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LOWERCASED, UN-TRADEMARKED READERS

At the end of the year, when I apologized to an agent who was patiently following up with me after waiting months for a response to a submission, he made a suggestion that set me thinking. Why not buy one of the new Sony® Readers and use it to read manuscripts instead of books?

New Year; New Technology. . .

While I imagine the Sony® Reader would threaten finally to slave me to the submission pile —no matter where I am or what time of night it is — that may not be the reason I balked at the suggestion. I mean, I figure I could resist turning the thing on and reading the next manuscript while Edie is driving us to visit our daughter in New Mexico, or sitting on a faraway beach (assuming I ever get to do that again). I could resist that. To quote the late Senator John Tower, “I am a man of some restraint.”

Certainly such technologies have the capacity to increase my manuscript-review productivity. And if I truly could avoid addiction to it, then what’s the problem?

It could be that I’m convinced the publishing industry has been fooling itself. It seems to me that we’re forestalling the complete redefinition of publishing that’s headed our way by pretending to believe that we need only focus on the coming generation of e-book readers in order to stay the Publishing Industry course. If we can just serve the technology somebody else develops without us while somehow holding on to copyrights and intellectual property rights, then we’ll weather the electrical storm. Or so we seem to think. Books be damned; all else, we hope, will blessedly remain the same. We can keep making multi-million dollar deals, put all our money behind Brand Name Authors, keep banking on celebrity “books”, and focus the reading public’s attention on a handful of new titles at a time. It will all be okay.

Buying a Sony® Reader feels to me like succumbing to that kind of thinking. As though we need only fold the next generation of information delivery into our old system and blare on (as my father used to say). As though the old system will always work. As though we can expect that in a fully digitized world novel buyers will remain gathered together in our controlling hands. As though it is only that the “books” will look different.

I’d like to have a Sony® Reader. I’d like to be more efficient in my manuscript review. And I’d like to keep publishing the best novels I can find — for a long time to come.

But I don’t think that simply following the technology is the path to the new place publishers are (how soon?) to occupy. It seems to me especially not to be the way for small publishers. To get to that new place, I believe that small publishers will have to track constant technological change in the light of human behavior. This is something that stories about digitized “books” seem rarely to address.

To get where we’re going, we have to remember that (lowercased, un-trademarked) readers and the authors who address them will behave in ways that are purely human — that is, in ways that we all should be able to understand — regardless of the technologies that are folded into their reading lives.

Some cultural anthropologist (I think) once asked, “Did story precede language?” Maybe. And that’s what I’m talking about. If digitized texts fragment the novel-reading markets — as they will — then what is most individual in (lowercased, un-trademarked) readers will come to the fore again. How we address that will be separate from how we or someone else delivers the story.

Fred Ramey

 
 

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