October 20, 2009 Special Issue

Publishing without the pulp

How electronics is revolutionizing and devolutionizing print

by Christopher Olson

You don’t have to be a luddite to find some so-called “advances” in technology ludicrous.

Science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke predicted a day when newspapers would be replaced with electronic sheets which would be updated every day with news stories and information, live updates on developing stories instantly filling the margins.

But was Clarke thinking of Amazon’s Kindle? Please.

The Kindle, a trademarked handheld digital book, has no reason to exist, other than to fulfill a notion of what the future would—and should—look like.

One innovation that Amazon can take full credit for is that book burnings will now be a thing of the past. If a society run amok wants to eliminate all knowledge of a certain author’s works, all they will have to do is press the delete key.

That’s exactly what happened when Amazon realized it lacked the complete copyright to particular editions of George Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984, and remotely deleted the works from their users’ Kindles, offering up a full refund in return. They may have been acting ethically, but it also underscored how the technology could easily be abused in the future. It didn’t help that the scandal had Orwell indirectly involved.

Like Clarke’s bold prediction for the future of print culture, Amazon are hedging their bets against a dystopian future in which what happened to the music and film industries eventually happens to the pulp and paper market, and works are freely disseminated to the masses in forums worldwide.

When a fan of the Twilight book series by author Stephenie Meyer scored a working draft of the author’s proposed fifth entry in the teen vampire series and posted it online, Meyer gave up on the book, citing her own lack of satisfaction in the work and its premature availability to the public. She eventually put the leaked chapters on her website so readers could read the incomplete manuscript legally and guilt-free, driving a stake into the heart of hopes of ever releasing the text in print form.

In an interview with The Link, Montreal poet Brian Campbell pointed out the difficulty in using the Internet to disseminate one’s unpublished works to friends and colleagues for their feedback. “Posting”—like “publishing”—makes a work ineligible for most literary prizes. That’s why, Campbell says, he uses a private Facebook account to post his poems for exclusive subscribers, specifically because it’s unsearchable on search engines like Google.

Speaking of Google, the company is trying to outdo websites like Project Gutenberg—an online attempt to provide the masses with writings currently in the public domain—by putting all books online with Google Books, a searchable database. What could result in a democratization of knowledge could also lead to a sharp drop-off in sales and the market for new books, even if a service currently only offers excerpts from copyrighted material.

Even though Google offers downloadable PDFs of all public domain books (or at least plans to), that didn’t stop me from purchasing the Norton Anthology of Shakespeare for school. Even though the bard’s books are available online in their totality, there was a sizeable hole on my bookshelf that no Kindle could fill.