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Kaloo Kalay
Oh, yeah, The Text Entire.
Here’s another short step in the twisted path of my thinking about what’s coming (though this entry won’t quite get me there, either):
I’ve said in various ways that the industry seems to be focused primarily on two aspects of the digital evolution of publishing. The first is the effort to foresee and then mount an efficient new delivery system. This focus came to us quickly, I think, because it’s actually the easy part. Of course I understand that we don’t really have much of an idea what readerly* behaviors will be in the future. But we do know (I think) that they’ll be based on digitized texts.
As such, tracking the technological developments in text delivery-systems is just old-fashioned, rationally good business practice—if a bit nerve wracking.
The second aspect of the coming evolution that the industry seems most fixated upon is the use of Web 2.0 concepts to promote the same old books. It seems to me, publishers are (proprietarily) constantly working on the widgets.
I would argue that both of these focuses are old-think. They both are predicated on the assumption that publishers will be able to continue, not only to publish more books than are really respectful of reading, but to control the focus of the reading public simply by dominating the appropriate delivery system and then digitizing the marketing.
They are both predicated on the assumption that mass, celebrity-focussed reading markets are just becoming digitally literate rather than otherwise.
But in the book world, Web 2.0 is more likely to become the tool of something else. Using that overriding resource (and its successors), readers will be able to seek out broader sources of information about what is available—and what is good—than they have ever enjoyed. That is, the focus of readers won’t be so easy to control. And when that happens, kaloo kalay, an entirely different set of books is likely to come to their attention.
(Which reminds me of Garrison’s Keillor’s visionary assertion of a decade ago that when the fragmentation of markets is complete there will still be celebrities, but not many people will know who they are.)
In short – in very short – what comes to the fore here is that in the coming digitized context of reading, how one publishes a book will not be nearly so important as what one publishes.
And that’s where publishers who care about The Text Entire come in.
Fred Ramey
Posted 21 August 2007
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- Yes, I know that Roland Barthes would never have used “readerly” this way.
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