolving around the question of how we have changed the way we consume and produce content in an era of advancing communications technology. A significant underlying tension in our readings and discussion has been the use of print media versus digital media.

Through focusing on transliteracy and examining new media narratives, it has become clear that those who use new media effectively have moved beyond the format of text to communicate ideas using a variety of formats: text, visual, audio, animation, video and interactive content. But perhaps in retrospect it is a good idea to look back at the format of text and how new media is changing the way we explicitly interact with it in the new digital age.

In the article, A Book Club of Billions: 52 Ways to Die in a Cave and Other Lessons in Social Media Marketing, Tammy Nam discusses how two book publishers have used social media to promote their works. In the case of James Tabor’s book Blind Descent, the publishers produced a two page Scribd document that was distributed virally to help push book sales. The book Marijuana is Safer by Steve Fox, Paul Armentano and Mason Tvert, was actually released in full and for free on Sribd. In two days, “the book was read more than 100,000 times and downloaded more than 11,000 times” (Nam, 2010). According to Nam, these publishers, “are using Scribd to take advantage of what's so great about the web for book marketing” (2010).

In the article Google puts $1m into academic research projects for digitised books, Jemima Kiss shows how Google is working to digitize older print content and to add relevant geographic content to the files. “Researchers say the project will help to open up interested in history, classics and archaeology, but will also help develop new tools and research methods as well as expertise in using data in this way” (Kiss, 2010).

It is well recorded that people read differently with digital text than they do with printed text. There is a higher propensity to scanning material and there is a bias toward shorter pieces. For me, in an attempt to sum up the term, there needs to be a recognition for the benefits and limitations of each media. It would be ineffective to simply publish a book or long academic article that is meant for attentive sustained reading in a digital form that looks identical to its published form. The use of new media should take advantage of all of the strengths that the media offers – in integrating video, sound, animation and interactivity. The richness of the content will come not from the length of the text but instead from the accompanying media. The corollary is also true, formats that require and work well with long text are best served in traditional print. Academic pieces that require in depth consideration and attention as well as vivid fiction for which the imagination on the reader is vital should remain in print formats.

To Jessica, the authors that we spoke with and my classmates, thanks for this course.


References:

Nam, Tammy H. (2010, July). “A Book Club of Billions: 52 Ways to Die in a Cave and Other Lessons in Social Media Marketing.” The Huffington Post. Retrieved from: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tammy-h-nam/a-book-club-of-billions-e_b_645527.html.

Kiss, Jemima. (2010, July). “GooglePuts $1m into Academic Research Projects for Digitised Books.” The Guardian. Retreived from: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/pda/2010/jul/14/google-books-funding-re%20%20guardian.co.uk.

Week 13: Review and Conclusions

Week 13: Review and Conclusions

Narratives can be published in various online ways: 

• Voicethreads
• Skype
• Blogs
• Wikis
• Social Bookmarks/Folksonomy
• Diigo
• Evernote
• Flickr
• Netvibes
• Twitter
• E-mail
• Google Pages
• Facebook

Anyone Can Publish

A timely example of how even the youngest learners can demonstrate transliteracy (http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/3-little-pigs/id357980333?mt=8). Henry Dewey created his own illustrations to interpret “The Three Little Pigs” and then with the assistance of his father, created an iPhone app for people to read his version of the story, which includes Henry’s narration of the tale.

Henry Dewey is a typical 8-year-old. He loves to build with Legos and annoy his little sister, hoping to someday own a reptile to terrorize her with.

The first-grader at Trinity Episcopal School in Rollingwood is also doing some nontraditional things: Henry just released his first iPhone application, an e-book version of the folk tale “The Three Little Pigs.”

Using pen and ink, Henry spent the entire fall semester creating the illustrations for his book during an after-school art program at Trinity.

“I like being creative, making bobbleheads on paper,” Henry said.

Early in the process, he decided he wanted to transform his project into an iPhone application to provide more options on the gadget for children.

He told his father, Mark Dewey — himself an iPhone application developer — about his idea. When Henry finished the illustrations, the drawings were converted into a digital format. Then his dad helped turn the project into the application, rewriting the story and having Henry narrate it.

“At a young age to know you can be a creator, in the mainstream of American culture, that can be powerful,” said Mark Dewey, whose digital media company, Geoki, published the app. “We hope that carries on through his growing and his life.”

Week 9: Transliteracy

During this week you will want to refer to Professor Sue Thomas's guest lecture.

“The ability to read, write and interact across a range of platforms, tools and media from signing and orality through handwriting, print, TV, radio and film, to digital social networks.”

The word “transliteracy” is derived from the verb “to transliterate,” meaning to write or print a letter or word using the closest corresponding letters of a different alphabet or language. 

The idea of transliteracy is really about promoting a unifying ecology. As Thomas explains, 

“The concept of transliteracy calls for a change of perspective away from the battles over print versus digital, and a move instead towards a unifying ecology not just of media, but of all literacies relevant to reading, writing, interaction and culture, both past and present.

 It is an opportunity to cross some hitherto quite difficult divides.” 

Transliteracy asks key questions about communication:

1. How were people remembering and communicating for the thousands of years before writing?
2. Where are the similarities with the way we communicate today?
3. Has our addiction to print made us forget skills we had before?
4. Can digital media reconnect us with those skills again?

Watch “Social Media Revolution” on YouTube:  

Literacy is not linear. ““Part of the confusion about media convergence stems from the fact that when people talk about it, they’re actually describing at least five processes” (Henry Jenkins, 2001). 

• technological
• economic
• social or organic
• cultural
• global
  

MEDIA CONVERGENCE
Another term which has become widely used about these kinds of experiences, especially by the media and gaming worlds, is “convergence.” In 2001 when Henry Jenkins noted the confusion about media convergence actually is because of the various processes that are at play (it is not one single required literacy). For Jenkins, “these multiple forms of media convergence are leading us toward a digital renaissance - a period of transition and transformation that will affect all aspects of our lives” (Jenkins, 2001). 

Sue Thomas often refers to the Asheninka tribe as an example of a transliterate group. For them transliteracy imbues every aspect of their culture:

“Everything we use has a story. Each drawing which is passed from one generation to another is our writing; each little symbol has an immense story. As one learns a drawing, one learns its origin, who taught it, who brought it to us.”




Discussion Questions:

Q1. What is transliteracy? Give examples of how transliteracy appears in your daily life.

Q2. How does Coover’s “The End of Books” (originally written in 1992) align with a contemporary thinking of transliteracy and the development of the web into web 2.0?

Q3. According to Aarseth’s “Nonlinearity and Literary Theory,” “the text...entails a set of powerful metaphysics...the three most important ones are those of reading, writing and stability” (763).  Having read about and discussed the idea of transliteracy, would you suggest adding or changing any of the three elements that Aarseth notes as most important? Must “users” (readers) “learn to accept their position as agents of the text” or might they play a more decisive role (as in Andy Campbell’s works)?

E-Books?

Give our recent discussion with Andy Campbell of Dreaming Methods, I thought this article from The Guardian Book Blog would be of interest:

Are books and the internet about to merge?

The difference between ebooks and the internet is minimal, and we should be glad the two are growing closer and closer

Book and internet: can you see the join? Illustration: Images.com/Corbis

Damien Walter

guardian.co.uk, Wed 15 Feb 2012 16.00 GMT

Comment

Blogpost

It's easy to forget that the world wide web as we know it today evolved from an early attempt to put books on the internet. When Tim Berners-Lee envisaged what would become the world wide web, it was with the idea of making academic papers and other documents widely available. To this end he devised a simple way of laying out text and images on a page, inventing what we now call Hypertext Markup Language or HTML.

Early HTML could define pages and paragraphs, bold and italicise text, embed images and lay out tables. A little more than 20 years later, HTML 5 includes media playback and animation, and the web has now become so ubiquitous that for most users it is indistinguishable from the underlying framework of the internet itself, but at its core the technology of the web remains little changed. Every web page, however sophisticated it may seem, is basically a digital book that we read on our computer through our web browser.

So when Hugh McGuire, founder of PressBooks and LibriVox, stated today that the book and the internet will merge, he was in one sense simply reiterating what is already the case. But from the perspective of people without the technical knowledge to see how closely entwined the book and the internet already are, it has the whiff of yet another doom-monger proclaiming the death of the book as we know it.

McGuire's argument hinges on the recent emergence of ebooks as a serious contender to the print book as the dominant artefact of the publishing industry, with some suggesting that ebooks will make up 50% of the book market by 2015 thanks to the Kindle, iPad and smartphones. Ebooks are deliberately packaged and marketed to appear as much like traditional print books as possible, so many readers will be surprised to discover that ebooks are built around much the same HTML structure that powers the web. Every ebook, no matter how much like a print book it may seem, is a web page that we read on the simplified browser embedded in our e-reader of choice.

The distinction between the ebook/webpage, webpage/ebook is not a material one. In technological terms they are exactly the same thing. But when McGuire first mooted his argument on Twitter in April last year my response likely mirrors the response of many book readers, "Books are researched, written, edited, published, marketed … and hence paid for. The internet is ego noise, hence free." The distinction many of us draw between a book and a webpage is one of quality and hence of value. The real question raised by McGuire's argument is whether we continue to value ebooks as books, or as webpages. Books are something we pay for. Webpages are things we read for free. Which model will win out?

Unless you are one of the very small number of people whose fortunes rest upon the outdated business model of publishing, you should hope that the latter wins. Because this is about a much bigger issue than how writers and editors get paid for the valuable work they do. For hundreds of years we've been slowly expanding the reach of human knowledge, both in terms of what we know and how many of us know it. Today we take a resource like Wikipedia for granted – but compare it with the situation of only a few decades ago, when the majority of the population had lacked easy access to such knowledge. The benefits of expanding access to knowledge, both social and economic, are incalculable.

Now we stand at the threshold of possibly the most revolutionary advances in human history. The combined technologies of the internet – HTML webpages, ebooks, search technology, social media and many more – are very close to making all human knowledge accessible to all people for free. Even the short-term consequences of this advance are hard to envisage, and in the long term it has the potential to improve our future as much as the invention of the printing press improved our past and present.

Every time society advances, it faces challenges from those people economically and emotionally invested in the past. Undoubtedly stone age flint knappers were less than happy about bronze-age technology disturbing their business model. The medieval church was none too pleased about printing technology breaking their hegemony over knowledge, but we'd never have had the Enlightenment without it. Today the media-conglomerates, governments and educational institutions that profit from gatekeeping knowledge of all kinds are pushing the Stop Online Piracy Act, and even more draconian legislation to try and hold back the flood of free knowledge that threatens their power. Unless we want to stay in the knowledge equivalent of the stone age, and miss the next enlightenment the knowledge revolution promises to bring with it, we should all redouble our efforts to make sure they lose.

For centuries the book has been the highest symbol of knowledge. The object that has enshrined and preserved knowledge through history. The book is so inextricably linked with our concept of knowledge that for many people it is hard to separate one from the other. But for human knowledge to reach its full potential, we may have to let go of the book-as-object first, or open our thinking to a radically different definition of what a book is.

Audio Books

Image and podcast from here.

I thought you might find this discussion interesting - authors discussing audio books, especially in light of your digital literacy and me assignment.

Mr Gaiman and Mr Hodgman continue their conversation about Audio Books. Here they talk about the upcoming audiobook release of Robert Sheckley’s DIMENSION OF MIRACLES and why it sometimes feels like a strange cross betweenHitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy AND Mad Men at the same time.

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

What is a book?

I have been so immersed in a book culture that even the notion of defining the book at first struck me as a ridiculous question when I first started thinking about it a few years ago. A book is a book. It’s printed. It exists between two covers. It’s static. Yet we are all becoming involved in the redefinition of the book. 

The question of what the book is transforms into a question of what we need it to be, and then, what can a book be? I think some of the ‘games’ that my children ‘read/play’ should be marketed to parents as the new form of the book, because that’s really what they have become – game series like Assassin’s Creed and The Elder Scrolls. They await the new releases just as I await the latest books from my favorite authors. They immerse themselves in the plot, unlock the narrative and experience the story through film, text, music and by creating the action with their playing. 

Literature – fiction and non-fiction -  is how we tell each other stories and create a shared experience and understanding. As our reading moves online, and we explore the text plus world to enhance our reading experience, it is going to become richer. But as Glenn’s son said, the experience of moving through text and following new information can take you places that you didn’t expect to reach. One thing about the 19^th century book, you could always return to your earlier experience and relive it;Chapter three stayed put and you could go back to it. I find myself longing for a way to put an electronic lock on my online experiences so I can readily re-access them. Like the Hotel project that Coover describes, it can be disconcerting to find that your favorite character has left the digital world, never to be found again. It reminds me of a Zen haiku bit of internet humor that circulated a while back – positing that Microsoft Error messages should be replaced with haiku:

With searching comes loss

And the presence of absence:

"My Novel" not found.

So the answer to what a book is and what it will become also depends on where and what its purpose is – is it an electronic textbook, an e-art book (and wow, does that definition change from the old coffee table book notion of an artbook), a novel for mass consumption, or a game-like experience? There’s still a mass market, and I wonder if readers will become exhausted by the new opportunities. 

I went down a Peter Robinson rabbit hole while reading Jared Jenisch. Robinson writes in WHERE WE ARE WITH ELECTRONIC SCHOLARLY EDITIONS, AND WHERE WE WANT TO BE and would just end with a quote from him on scholary texts and how hypertext transforms us from readers into editors:

“Scholarly editing has for centuries distinguished between editors and readers: we, the editors, are gifted with special access to the materials, and we are licensed by the academy to make editions which you, the readers, accept. This [hyperlinked] approach attacks this distinction. All readers may become editors too, and all editors are readers before they are editors. This does not propose that all readers should become editors all the time: most of us will be content to accept, most of the time, what Gabler tells us about Ulysses, or Werner tells us about Dickinson. But any good reader must sometimes be an editor. Gaps may also appear in other barriers, long present within the academy: that between documentary and critical editing, that between textual scholarship and literary scholarship. We are all engaged in the business of understanding: distributed editions fashioned collaboratively may become the ground of our mutual enterprise.”

This is hypertext.

I took a look at Bieguelman's, "The Book After the Book" site before doing any of the readings for this week. I found the site to be confusing and with a number of broken links, I suspected that it was out of date. Ultimately, I was looking to find a starting point and then a listing of the different sections, so I would know that I had read the whole book. I left again in frustration.

After that experience I read "The End of Books" article by Robert Coover which discusses a class Coover lead in hyperfiction. The reading was quite compelling. Coover did a very good job of positioning hypermedia as something different from books - more over, something different even than e-books. As Coover says, "hypertext provides multiple paths between text segments" and so the reader is able to create their own narrative, which will be different from the narrative created by other readers and of course different from the narrative envisioned by the author (Something that Bush discussed when he talked about the Memex).

I revisited the Bieguelman site and it all became clear. This time, as I clicked the links I found myself relishing the experience of discovery as opposed to being frustrated about missing the story. I now knew that I had to create the narrative for myself and I had to be comfortable with creating a loop or with missing pieces of text entirely. This is hypertext.

I finished my exploration today by watching the Jay-Z Decoded video that Hillary had posted and the power of hypertext and the way in which it transformed reading and books was abundantly clear.

In the end, hypertext will not destroy or replace books. It truly is a new media. But, that does not mean that it will replace the old media of books. They will still have their place and their audience. Choose-your-own-adventure books were fascinating to read and disturbed the regular process of reading, yet many people still enjoyed to read narratives created by an author. This will continue to be the case. New media has the impact of segmenting audiences or segmenting spans of attention rather than displacing and killing old media.

Transforming books

Books will continue to exist, but the possibilities for their transformation are astounding. Although many of us still enjoy the tactile experience of reading books and flipping pages, I think that we may attribute more nostalgia to the physical book than they deserve.

For example, can you not enjoy an inexpensive copy of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet as much as a leather-bound printing? Is a dog-eared copy of Pride and Prejudice less dramatic? I don’t think so.

If we compare books to other forms of communication such as photography, is a digital picture worth less than a printed one? Is an online video less valuable than a DVD? I would argue that we value them both equally. But by removing the notion that we must publish books on paper and bind them together, we open up a world of possibilities.

Take for example, the creative ways for distributing a book that evolved when rapper Jay-Z partnered with the Microsoft search engine, Bing, back in October 2010. In a project that was two parts marketing and one part social experiment, Jay-Z and Bing released every page of the rapper’s upcoming book, Decoded, by strategically placing them across the United States and the world. 

For one month prior to the book’s release, they would publish five to ten pages in odd formats and venues that were determined by the content on the page. For example, pages were printed on billboards, on hamburger wrappers and even printed inside limited edition Gucci jackets.

Watch a recap of the amazing marketing and strategic publishing event:

You can read more about it here:
http://bing.decodejay-z.com/home/map?fbid=RrGro4BTA_9&wom=true

By publishing his book in nontraditional ways, it added value to the book, instead of taking away from it. Readers were now everywhere and often snapped pictures of the book and became involved in the story as opposed to passively reading it. 

What's your type?

While we're considering Gutenberg and Google and textuality and whether it's the end of books or what is the end of books, maybe we should let the books speak for themselves?! You may have already seen this, but it's fun! Have a nice weekend.....http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYcSrIkVpzM

Can books exist only in print media?

I have thought a lot about the question of whether books can only exist in paper-printed media. This is an important question as Sara Lloyd reflects in "A book publisher's manifesto for the 21st century." 

I've always felt a relationship with books - a connection that was real between me and the printed words on the paper.  I have fond memories of going to the library as a child - I lived in a small town and didn't have to be taken by my parents. I found my own way there. The idea of writing my own book has been a deeply held goal of mine for many years. 

 This past Christmas I got my first e-reader and I am enjoying it, despite the fact I really do enjoy the feel of a 'real' book in my hands. My use of the adjective 'real' suggests the book isn't real if it is on the e-reader - I'm not sure that is correct.  I think the 'book' can still exist online.

The idea that I could publish a book online without having to find a publisher to accept my effort is appealing, although I believe that publishers offer invaluable services like professional editors (every writer needs an editor) and marketing - services that many writer's are happy to accept.

Still, I am concerned about the idea of losing the printed version of the book.  And here's why.

Books are a reflection of our society and our culture.  They also are a record of our history. If we want to preserve that, if we want to leave a history of our time for future generations, I think it needs to be in print.  Technology changes.  What if the Dead Sea Scrolls were left on a Memex (Bush - As We May Think p. 44), imagining such a machine could be created in that time,  would we be able to read them today? 

Guest Lecture Response: Neil Baldwin

Hi Everyone,
Here is something Neil has written in response to your comments regarding his initial post. Neil encourages you to share your thoughts here in the comments.

"it will be two years in april since the creative research center www.montclair.edu/creativeresearch went live, and you, as one of our earliest adapters, can see how much we have grown -- just look at our Web-bibliography and Links and Blog pages.
the Long Form is alive and well at the creative research center.
and i, as a writer and author, have commensurately migrated more and more to the Web in everything i do.
or, i should more pertinently say, everything i produce (in the content sense).
to be sure, as many in your class pointed out, and as milosz says in his wonderful poem at the end of my post -- i still turn to The Books when i want a particular kind of respite or solace.
as a matter of fact, right now i am halfway through the cairo trilogy by the nobel prize winner nahguib mahfouz.
it's a thousand pages, and i hope it goes on forever....
the preponderant part of my day - as an author and, in the past five years, as a university professor - is spent either in class or at my desk - and when i am at my desk i am on the computer.
sometimes i might get up and walk around and take a break, but the pull to come back is strong.
occasionally, i feel guilty (if that is the right term) for spending so much time in cyberspace.
but then another side of my mind issues the corrective that i need to go where the actionis, in the fullest sense.
along with the desire to put a narrative out there comes the reciprocal desire for response.
i was going to say "feedback" but that is too distorted.
as a writer, i have always had a hunger to communicate, and that is a given in my life and work. but in the past fifteen-plus years since the Web entered my life, there is no question that my urge for a reply - in the widest cultural sense down to the most immediate "did you get my email?" sense - has increased.
i have ambivalent feelings about this mirror-effect, i.e., the more going out, the more i want to see and experience coming in.
one could adapt the metaphor and say it is as natural as breathing...but i would be remiss if i did not tell you and your students that it has a darker tinge.
i can't quite define this new synaptic mode. i think it is primal, archetypal.
i'll stop now with this final thought: i do not see the e-book 'explosion' in a darwinian way anymore.
i do not see an electronic tsunami crashing down upon us and carrying away the flotsam and jetsam of print.
i agree with the general sentiment of your class that the media will coexist.
the gradual atomization of TV, the music business, movies in multiplexes, interactive displays in museums, smartphones, and so on - - there is no way this surge could not effect and disturb the dynamics of the act of reading.
however, as long as human beings seek out manifestations of creative self-expression, books will remain."

Week 3: History of the Book

It’s not just about the printing press! The history of the book presents us with a complete, observable communications revolution. The historical record allows us to examine the whole of a vast socio-cultural, political, and economic change over a period of some three to five hundred years (depending on whose perspective you prefer). By following the developments in manuscript and print book production, tied to the changes in the technologies used to produce those texts, we can also chart the various changes in social organization, politics and economics. 

“Can books only exist in the paper-printed media? Can the text be separated from paper to be reused as a book through digital media? Is such a discussion relevant to the subject of books?”

Some key ideas to consider:

• the history of the book
• the end of books (!?)
• the net_reading/writing_condition
• What are some current views about the emergence and diffusion of media?

Was There a Reading Revolution in the New American Republic?

Professor Robert Gross explores the history and historiography of book history and reading in pre Civil War America. This lecture was originally given at the University of Toronto in the fall of 2008.

Guest Lecture: Neil Baldwin

AND YET THE BOOKS: One Author’s Uncertain Trajectory Through the Craft and the Business by Neil Baldwin baldwinn@mail.montclair.edu

The foreground “through-line” for this lecture/essay is drawn by the six major nonfiction books I have written and published, signposts along the road of my life as a writer during the past quarter-century – topped off by my new novel, The 25^th Protocol, an ebook.

The irrepressible background is known intellectually as the culture industry (a more recent term, cf. the works of Theodor Adorno and Pierre Bourdieu) a layer of the Zeitgeist within which resides the publishing industry (note, above all else, the term industry) which I did not strictly “enter” as a legitimate inhabitant and practitioner until the spring of 1989 when, after five years as director of the annual fund in The New York Public Library, I was hired by a consortium of publishing executives to become  the founding executive director of the National Book Foundation, sponsor of the National Book Awards.

However, I am getting ahead of myself.

TO ALL GENTLENESS: WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS, THE DOCTOR-POET  -  my first work of nonfiction, was begun in 1982 and published in 1984, growing out of my doctoral dissertation, a descriptive catalog of Williams’s archive of manuscripts and letters in the Poetry Collection at the Lockwood Memorial Library of the State University of New York at Buffalo.  The book was sold to Atheneum Publishers at a long-ago time when that venerable imprint was part of Scribner’s, and was housed above the eponymous book store on Fifth Avenue that is now a Benetton shop. Scribner’s  was bought by Simon & Schuster, now a subsidiary of the Viacom Corporation, at which point Scribner’s became branded as Scribner and Atheneum  was subsumed into a children’s book imprint.

When I began work on this book my wife and I had a one year old girl and a three year old boy at home so I had to become a writer in residence at my brother in law’s apartment on the upper east side of Manhattan and went over there for daylong stretches while he was at work on Wall Street. I typed the whole thing out using carbon paper for a duplicate and white-out for mistakes .  For To All Gentleness I received a $3,000 advance.  It was published in a first printing of 1,000 copies and reviewed in the Sunday New York Times Book Review by Susan Stamberg of National Public Radio. William Carlos Williams’ son, Dr. William Eric Williams, wrote the Preface to my biography of the great American modernist.  The Williams family told me that of the many published in the 1970s and 80s, mine was the best biography of their patriarch.

 MAN RAY – AMERICAN ARTIST – was conceived in 1984 and published in the fall of 1988. I had the ambitious vision to broaden my purview beyond an exemplary figure in one art form, literature -- albeit the most influential American poet of the twentieth century -- and find a figure who encompassed all of modernism in the arts.  I learned by fortunate accident that my choice of subject, the exotic, multidisciplined Man Ray, was born in Philadelphia as Emmanuel Radnitsky  and grew up as a Jewish Brooklynite, the son of a tailor.  Shopping the proposal around, I had lunch with a renowned  Random House editor who chastened me that Man Ray “was something of a charlatan.” Undaunted, researching for the book,  I travelled to Paris often, and interviewed Man Ray’s widow, Juliet;  as well as Malcolm Cowley, Kenneth Burke, Virgil Thomson, Marcel Jean, Pierre Matisse, Dorothea Tanning,  Andre Kertesz, Berenice Abbott,  and Ned Rorem, among many others, then followed Man Ray’s trail in Hollywood and London. The book was a technological hybrid, the first half composed on an Olivetti  typewriter and the second half on a Kaypro computer with four-inch floppy discs.  Once a month for breakfast I would meet with my editor at Clarkson Potter, the charming and erudite Nancy Novogrod, formerly of The New Yorker, in a chic, quiet Madison Avenue restaurant, and together we went over the manuscript line by line.

I left The New York Public Library the summer after Man Ray came out, and was recruited to run the nascent National Book Foundation, which, at the time, had no office, no staff, and, much to my chagrin, no money.  But the chairman of the board cheered me on -- “You’re a fundraiser, go out there and raise your salary!”

EDISON – INVENTING THE CENTURY  -  was begun in 1991 and published in 1995. The Walt Disney Company, getting into the publishing business along with other media conglomerates in the new spirit of corporate synergy, founded a new imprint.  When I first met the young publisher, Bob Miller, it was so early in the process he didn’t even know yet what his company was going to be named.  My editor began to call me every week, determined to find a new biography subject for me. What about Thomas Edison? she said one day. I scoffed.  Why would anyone want yet another saga of the Wizard of Menlo Park when there were at least two hundred Edison books out there already?  I changed my mind once I pierced the pasteboard superhero mask and found the human figure concealed within thousands of laboratory notebooks in the Edison archives and vintage red brick “invention factory” in West Orange, New Jersey, down the road from my home.  I convinced the executor of the Edison estate to literally break open a safe deposit box that had not been breached since 1947 and lend me a microfilm reel of thousands of letters from Edison’s second wife never before seen publicly. “Your book is about Mr. Edison,” the attorney mumbled grudgingly, “why on earth would you want to see her letters?”   With my editor at Hyperion, I placed each and every Edison family photograph into the book narrative in the exact spot I wanted it.  “This is the standard biography. It will be a mainstay, a classic, one of our eternal backlist titles,” he assured me on publication day.  The hardcover went out of print and I sold the paperback rights to the University of Chicago Press.

LEGENDS OF THE PLUMED SERPENT: BIOGRAPHY OF A MEXICAN GOD – was “hatched” in my imagination in 1988 but not published until a long decade later.  I began this seemingly-anomalous enterprise before Edison, the result of an unsatisfying visit with my wife, Roberta, to the Maya ruins of Uxmal, deep in the Yucatan, where I discovered to my despair that no intelligent guidebook in English existed there or at any other  archaeological zone in Mexico. This realization grew into an excavation of the primary mythic archetype of a culture I knew little about but wanted to take on…why? “because it was there.”  I ceased my bottomless research after three years, deciding it was  presumptuous of me, and reverted to the mode I knew better, conventional biography.  When the work on  Edison was drawing to a close, I felt ready to resume the obscure trail of Quetzalcoatl again, taught myself Spanish, and spent a decade of trips to Mexico on weekends, holidays, and vacations while continuing to grow the National Book Foundation into a full-fledged cultural institution.   My new agent pitched the idea for “the Mexico book” to yet another upstart publisher, Public Affairs. The editor in chief, Peter Osnos,  agreed to take on The Plumed Serpent so long as I  signed up to write another book, on Henry Ford, which he found far more interesting.  I had already begun to hire outside publicists to help promote my books, and now I reached yet another landmark in assisting the changing industry – Plumed Serpent was the first book where I took over typesetting responsibilities, submitting the manuscript electronically, composed directly from my keystrokes.

HENRY FORD AND THE JEWS: THE MASS PRODUCTION OF HATE –  arrived as the germ of an idea during the composition of the Edison biography and was completed two days after a terrible day:  September 13, 2001. Coterminously, however, the authorial plot had thickened when I took a four-month sabbatical from the National Book Foundation in January 2000, to drive across the country with my son and set him up in L.A. so he could follow his dream as an aspiring actor…waiter…personal trainer. [That is another instructive story for another time.]  Once on the west coast, I proceeded north at Microsoft’s request -- thanks to their paying me an absurd amount of money -- to  their corporate headquarters in Seattle where, after signing a voluminous non-disclosure agreement,  I spent a week consulting on the e-book prototype. I was lectured by Microsoft engineers that the days of print were numbered and I should “get with the program” because, in their Darwinian world view, digitization was destined to end the traditional type-driven Gutenbergian way of doing things and vanquish the book publishing method forever.   I got so brainwashed that at one point I even considered their tantalizing offer to relocate to Seattle and take over leadership of the “eBook Awards Foundation.”

To rewind this convoluted postmodern fantasy:  When  Edison came out -- in the “franchise” mentality and the beginning of “branding” as a viable concept for authors -- Hyperion had asked me to segue into another biography, this one of Edison’s good friend and financial supporter, Henry Ford.  I duly wrote a proposal for a Ford biography, then summarily withdrew it, because in the course of researching the Edison book I had come upon Ford’s disturbing pathology of rabid anti-Semitism.  I wanted to pursue that theme, and branch out into the biography of a character defect, instead of an A through Z narrative of one person’s life from beginning to end.  Publishing executives to whom the Henry Ford and the Jews book proposal was submitted called me at my home (in a transgressive end run around my agent) to challenge me incredulously as to why on earth I would want to “delve into the gloomy underside of America” thereby placing my “previously unsullied reputation into question.”  The Ford book hit the stores and  I embarked upon a ten-day lightning-fast AM/drive-time radio tour, during which the Scripture was read to me by many disgruntled callers. That trip taught me a lot about “the other America.”  Thanks to a timely disclaimer by the Ford Motor Company on the front page of the Detroit News to the effect that, “Mr. Ford was a human being who made some mistakes and he has apologized for those mistakes;  Mr. Baldwin’s book adds nothing new” – my new book became a best-seller in Detroit and went on to sell more than any of my others to date.  With Henry Ford and the Jews, a further boundary was crossed in my relationship to the publishing industry:  sales and marketing vp’s now sat at the conference table during heretofore sacred editorial meetings, and began to become the tail that wagged the dog.

THE AMERICAN REVELATION: TEN IDEALS THAT SHAPED OUR COUNTRY FROM THE PURITANS TO THE COLD WAR –  appeared to me in a dream in the summer of 2002 and was published three years later.  After 9/11 and the demonic  tinge of Henry Ford and the Jews,  I desperately wanted to escape and write a redemptive book about America.  By now I was no longer categorized as a biographer (categorization is important in the book business because it determines where your book is shelved in the store -- and if it is a superstore, that can determine whether shoppers can even find it).  I had morphed into an “historian,” or, as the trade journal Publishers Weekly labelled me, a “pop historian.”  My wife and I were driving down to the beach one summer weekend and I told her about the odd vision I had had the night before – three words hovering in the air in front of my face, THE…AMERICAN…REVELATION… were all I had to go on. We started making a list in the car of what I thought  were  quintessentially American values:  the first phrase that popped into my mind  was “the city on a hill” because in a recent issue of The Economist the British editors had ascribed the invention of this phrase to President Reagan, whereas it was from the Puritan Great Migration leader John Winthrop (1630) by way of the Sermon on the Mount. That led me to write more stories of  exemplary individuals who had placed deeply-held ideals into our culture – and how these ideals managed to “stick,” become altered, abandoned or forsaken.  This book proposal was auctioned in high-stakes fashion by my new agent, Robert Gottlieb, who had defected from William Morris to form his own company, and wanted to show the business at large that I was “up and running.” Robert and his colleague, John Silbersack, succeeded to such an extent that I was able to emancipate myself from the National Book Foundation after fifteen years at the helm and go for the brass ring -- my long-cherished ideal, just to be a writer and nothing else.  I took two years to write the book, for which I got more money up front than ever before in my life.  Despite another publicity tour and superlative reviews, THE AMERICAN REVELATION did not sell well, after which I fell into a depressive funk, convinced at my lowest ebb that if I died in my study under the eaves nobody would even know. 

My agents gently told me that the “disappointment” of The American Revelation might result in my being “penalized” by “the industry,” therefore making it more difficult to sell my subsequent book  ideas,  even though, they added hurriedly, it wasn’t really “my fault” that the book “didn’t perform.”   Then I read The Long Tail  and found out that 95% of the 150,000 titles published in America sell less than 5,000 copies. This made me feel better. 

Anyway, to conquer my post book-tour anomie  and the self-styled feeling that I was “a loser,” my wife made me stick a copy of the book into a jiffy bag and mail it to the president of Montclair State University near our home, just to see what would happen.  Now I am a Professor there, teaching The American Revelation  to freshmen and autographing it on the last day of class so my students can sell it on eBay.  (Was it F. Scott Fitzgerald who said there are no second acts in American life?)

TO ALL GENTLENESS redux  -  In the fall of 2008, the publishing wheel came full circle, with the 125^th anniversary of William Carlos Williams’s birth, and my desire to return this memorable title into print after long hiatus. Timing is everything. You can’t just publish a book, Susan Magrino, my very first publicist once told me, you need to publish an event. For this historic commemorative moment, I approached my old friend, Paul Coates in Baltimore, founder of Black Classic Press.  Mine is the first book by a white author to be published by Paul’s subsidiary, Inprint Editions, in the 30 year history of his venerable company. 

… oh yes…lest I forget! THE TWENTY-FIFTH PROTOCOL is a genre-breaking thriller I began crafting in the fall of 2006 and finished three years later. I sent it to my agent and he began the sad process of “making the rounds” of more than two dozen NYC publishers – actually that is just about all of the NYC publishers. One by one, they weighed in with rejections which, when you looked beneath the surface, really were attributable to my audacity at changing gnres. They all knew me as a nonfiction author and now I was writing fiction!? Not to mention genre fiction of all things. I went back to the drawing boards and in the the new year of 2009 I planned to gather a group of like-minded authors and form a collective to publish our own fiction exclusively on the Web. The hypertext arena beckoned.

That brainstorm lasted about a year, during which time I realized that what I really and truly wanted was to just publish my own book on my own terms directly into the e-book market that Microsoft had warned me about all those years ago and which was now a growing threat to “real” books.

So that is precisely what I did, uploading my meticulously-edited manuscript onto Amazon, and here it is!

There we have it: these six nonfiction signposts -- plus one fiction work in cyberspace!  --  along the road of my writing life.  There were many other books I could chose not to cite here, i.e., volumes of my poetry, translations, textbooks, readers’ guides and three anthologies of National Book Award authors, including most recently a book published by Ingram’s Lightning Press, National Book Award Classics: Essays Celebrating Our Literary Heritage.

It has always been my nature, more often nowadays as I have re-entered the wonderful and transformative world of the classroom, to conclude by raising questions rather than spoon-feeding answers.  In that spirit, let me conclude this chain of books and events with an attempt to articulate the predominant impasse that sits in my mind as someone who has been a writer – an author -- for a very, very long time. And in optimistic actuarial moments I figure I have at least a quarter-century of literary activity still ahead of me.

Since I started publishing my work, there can be no doubt that technology has transformed and accelerated the way books are produced – authors as “content-providers” -- and brought to market.  This is the manifestation of a tenaciously-held business model.  Walk into any Barnes & Noble (since there are no more Borders left) or click on Amazon.com and you will instantly see what I mean.  At the same time, technology has given rise to audiovisual distractions so that while more and more books are being published,  fewer people seem to be reading them. The seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds I talk to every day at Montclair State University are very candid about the fact that they “do not like to read.”

 When pressed, they refine that statement to say that it pertains to “reading books;”  anything online is fine with them. And the latest news from the book publishers is that they are responding and adapting by tying their product into video games -- cross-marketing media  -- with the philosophy that any reading, even with a reduced attention span, is better than none at all.  I am not a Luddite.  I am not going to go off on a narrative tangent with this sign of where we could be heading, a metaphor for the larger cultural moment we inhabit, transcending over- production and under-consumption.

That larger cultural moment, still undefined, is determined by the current millennials, my students, and there are millions more on the way for the next half-dozen years, the first generation to be born into the internet era. They have no previous frame of reference;  therefore, we must never chastise them for their feelings about our comforting, familiar artifacts.  Rather, let’s slowly read to them the wise, consoling, enduring words of Czeslaw Milosz, and the final lines of his lyric, And Yet the Books:

I imagine the earth when I am no more:

Nothing happens, no loss, it’s still a strange pageant,

Women’s dresses, dewy lilacs, a song in the valley.

Yet the books will be there on the shelves, well born,

Derived from people, but also from radiance, heights.

The books referenced in this guest-lecture may all be purchased on line through my Web site, www.neilbaldwinbooks.com.