Open Publishing: The Net and the E-book

New York's big multinationally-owned publishing houses have been waving wolfbane and crosses at the Net for a decade. Now they've started hyping their e-book offerings as proof that they are becoming hip, responsive, interactive. "E-books" is the latest buzzword in publishing, made up of companies that are about as open as the NSA. Maybe the publishers ought to consider the real lessons of Net and try being as open and innovative as some of their successful young interactive writers. After all, there's money in it.

"It's a fundamental shift in the paradigm of publishing," Claire Zion, editorial director of Time Warner's electronic publishing division, recently told USA Today. "We're no longer dictators of taste; we are listening to what readers want." And Bill Gates is just trying to encourage innovation.

The idea that corporations like Viacom, Bertelsmann, or the nascent AOL/Time-Warner, have suddenly relinquished their vast cultural power and gone populist is a joke, of course. Companies that size, with their zillion-dollar firms run by zillion-dollar CEO's and global boards of directors, aren't in the business of letting Martha and Harry in Sioux City dictate taste. They're in the business of synergistic mass-marketing, which sometimes involves having to appear forward-looking, techno-savvy and interactive.

But interactivity isn't a remote possibility for companies like Bertelsmann's Random House (my book publisher) and Viacom's Simon & Schuster. Their very natures -- the closed doors, the semi-monopolistic clout, the power flowing down from the top -- are antithetical to interactivity. You'll know they are really changing when they tell us as much about them as they know about us. Interactivity isn't about distributional formats anyway. It's about content.

It's worth noting that the people screaming loudest for e-books tend to be 50-year-old publishing executives. Computer geeks have been reading comic books, gaming manuals and sci-fi stories since they could walk. It's a myth that younger consumers don't like books. But the Net generation does have a particular creative sensibility that is profoundly interactive.

The writer/artist/creator reflects the radical restructuring of storytelling that's characteristic of cyberspace, creating a different kind of relationship with the reader. Kids don't think of this in literary terms, but they know it when they see it.

Consider Dave Eggers' A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius Or Mark Z. Danielewski's amazing House of Leaves, first published in bits and pieces on the Net. Both are being devoured by kids on college campuses. And both are powerful examples of how interactivity is a cultural and creative idea that depends on its audience for authenticity. It's not a simple matter of distribution. These books do indeed mark a paradigm shift, because they show how interactivity affects content.

Egger's novel plays with reality on every page. It pulls back the curtain on the business of writing and publishing itself, exposing hype, challenging standard literary conventions like prologues and epilogues, even traditional narrative itself. At one point in the story, Eggers auditions for MTV's "The Real World." He recounts an astonishing inteview with one of its producers about the death of his parents. Midway through this account, though, Eggers startles the reader by declaring that the interview, which contains some of the best and most revealing writing in the book, never occurred. Then he goes on with it.

In a way, science fiction comes to mind -- William Gibson, for instance, has created a mutant breed of sci-fi that mixes surrealism and pop culture imagery with esoteric historical and scientific information. Cyberspace has bred a chaotic new kind of technological creativity. Gibson's own characters connect with an abstract geometry of data, risking life and safety to plumb the depths of data and perspective.

So House of Leaves is an interactive novel because it reinvents the stuffy format of the novel, injecting an informal, risk-taking approach that is one of the hallmarks of younger consumers raised on interactive technologies. It's the way they see the world, the way it often appears as the result of traveling the Web via e-mail, messaging, browsing and gaming.

And House of Leaves provides other radical demonstrations of how creative interactivity works. A scary, disjointed, and truly brilliant novel, it was born on the Net in some of its original incarnations and is also popular in its paperback -- yes, paper, not e-mail -- edition. It too is intensely interactive in blasting away the conventional structure of the novel. House of Leaves is neatly blends the kind of first-person horror of The Blair Witch Project and the techno nightmare of movies like The Fly.

Hopscotching back and forth in time, it invokes Gibson's Neuromancer and his disjointed and disconnected notions about actual and virtual realities. House of Leaves changes typefaces, relies on footnotes, prints pages in chunks and upside down, uses a variety of voices, styles and formats. Yet, amazingly, a coherent and genuinely disturbing story emerges. This might turn out to be one of the important fictional works inspired by the Net and its culture.

"Dutch," biographer Edmund Morris' controversial best-selling biography of Ronald Reagan, also qualifies as interactive, albeit in a different way. Morris invented a fictional character to help him explain and enliven the life of a dull and inarticulate leader, a move which outraged traditional publishers, biographers and critics. But the device worked very well.

Creative interactivity isn't just about playing with narrative and structure, challenging convention. Mostly, it reflects the particular technological and cultural sensibilities of younger people raised in cyberspace, the terrority Gibson has written about. Traditional corporate publishing by conglomerates whose dictators strive not for innovation but for mass market acceptance and profit margins, and whose business and editorial decisions are conducted like CIA operations, isn't in a good position to reach these new markets.

Will electronic books replace their physical counterparts, one of the world's most efficient and enduring technological innovations? Not soon, not likely. An e-book can be a viable alternative in some cases, though -- some e-books might even make money.The real significance of Napster appears completely lost on publishing executives, however. File-sharing is what the Net was made for, but is it really what publishers want: readers passing their e-books around for free on file-sharing sites? Probably not. But by taking a middle way -- in which publishers give consumers a say in titles, book purchases and pricing -- they'd end up publishing a lot more writers like Eggers and ultimately sell a lot more books. Don't hold your breath.

Comments

Project Gutenberg and TEI are doing it "right"

[Ars-Fartsica]

The folks at Gutenberg and the TEI (Text Encoding Initiaitve) have had the right idea all along - publish in good old ASCII, or SGML.

Most of the current Ebooks rely on broken structure models designed to exclude unwanted users.

Yes, most of the stuff on Gutenberg is certainly not bestseller material, but they are the trailblazer when it comes to making texts truly open and available.

All a matter of classification

[ShadyG]

All this is about is an attempt to exploit the DMCA by disguising books as software. As long as the intellectual property is digitally protected, a lot of rights granted to book owners/readers do not extend to those who use e-books. It's basically a transition from an ownership-based model to a licence-based one.

-- ShadyG