or, Have You Ever Actually Seen an eBook? In Their Current Iteration They’re Fucking Shithouse.
…
A halfway whimsical and mostly sarcastic note I posted on Facebook and Twitter recently solicited some unexpected comments that have lead me to think critically about what some people would say is the most important publishing-industry debate raging at the moment: the emerging eBook market and how it will affect the pBook market and its bookstores.

The tweet came to mind after I followed a link of Creative Penn’s to another whitepaper about the emerging eBook market. Among the first pages is this quote: “‘2011 will clearly be the year of the e-book.’ – Bloomsbury’s founder & chief executive Nigel Newton.”

WTF is Nigel Newton, and WTF is ‘Bloomsbury’ emboldened!?

Because Bloomsbury narrowly escaped the doldrums of print publishing by inflicting us with Harry Potter?

I heard this claim last year from B+P’s Digital Publishing Symposium , so I tweeted: ‘[insert date here] will clearly be the year of the e-book. – [insert authority here]

I also posted it on Facebook, and Candace Petrik wrote, “Don’t forget that (insert date here) will be the end of the bookshop industry”. And Felice Howden wrote, “Or the classic: ‘e-books will make up [insert arbitrary percentage here] of all book sales by this time next year.’” After scrounging for something witty to say, I added: “And [insert monopolistic online retailer here]’s e-book sales outstriped p-book sales on [insert gifting holiday here].”

(Then I wrote: “*stripped”.)

On Twitter the post was retweeted a few times and Lyndon Sharp added ‘Journo’s quote template’ before his ‘RT’.

This all sounds pretty funny, but it’s serious. There is a lot of media hype around at the moment about the momentous changes tearing through the industry, and there seem to be a lot of people around who have taken it upon themselves to lie about the speed with which the eBook market is overtaking the pBook market.

What I’m trying to get at here, though, is that people share this sentiment with me; it’s not just me being a dick. When you discover your ideas are shared with others, not because you shared those ideas but because they came to that conclusion themselves, you feel validated, right.

So this is a real thing that’s happening: people are making outlandish claims about the exponential rise of the eBook market, and people aren’t buying it. Nor are these people buying more eBooks than they buy pBooks. Why? Because eBooks, in their current iteration, are fucking shithouse. Why can’t we admit that to ourselves? Because we want to come off as progressive. Show me some progress and I’ll call you progressive.

I don’t know why people seem to enjoy making unfounded claims about things that not even Thorpe/Bowker would be able to make, and I can’t quite be bothered trying to counter the claims with contrary evidence (because we could play this game all day and ultimately the market will determine the conclusion, no matter what we have to say about it), but I think it’s worth noting that banging on about all this for too long might be the reason we’re (allegedly) so far behind in the global eBook market, which is also not true, apparently.

Maybe we should just be making good (read: novel) eBooks and trying to sell them, rather than dragging up half-researched figures and waving them around like we need evidence of the digital revolution we’re storming ourselves with. This topic used to be an elephant in the room: it is now more like an elephant in a china shop; we’re talking about this stuff as though we’re going to break the fucking industry if we don’t revolutionise our business models immediately.

That’s crap: our industry is one of the most curiously robust industries in our mixed economy, and I worry that if we try to force it to operate in a way it is not yet ready to operate, we will begin to lose sight of the point, which is to publish great literature for people to read: how we deliver this literature is just one of many ongoing problems the industry has always suffered, which is the result of literature being a relatively marginalised and misunderstood commodity of more cultural worth than we’ll ever know how to quantify economically.

I, for one, am going to try to shut up about eBooks for a while, at least until I stumble across some evidence that any sort of major shift is actually occurring. I’d appreciate it if you’d do the same, but I understand that conversations between ignorant strangers are difficult and sometimes need to be filled with chatter.

But that’s all this is right now: partially informed chatter between people who want to sound like they know what they’re talking about so they can say in [insert date here] they predicted the demise of the book industry. Well fucking done! What a great claim to fame. Shut up and read a book, and get back to me when you have some actual evidence, because currently, most eBooks are just electronic representations of existing pBooks.

*yawns*

Until someone uses this you-beaut technology to create something that is actually (how do you say?) novel (*coughs*), the eBook market will stay exactly where it is (in the margins of the margins), no matter how many times an industry aficionado says otherwise.

If you want to see the eBook market take over the pBook market, stop talking about it and start making eBooks that are actually better than pBooks.

Like this. Or even this. These are examples of the future of digital storytelling. And until they are made in abundance we will be stuck with this dead-tree industry that you so like to disparage.

Meanwhile, bookstores will be fine. Kapeesh? Orrighty then. Carry on.

…
This post was drafted while listening to 65daysofstatic’s We Were Exploding Anyway, because I am a fucking hipster and listening to post-rock while ranting about literature markets makes me simultaneously happy and sad.
…

I just got home from a day helping to select successful applicants to the Write in your Face (WIYF) round of grants offered by Australia Council (OzCo) and administered by Express Media (EM). Those links will tell you more about this whole shebang, but I’ll copy/paste the juicy bit for all our Canadian readers:

WIYF grants are offered to young and emerging writers who use language in innovative ways. This may involve writing in the digital space, blogs, graphic novels, comics, multimedia, multi-artform or cross-media works.

Basically it’s a really exciting grant, because all sorts of weird shit gets thrown at it in applications. It’s especially exciting for me at the moment because this is my first opportunity to sit on a selection panel and be directly involved in delivering necessary funding to literary-arts projects that otherwise might never see the light of your computer screens.

I made some notes today, but it’s too late to type them up and I have to work in the morning.

I want to write here soon about: how WIYF has been (de)devolved from EM to one of OzCo’s more general digital funds (that ‘evolved’ is now bearing the suffix ‘ded’ makes my squidgy little progressive heart want to curl up and vomit out my arse); how something Lefa (EM’s Program Manager) said reminded me of the importance of thinking of the literary-arts as contributing in ‘not immeasurable economic value’ to society; and how reacquainting with the dreadful process of ‘scraping the barrel’ made me consider the importance of not awarding grant money, following on from feelings I’ve had for sometime about not awarding prizes to literature that you otherwise wouldn’t publish, just because you said you’d award a prize.

These are all subjects near and dear to my heart, and ones that have been bouncing around for a while, but some other things came up that I’d like to explore some more if I get the time: how to set up systems to allow people to tell stories without telling stories to them; and how to avoid writing to markets by creating markets for your own writing instead, and how to use digital technology to do this.

To cap this off in the spirit of Three Degrees of Uncoordination, I’m going to quote from the editorial of Chalk, one of the magazines I had the fortune to read as part of the WIYF process:

…

edition1

a co-composition _ _ a communicating collaboration _ _ these are a series of conversations and interconnecting threads _ _ alive in the informal economy of the culture industry

 

First off: it is impossible to typecast someone entirely accurately, because contradicting character traits and values are inherent in the human condition, as each passing second, each new experience, keeps our minds in a constant state of flux. At least they should, which is an idea I’ll get to by the end of this talk.

I have an aversion to generalisations about demographics or generations because they are, after all, comprised of minds that are in a constant state of flux. There is no way I could make some sort of all encompassing claim about any sort of trait that characterises all young writers.

Nonetheless I’ll get on with the job of talking about the most prevalent and corrosive exercise in typecasting I could think of: the ludicrous claim that a writer needs to have accrued a certain quota of life experience before they can hope to communicate anything of value to a readership. Hands up if you’ve heard this claim before. Leave your hands up if you think it’s bullshit.

Our class was actually told this during the short time I spent at creative-writing school, and was perhaps one of the reasons I dropped out. In the decade since then I have been fortunate to have the opportunity to edit Voiceworks for two years, during which time we published hundreds of writers and artists, and read the work of hundreds and hundreds more. Either side of that experience, at Wakefield Press, I have had the fortune to work with a wide range of older authors.

The resounding impression I can draw from this experience is that it’s much harder to edit older writers than it is to edit young writers. (I think it’s worth mentioning that most of the authors I currently work with don’t find out how young I am until they meet me at the launch, and they are invariably surprised. I guess they don’t know about Facebook stalking.)

The young writers I’ve worked with are generally far more liberal-minded, far more interested in learning new things (including how to behave in an author–editor relationship), perhaps because they’re still painting on a relatively blank slate. We also have an unprecedented level of access to information these days, which helps to combate our inherent tendency to embrace confirmation bias to support our fragile intellectual egos.

Older writers, especially those who have been published a lot before and received any sort of critical acclaim, are generally less open to having their work tampered with.

Of course this is not a one-size-fits-all cast. I’m going to hazard a generalisation for the sake of talking about this, and say about a quarter of the young writers I’ve worked with are as precious as three quarters of the older writers I’ve worked with.

But it’s not a matter of age that I’m talking about here, it’s a matter of attitude, of personality. The most talented writers I’ve worked with are aware of their own limitations as authors – they covet criticism because they still want to learn. The most talented writers I’ve worked with are those who are inherently interested in others, and therefore far more interested in actually communicating with them, rather than talking to them from above. That this inherent interest extends to me, their editor, renders them far more amenable to the idea of actually collaborating on their work.

Invariably it is the oldest, least talented writers who have had to bolster their own egos from within. As far as I can tell, the best way to do this is by sticking your head up your arse and shouting. [This is where the woman guffawed and I looked up, sheepishly, wanting to join in, forgetting I was supposed to presenting a speech, not having a chat at the pub.]

This has all gotten very specific to my exerience as an editor, but my experience as a general reader illuminates something else, I think.

Maybe 95% of the books on my shelves (by young writers, and old) are characterised by pinko-lefty themes. When I realised this I started soliciting recommendations of right-wing authors – novelists, in particular. My inquiries were often met with either the scornful suggestion that, ‘Dude, neo-cons don’t have imaginations, that’s why they’re neo-cons’, or, ‘Just read anything by Ayn Rand.’

The former reminded me of the t-shirt that Quadrant used to sell, which bore the slogan: ‘I’ve never read Quadrant because I don’t like it’. The latter leaves me quite concerned that the only suggestion I could find among my networks was for a novelist who was writing maybe seventy years ago, in America.

Look at me, though: I’m wearing a fucking costume. I wear skinny black jeans, and a self-referential, pop-culture t-shirt. I have a stupid ironic haircut, a question-mark knuckle tattoo, I ride a single-speed roadbike around the city wearing a messenger bag. I’ve become a fucking hipster. I like to think of myself as liberal-minded, but this doesn’t mean I’m a lefty.

[At this point Dan tapped his glass, which was the signal for five minutes: we had seven minutes; I wasn't going to make it. I skipped the italics below and got straight to the point. Meanwhile, consider this picture as an illustration of my last point.]

…

…

But neither am I a righty, because, to bastardise one of my favourite high-school sayings, I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than the frontal lobotomy required to hold conservative views.

The friends who know me would consider it laughable to suggest that I make any sort of daily style choices, but I certainly have gathered about me an image based on those who share similar values, and this act of personal typecasting has been necessary for me to escape another image I had created for myself when I was in high school and thought gate crashing parties, listening to heavy metal, getting fuck eyed and ending fights was a cool thing to do.

We need to typecast ourselves in order to feel that we fit in somewhere, and making fashion statements facilitates our movement between social groups. Sometimes we need to do this to operate within and move between schools of thought, if that’s what we want to do. We need labels to understand who we are, and to express ourselves to others.

Young people, I think, are especially susceptible to typecasting because they are still forming their ideas about themselves, mingling with subcultures where their parentals don’t hang out. It is important that we take control of this process though, and as the foothold of mainstream media on public opinion continues to slip, we are increasingly able to grasp the power to do this.

Old people I know – friends and authors alike, as well as authors who have become friends – tend to have ‘grown out’ of subcultures. Perhaps as their sense of individual identity strengthens they feel they can happily exist among mainstream society without compromising their values.

This is doubtful, and as we age and develop as humans and writers and thinkers, I think one of the trickiest balances we need to affect is between how much of this sub-communal identity we should retain, and how much we should forgo in the interests of ‘growing up’, of assimilating with mainstream society.

Wouldn’t it be a shame if we spent our youthful creative years bemoaning that patronising claim that we need to grow up before we can write well, only to finally grow up and write and think just like our forebears?

It’s one thing to challenge our mainstream ancestors. It’s a whole other tricky task to challenge the prevailing mindset among our own subcultures.

I think the reason we don’t already find it easy to do this is that young creative types are usually typecast as lefties, and lefties are generally typecast as adherents of political correctness.

[Okay, the next bit in italics is what I ham-fisted on the day, and the roman text is where I resumed reading.]

Considering how my image reflects the company I keep, it’s not surprising I’ve found it difficult to squeeze right-wing fiction out of my networks, which is frustrating because I like to question beliefs, but it is politically incorrect to question certain beliefs held by the intellectual left: the human causes of climate change and the viability of representative democracy being the two most important that I could think of.

But it is essential that we do, lest we find ourselves cloistered in a niche of unquestioning adherence to political correctness that infuses so much of our stifled debate in this country.

So, if you asked the mirror, “Mirror mirror, on the wall, which is the worst typecast of them all?” it might say it is the self-perpetuating identity of the leftist elite who overpopulate Australia’s literary community. [This was where the silence increased.] By pedalling the same opinions to one another because we’re too timid to question our friends we are actually inhibiting the very progress of human thought we claim to advocate. [This was where I thought I heard the gasp.]

It is the young writers of Australia who are most well equipped to do this, for the same reason their detractors would say their writing has no value: they haven’t been around long enough to have become brow-beaten and bigoted; there is still hope they can turn their critical faculties on themselves and resolve to start thinking anew.

In the interests of publicly demonstrating my commitment to this new liberalism I was going to strip myself of my middle-class pinko-lefty costume and do the rest of this panel in my underwear. Instead I’m going to read this stanza from a Bukowski poem called ‘unemployed’:

…

dear reader,
do you know something?
those who keep asking the same question
really don’t want to hear the answer.

Last weekend I attended Emerging Writers’ Festival in Melbourne because: it’s an awesome, craft-based festiva bringing readers, writers and everyone in between together; they invited me to talk on a panel; I jump at any chance to revisit Melbourne.

The difference between EWF and most other writers’ festivals in Australia is that it’s more like a readers’ and writers’ festival, where readers and writers interact, compared to most of the major festivals, which are structured so that readers sit in crowds and stare in awe at writers, as though they are some sort of sacrosanct being.

Speaking of sweeping generalisations, our panel was called Typecast, which was presented in the program with the blurb:

…

The gay writer, the Indigenous writer, the young writer… what are the joys and frustrations of being typecast? Does writing for niche audiences create or hinder opportunities to publish in a more mainstream way? And once set is it ever possible to escape your typecasting?

I was the ‘young writer’, but as I said on the day, really I was speaking as a young editor who has worked with both young and old authors. Anita Heiss was the ‘indigenous writer’. Julian Leyre was the ‘gay writer’. Karen Pickering was the ‘feminist writer’. And the panel was hosted by Dan Ducrou, who has been dubbed the ‘young-adult fiction writer’, which he said was odd considering how much explicit sex and drugs are featured in his book, The Byron Journals.

That’s just it, and this was the premise of the talk I presented: these sorts of typecasts (otherwise known by the more discernibly unacceptable term, ’stereotypes’) are inherently flawed, because every writer’s work is characterised by myriad themes, which flutter about and alight in readers’ minds in all sorts of unqualifiable ways.

But we need to apply these labels to start somewhere in talking about these subjects, and a theme of the session was how each of the speakers has had to push against being arbitrarily categorised by others.

The conclusion of the speech I made solicited a sort-of barely audible gasp in the audience, and at one point an audience member laughed with such gusto that I was momentarily distracted. I didn’t read all that I wrote because I tend to pursue tangents with unbridled enthusiasm when I talk, and I can’t refrain from this even when I’m public speaking.

Angela Meyer, of LiteraryMinded, was in the audience, and I was chuffed that she said, in her write up of the session, that my speech “was a nice, challenging thing to hear at a writers’ festival – a place where one can wander in and out of panels in a bubble of ‘confirmation’”.

That was prexactly my intention, so it’s nice to have that … ah … confirmed.

I’m going to publish my speech after this post, because: I wrote it and may as well use it here; I quite like it; you might quite like it too. If you don’t, well, I don’t really mind, but I’d appreciate any critiques.

It may be worth noting, if you read the speech, that Dan introduced each of us before our talks, an exercise designed to establish the authority of the speaker, but the concept of an authority or expert is as dubious to me as the act of typecasting someone. Nonetheless, this is what I wrote for Dan to read out:
…

Ryan Paine is an editor at Wakefield Press, where he works with a lot of old writers. Before that he was editor of Voiceworks, where he worked with a lot of young writers. Before that he was a typesetter at Wakefield Press. Before that he was a labourer, before that he was an outer-suburban high-school stoner, before that he was a chubby little mummy’s boy grubbing for friends in primary school, before that he was a grumpy little shit, before that he was an ill-conceived idea.

So, I flat-out failed to publish the rest of my interview with Ronnie Scott over Easter. Frankly: I was indulging in too much pot all weekend, so I pretty much hybernated in my flat and tried to finish reading Power Without Glory, which I also failed at.

Power Without Glory is really long, and dense, and written in this painfully stuttering style, like listening to Grandpa Simpson. I have all sorts of theories about this, but for now it’s enough to say it is nonetheless an interesting snapshot into an era, and I’m eager to finish the bastard so I can start reading about the controversy it stirred up – a libel case, no less.

The other (subliminal) reason I failed is that I’m just, frankly, over blogging. As I just wrote to a friend:

I’m going quiet on SIB, and have all but ceased my Facebook and Twitter activity, because I want to go back to the headspace where, as a teenager, I used to sit in the backshed smoking bongs and reading books until the sun came up. I just don’t seem to be able to immerse myself in literature anymore, and I’m sure it has to do with the easy-grab information I can access online.

This was in response to an essay draft he sent me about why online communication needn’t, necessarily, be about all-inclusive commenting, the democratisation of commentary, yada yada yada, and, well, flinging the essay my way came at a time (the same day, in fact) I changed my Twitter by to, simply, ‘internet apostate’. That’s right, I’m forsaking my church: the internet will not set us free, because the internet does not have free will. (If I say that enough times someone might read it.)

I have also spent my entire adult life working in publishing, and much of that time working as an editor (to the aspiring: working as an editor is 5% editing, 150% admin), so maybe I’ve succumbed to the old mechanics’ syndrome: I nearly dropped out of high school to start an apprenticeship as a mechanic, but decided not to because I was worried it would impinge on my hobbyist passion for restoring vintage cars. That passion has since been usurped by a passion for literature and, whattaya know, I’m working in literature and my work is impinging on my passion. Woe! #firstworldproblems

Anyway. I’m going to publish the rest of the interview today and tomorrow. After that I’ve got some guest content lined up, a post from Gram about the rhetoric of the eBook industry, and a post from myself about whether books are actually underpriced in Australia, and then I’m going to hang up my hat for awhile, spend some more time in the carport I have cunningly crafted into a semblance of my adolescent backshed. (If you’re interested in book pricing, Matthia Dempsey wrote about it for Kill Your Darlings. Felice and I are also debating with a neo-con about it here.)

…

If:book Australia is a think-and-do tank dedicated to promoting ‘new forms of digital literature’ and exploring ‘ways to boost connections between writers and audiences’, which is more exciting than I can fully express.

They are associated with the Institute for the Future of the Book in New York, and if:book London, and are based at Queensland Writers’ Centre. Kate Eltham and Simon Groth there are my newest heroes, not least because Simon found an excellent photo of a statue of Farnsy to accompany the essay I wrote for them.

I’m pretty excited about this essay because: 1) it is a call to action on governing our own literary culture and is my first steps into the territory of full-blown internet apostate; 2) it was commissioned with a Direct Message on Twitter by Simon after he read SIB; 3) they paid me really good money to do it.

I’m becoming a little tired of writing and promoting SIB in the ad hoc fashion I do, so I’m starting to think of this commission as the catalyst for the beginning of a departure, maybe.

Sometimes I’m tired of being a wannabe leftist revolutionary and pseudo-intellectual. Thinking about ideology, politics, economics and the publishing industry all the time is kind of bringing me down: the ideologues, the politicians, the failing markets, the legalese … ugh.

Doing this sort of work with good (liberal) intentions is kind of like trying to ride your bike safely: there will always be dickheads on the road, making your journey unsafe no matter how cautious you are; there will always be ideologues pushing their agendas in the way, making your journey of intellectual discovery that much more difficult by being dickheads.

I want to focus on creating literature again for a while. I had a short story broadcast on Radio Adelaide recently, and sitting there listening to it with Felice in Lucy’s lounge room caused a heartswell that I want to chase up.

Also I don’t want to burn out and become jaded ten months out of the next Academy, so after a couple of posts I’ve got lined up I think I’m going to give SIB a break and just post whenever I feel like it and, ya know, try to stop worrying about the internet.

Meanwhile, here is the introduction of the if:book essay, which is called ‘You’re the Voice’ (the rest can be found here):

There was a time, kids, back in nineteen tickety two, when people sincerely believed in the internet as the great democratising power of the twenty-first century. I, for one, thought it was the Second Coming of the Gutenberg Revolution. But then I’m one of the most naive and optimistic people I know. Gullible maybe, whatever.

Now, in only nineteen tickety three, this promise has gone the way of … well, democracy itself. Just as a concentration of third-estate power has occurred in Thomas Carlyle’s esteemed fourth estate, control of the online knowledge market is coagulating in the cloyingly, sickeningly sweet hands of our dear friend Google.

Sure, there are others (alternatives), but only in the same sense there are alternatives to News Ltd and Fairfax in Australia’s traditional media industry: they’re nominal alternatives, with no real power. Running a successful, independent newspaper in Australia would be much like going into farming against Monsanto in the United States.

The book-industry implications for this trend first dawned on me when I found another puff piece about cultural criticism, this time in the Guardian: “Is the age of the critic over?” Puff piece or not, the precis really got to me: “Critics reflect on how social media, such as Facebook, Twitter and myDigg, fit into the perennial debate on cultural elitism.”

After a decent stint in a large publishing house in London, I find myself washed up on the shores of Australia again, without a job or any real idea of what skills I might possibly have to move me in a direction that approximates something I think is worthwhile. So to avoid actually doing something that I will ultimately hate before I’ve had time to consider it, I’ve started thinking again about what might actually be considered worthwhile.

Ryan Paine recently sent me a link to this:  The Domino Project, a well-meaning bunch of people who are using digital media to spread good literature by word of mouth. Cool idea, right? Yeah, it sure is. Then I noticed two things about this idea that fucked me right off.
…

1. The eBook version of their manifesto is free despite the fact that the printed version costs $7.39 (discounted from $12), and we all know how I feel about that bullshit.
…

2. The site itself is ‘powered’ by Amazon.
…

Let’s pause on number two, shall we? ‘Powered’? Now, I know that one of the many pies that Amazon is fingering is server space but this is something else entirely. The word ‘powered’, along with the orange advertising banner across the top that’s about as subtle as a brick to the face, smacks of an exclusive rights contract between Seth Godin and Amazon. Then there’s the sort of ‘umm… what was the question, again?’ answer provided to the FAQs item that reads: So, is Amazon becoming a publisher?

Word of advice: if a question is so uncomfortable you can’t bring yourself to answer it directly, don’t fucking bother posting it on your FAQs page.

From what I can see of the Domino Project, it seems an interesting idea. Seth Godin is talking about social media in an exciting way and has a vision that he’s not willing to compromise, although he has some dubious thoughts (second video, 0:30 – 1:10) about how books are talked about with other people. Regardless of my personal feelings about his mission, Godin is feeding a beast. A beast that doesn’t give a fuck about the quality of literature or the survival of the industry in general – two things that Godin purports are very important to himself.

Aligning yourself with large powers like this is something I call the Clegg Effect. It’s positive in that your own genuinely well-meaning agenda can be bolstered by the resources and existing audience of an established company. But obviously that’s not the whole story. It also means a compromise, and as you yourself are holding none of the cards, when push comes to shove and a conflict arises, who is ultimately going to come off better? Can you become bigger than Amazon if you have an affiliation with Amazon? Probably not – you are now part of that system.

Is this a bad thing?

Without getting too into it, it made me think of that guy’s parasite theory (or my own garbled understanding of that, anyway – watch me tote my ignorance like a champ). If you align yourself as opposition to an established norm in an extreme way, you will always be a static force outside the system and therefore won’t be able to change it. Like if you’re against battery farming chickens, you’re going to make more of a difference by buying free-range eggs, rather than not buying eggs at all. Abstinence basically means you do not exist.

A lot of publishers, booksellers and visionary idealists exist on the fringes of the established publishing industry and won’t, through choice or lack of resources, enter into the system. They’re niche, and for the most part self-sustaining. And for the most part, they’re utterly irrelevant to Amazon. We talk about reaching audiences but all we’re really doing is blowing bubbles – pretty little things that dissipate even as we watch them grow. In order to change this, is it a matter of drawing the audience away from those powers toward our own little bubbles and hoping the bubbles grow, or is it in fact a better idea to side with the big guys and try to change the way they do business?

Should we be trying a little harder to beat them before we join them, and shun The Domino Project for being a bunch sellouts who are blatantly going to destroy publishing models and not bother to rebuild them? Or should Seth Godin be applauded and my next career move be towards Amazon?

…

Maybe I’m naive, but I was surprised that T C Boyle’s story in this week’s Harper’s was boring.

I’ve heard good things about T C Boyle, and about Harper’s. Combine that with a story titled ‘What Separates Us From The Animals’ and I thought I was in for a sure thing. The reason I treat myself to a foreign magazine when I travel any serious distance is that I hope it will broaden my literary … ah, horizons. I guess it still did that this time, just … backward, to the horizon behind me.

I guess I pick up a magazine like Harper’s with the awareness that inside I will encounter a sample of the descendents of tradition, for whom I do have a healthy sense of respect, but so often this tradition strikes a chord so far from my intellectual and emotional interest that I wonder if I’ve stepped into a parallel universe where people find this quaint sort of bullshit actually interesting.

I could tolerate it if the insights into the human condition were powerful and formative, forcing me to reconsider my values or those of others I have encountered. Maybe the insights in this story did that for some readers. I know! Maybe a young, suburban Australian male with progressive, innovative pretensions is not among Harper’s ideal demographic!

But this reminds me of a debate my girlfriend and I have been having about the importance of opera companies and orchestras performing new work. She mentions often that opera companies and orchestras don’t perform a lot of contemporary work because the aged audience simply won’t stand for it – neither literally nor figuratively. The classics need to be represented in each year’s program to garauntee attendance – slipping the ocassional experimental contemporary piece in there is a considerable financial risk for the company.

She’s probably right, and maybe Harper’s is like that: keeping the interest of the older, more conservative demographic who can still justify the expense of a magazine, and might do so long enough to finance the emergence of the new writers.

But a magazine like Harper’s is not going to attract an audience appreciative of these new writers by continuing to publish stories like Boyle’s, about a middle-aged housewife who can’t tolerate the substandard personal hygiene of the doctor her town committee imported from the mainland. (If it weren’t for the reference to the internet in Boyle’s story, I could have assumed it was both written and set in the early twentieth century.) If younger audiences go and read elsewhere, Harper’s won’t have an appreciative audience for any new writing they publish.

If audiences stick with Harper’s, the new writers will descend so directly from the forefathers of tradition that literary progress will be significantly hampered.  Then, what if Harper’s audience dies before it begins publishing the sort of progressive stories a younger demographic might enjoy? Stories that are a bit more fucked up, a bit more contemporary, a bit less quaint and safe.

But, as Lara likes to remind me, if everyone thought like me the world would be in turmoil, so maybe the literary tradition represented by Harper’s constitutes a necessary status quo, an anchor for readers of the conservative left, around which they might hover safely, keeping their head above the water as they brush past more innovative, dangerous creatures under the surface with their legs.

Or maybe it’s me, and one day, when I grow up, I’ll develop an appreciation for Harper’s stories the same way I developed an appreciation for olives, avocado, tomatoes, mushrooms (all of which I hated as a child): by force-feeding them to myself and trying to think about what tasted good about them.

I do hate a lot of things (Disney, marketing, Andrew Wiley etc) but I want to put it out there that this isn’t all I’m about. I got really excited when Tim Hely Hutchinson (CEO of Hachette UK) decided to go with the agency pricing model, Amazon be damned, and was excited again yesterday when Penguin and HarperCollins joined the party – soon to be followed by the kings at Canongate and Simon and Schuster apparently. One of the coolest things about this is the massive debate that rages on forums around this topic and I spent many a good work hour yesterday reading both sides on The Bookseller and the Kindle Forum.

What strikes me most is the dichotomy between the trade forums and the consumer forums. What sort of relationships do the publishers have with their audience? Will no publisher issue a statement to their public about the reasons they want to take control of prices away from the retailer? So I went on the Kindle Forum and stirred in my two pence, and then a few more things, like sarcasm and blame.

People are championing Amazon as their hero – who “continue to fight against higher prices for e-books” (read: pamper to a customer’s desire to pay as little as possible for as much as possible) – and are ignoring the fact this whole debate was spawned by an effective press release by an international corporation. The blinding holier-than-thou attitude that Amazon has instilled in its customers is nothing short of disgusting and gives me that drunk-on-rage feeling. But then again, you can’t spell ‘Kindle’ without ‘Kind’. (Does this strike anyone else as exceedingly sinister?)

I'll be Kind-le to you - pun definitely intended!

But with publishers staying silent, what are people supposed to think? Innocence doesn’t clam up like a pair of nun’s legs when people start asking questions.

Still, actions are louder than worms etc etc and so I applaud all publishing houses involved for putting a spanner in Amazon’s face. I can’t help but feel this is a major milestone – publishers are now taking the ebook medium seriously and won’t let retailers like Amazon give authors a short straw. It’s already operating in the US, now the UK – Australia’s next, I’d say. Publishers there better make a move before someone else does it for them.

Get involved: head over to the Kindle forum. It’s an amazing conversation that’s worth getting fired into.

Culture by Committee

I finally got around to reading this, Benjamin Eltham’s Overland article about abolishing Australia Council (OzCo), Australia’s arts funding and advisory body.

I’ve been watching Eltham and Marcus Westbury’s cultural policy debate as closely as I ever watch any debate, and it’s especially exciting to see an article in Overland that backs up its critique with a well-considered alternative to current policies.

SIB’s interest in this debate starts with the fact many of OzCo’s ‘new work’ categories are limited to writers who have already produced significant bodies of work, often precluding emerging youth writers.

Reflecting this situation, there seems to be a growing trend of independence from OzCo among indie publishers who are interested in publishing the sort of progressive, culturally challening writing being produced by this demograph. Given that these publishers are operating in an ailing (literary) sector in an ailing (book) market, it seems like a case of market (subsidy) failure that OzCo fails to align themselves with these producers more actively.

–––

This article’s image is inspired by Design by Committee, whose logo (a camel) bears the statement: ‘a camel is a horse designed by committee’.