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To build a fire

The coincidence of books and fire is unsettling enough that I do wonder why Amazon’s e-book reader is called Kindle . But I don’t want to be alarmist. Or at least not predictably so.

I’ve been saying here for some time that the primary issue with respect to the future of publishing is not technological but behavioral. The addition of Amazon’s whispernet to the world of e-books is clearly an attempt to address consumer behavior. And I suppose it may work.

But it has long seemed to me that two results would be most likely from the elimination of hard-copy books (should that ever or soon occur). The first is that money would begin to leave conglomerated publishing. But that’s probably a topic for another time.

What I’d really like to ask here relates to a less-discussed possibility: the effect of the digital revolution on authorial behavior. Is it possible that authors will soon begin to think twice about the means by which their works reach the public? I don’t believe this would occur because in a digital world they might have a lessened chance at making a fortune. That’s not what drives a real writer to write. Authors’ thinking twice about how to make their original works readily public might occur instead because in a digitized literary world that work becomes something other than a book and might very likely not even remain intact. Digitized, an epic novel becomes a sequence of searchable, extractable, and then reproducible phrases. And, eventually, I suppose, we’ll come to a moment when that novel longer exists on any shelf. So what would the author be releasing to the world?

What brings all this back to mind is that, in this i-Pod world of ours, Kindle seems (at least for this first blushing moment) a feasibly successful technology. In addition, this cultural view of the Work Entire as something less than completly autonomous seems to be already assumed in Amazon’s promotional video. As she presents there, for instance, Anita Diamant expects to value the device because on an airplane she would be able to pass by a book she isn’t enjoying and go instantly on to her next download. That’s apparently a selling point, and it results because the book digitized is not an artifact. Yes, I know that such a file summarily closed will still be full and reclaimable in the Kindle’s Content Manager. But that’s a bit like saying that the third from oldest email in my inbox of (currently) 4,056 items is still an active consideration for me.

Closing a downloaded file just isn’t the same thing as setting aside a bound book. It is a more efficient dismissal than that.

If Kindle succeeds where others have failed, it will make scores of thousands of books instantly available to everyone with $400 and the price of each download ($9.99). And that should, hypothetically, be good for the wider distribution of literature.

We do know that if Kindle is the reader’s i-Pod, it will fully remake the publishing industry in ways that folks have long worried (or awaited). Fine. More interesting to me at this birthing moment, however, is what effect that level of success might have on what is written in the future, what effect on the behavior of authors.

What is the impetus for creating a piece of literature—what I have referred to as the Work Entire? I assume that impetus is an irresistible urge to create in words. Authors will write. But subsequently, what is the impetus for making the Work Entire available? And how will the digitized world affect that second authorial urge toward a readership?

I think we should be talking about that. Interestingly, James Patterson and Toni Morrison and the other authors speak in Amazon’s video only as readers. And all of the authors on the video are well established. It would be interesting to know what upcoming writers, and unpublished writers, think of this kindling flame. Will the digital world affect what authors make available to readers?

Fred Ramey
Posted November 20

 
 

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