A publishing phenomenon in China

Aventurina King at Wired is reporting on a publishing phenomenon in China, where free web access to novels has spurred record sales of printed books.

Literary sites like Source of Chinese and Magic Sword invite authors to upload their novels onto the web, where they might get noticed by an avid audience of young readers and eventually by publishers. King tells the history of Zhang Muye's serialized novel Ghost Blows out the Light, which has been "viewed more than 6 million times online" and has "sold 600,000 in print," and of another novel titled Killing Immortals that was launched online before selling over a million copies.

This is a collaboration of media that provides opportunities for emerging writers, increases revenues for the sites and for the publishers, and broadens readership. King mentions that "writing and reading novels has become the hobby of an estimated 10 million youth." The trend also strikes a balance between the "wisdom of the crowd" in determining pop-culture merit and old-fashioned editorial gatekeeping, since site publishers can identify the best novels to present only on their for-pay "VIP section."

The trend even contains a hint of throwback to the Victorian age, with its rage for serialized epic-length stories:

In the print world, book length is limited by the cost of paper, printing and distribution. On the Internet, where production costs are close to zero, length equals profit. VIP readers pay a couple of cents for every thousand characters (a print novel generally has 250,000 characters). Contracted authors are paid seven to 12 dollars per thousand characters, depending on their clout.

I've been arguing for years that hypertext does not represent any threat to the book. Here's a case of the web's influence to preserve a traditional aesthetic in writing while revolutionizing the economics of publishing, for the benefit of writers and publishers and the public.

Nor is it in the least surprising that the audience is willing to buy the books they can acquire at a lower price or even for free online. The pleasure of reading, especially fiction and poetry, continues to require the physical page. In his essay "Visible and Invisible Books" that appeared in The Future of the Page, University of Virginia's Jerome McGann points out that:

The history of the book medium and the development of fictional conventions within that medium have evolved an extraordinarily nuanced and flexible set of tools for the imagination. The truth is that the 'hyper' media powers of the book, in this area of expression if not prima facie, far outstrip the available resources of digital instruments.

Quote of the day

Copyright developed in the age of the printing press, and was designed to fit with the system of centralized copying imposed by the printing press. But the copyright system does not fit well with computer networks, and only draconian punishments can enforce it.

The global corporations that profit from copyright are lobbying for draconian punishments, and to increase their copyright powers, while suppressing public access to technology. But if we seriously hope to serve the only legitimate purpose of copyright -- to promote progress, for the benefit of the public -- then we must make changes in the other direction.

Richard M. Stallman, in the Abstract to his talk "Copyright vs. Community in the Age of Computer Networks," before the Computer Science Club at the University of Waterloo.

The future of online text - looks a lot like poetry

Earlier this month VentureBeat reported findings by Walker Reading Technologies regarding the inefficiency of conventional linear text, the kind you're reading right now.

Since "the natural field of focus for our eyes is circular," they say, our effort to focus on a single line, our brains are force "to a wage a constant subconscious battle with itself to filter and discard the superfluous inputs" from the lines of words above it and below it.

So Walker Reading Technologies has unveiled its LiveInk program that analyzes "written language for meaning and language structure, and then applies algorithms that reformat the text into a series of short, cascading phrases. It breaks complex syntax into simpler syntax, which makes it easier for the brain to absorb the material."

The resulting lines of text, which they illustrate in a jpeg, are remarkably similar to free verse, or simple found poetry.

Poets, of course, liberate their language from the forced march of prose linearity by breaking lines, to indicate both the natural pause of the human voice taking a breath, and to reveal deeper semantic and syntactic levels of utterance. It's coincidental that a program is developed to break prose into poetic lines at the same moment when contemporary poetry is moving from the printed page into what is often spontaneous and unique oral performance.

The company claims that LiveInk increases reading comprehension by "10-15 percentile points on nationally standardized reading tests." If their claim can be substantiated by educators, LiveInk could unleash the potential of the e-textbook at all levels of education. The great objection to online and electronic text is that it's difficult to read, because of the limited resolution possible on the screen or monitor, in comparison to the high resolution of the printed page.

But the physical book is limited by practical considerations of physical space, the size and number of pages that can reasonably be bound and carried -- a limitation that doesn't apply to hypertext, since the formatting of lines will have minimal effect on the size of the file or its demand on memory space.

If LiveInk truly enhances comprehension and improves comprehension, it will mark a revolution.

The one question is whether students will resist LiveInk's reformatting of the line. After all, it looks suspiciously like poetry, a form of writing that most students in my classes over the past 35 years have rejected as being too "weird-looking" to understand.

More about online campaigns

Following up after yesterday's post regarding online campaign strategies, I recommend Michael Scherer's piece called "Power to the people, 2.0," at Salon.

Scherer's focus is on the lessons that John Edwards and Barack Obama learned from Howard Dean, about using the Internet to build an authentic political community. He quotes Joe Trippi, formerly Dean's manager who's now in the Edwards team: "People want to belong to something. They want to belong to a community that goes back to that notion that there is something bigger than yourself."

In service of building the social network, campaign managers are even taking the unconventional step of shifting attention away from the candidate's image and toward the supporters' active involvement in local issues. "On Tuesday, the home page of Obama's campaign Web site did not even feature a head shot of the candidate." (Doesn't Obama know that the Internet is only for narcissists?)

Hillary Clinton's camp, by contrast, is using her web presence to position her publicly, with relatively meager efforts to solicit active involvement. The Republicans, Scherer notes, "have treated their online operations more or less like an electronic form of direct mail campaigning. The campaigns rarely seek to involve supporters through online outreach in anything beyond traditional volunteer work and fundraising."

The article ends on a note of caution, reminding readers that Dean's Internet savvy failed to deliver his New Hampshire victory. The point is well taken. However, the Dean campaign is now several years in the past. Social networking is a more influential, more pervasive phenomenon today, far better understood than the nascent movement it was in the 2004 campaign.

Democrats turn out to be good at "doing" the Internet

Jose Antonio Vargas, in yesterday's (May 21) Washington Post, gave an insightful commentary on politics and new media, pointing out that "the culture of Democrats is a much better fit in the Internet world" than Republican culture.

The Republican party's greatest strength in decades past has been their disciplined technique of staying unified in the delivery of its message. The standard procedure is to formulate the message at the top, at the level of the RNC or the White House, then distribute that message downward through various media outlets.

But that process doesn't work in "the often chaotic, bottom-up, user-generated atmosphere of the Internet."

The less discipline, more fractious Democratic party is being invigorated by the free forum chaos of Web 2.0, according to Peter Leyden of the New Politics Institute: "All this talking and discussing and fighting energizes everyone, involves everyone, and gets people totally into it."

The few Republican triumphs online that Vargas chronicles, which include 2004 attacks on John Kerry and Dan Rather, were still top-down, coordinated projects rather than grassroots initiatives by cadres of amateur politicos, as has generally been the case with the notable Democratic successes, such as the YouTube broadcast of George Allen's regrettable "Macaca" comment.

Republicans have had astonishing success on radio, which McLuhan called the "tribal drum." The advent of Web 2.0 offers a new, radically different form of participatory community where the voices of Democrats and Progressives may speak the loudest.

In praise of paper, in hope for hypertext

I've just finished reading Matthew Sharpe's dark, hilarious novel Jamestown, in which one of the multiple narrators wonders at himself in the act of recording his thoughts on "humankind's flimsies and least likely invention, paper."

My own feelings about paper are untinged by irony, but hypertext has complicated my relationship with it.

Last month, I spent an afternoon sorting through some boxes I'd left unopened in the basement for over a decade, and discovered a folder containing yellowed typescripts of poems I'd assumed lost after a hasty division of personal effects when my first marriage suddenly ended. My only other copies existed as WordPerfect 5.1 files on a 5.5" floppy -- irretrievable, corrupted documents on antiquated technology.

Our electronic files are fragile, in danger of obsolescence. Paper lasts. Even when the individual page disintegrates with age, the technology remains constant, unchanged for thousands of years. All hail to paper.

A few weeks ago at Salon, Laura Miller reviewed David Damrosch's The Buried Book, which is an account of how the Epic of Gilgamesh lay "buried in the ruins of a Mesopotamian palace" for almost 3000 years before being unearthed by archeologists in the 19th century. The story, of course, was recorded in cuneiform and baked onto clay tablets -- an even hardier medium than paper.

I have no idea what expectations the Gilgamesh scribe might have entertained about the future, the longevity, of his efforts. It's clear, though, that papyrus and then paper enticed writers to visions of immortality. The paper text offers the advantage of being easily reproduced, whether by scribe or (later) by press. This possibility of such permanent, portable, reproducible records led the Roman poet Horace to predict (rightly!) that his poems would outlast bronze monuments ("Exegi monumentum aere perennius"), a sentiment echoed by Shakespeare ("Not marble, nor the gilded monuments / Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme") and other writers through the ages.

I continue to work in the medium of the printed page, almost every day, pursuing every writer's dream of a finished, published piece that will live beyond my allotted years. This morning I taught a Business Communication class in a computer lab where two editors from Columbus State's student literary magazine, Spring Street, were compiling manuscripts for this year's edition. Watching them work, I felt the old romantic thrill of bringing the work into print, birthing it into paper.

Hypertext, the electronic document, is impermanent. We bloggers and web writers commit our thoughts to binary code, electronic files, servers, and pixels on monitors -- all technologies that may be as useless in the next decade as my old 5.5" floppy is now. What we write today may be (will likely be) unavailable to a future audience in any form.

But its singular appeal is its novelty. Unlike paper, hypertext isn't freighted with millennia of cultural history, social associations or artistic expectations. It's a radically new medium, with potential that's we've just begun to realize.

The future of newspapers

A recent blog from Arianna Huffington about News 2.0 presents an optimistic vision of papers like the Washington Post starting to successfully embrace the digital age. The Post, for example, has "gone from a largely local paper with a print circulation around 656,000, to an international paper attracting eight million unique online readers a month."

But I began growing nervous as the article continued in its rosy assessment for the future of hybrid digital-and-paper delivery system like NewspaperDirect. The debate over the merits of the printed page vs. the computer screen has been continued too long. This old debate is wrongheaded in its approach, obscuring how dynamically different hypertext is from hard copy, consumed in tedious discussion about which is more convenient or more aesthetically pleasing.

So I was relieved when Huffington at last turned to a more vital issue, how new media is beginning to affect journalism in its substance, rather than in its delivery methods. She praises, rightfully, sites like Talking Points Memo and TMPmuckracker for bringing together "journalistic doggedness and reader interactivity" in breaking the recent Justice Department scandal involving the fired U.S. attorneys.

It's beyond question that the mainstream media has, for the past decade, failed the public miserably in its duty to inform and watchdog. Witness the lead-in to the American invasion of Iraq, when the only responsible critique of the plan was offered by Knight Ridder and by the online "fringe." Most newspaper, as well as all the commercial broadcast networks, simply yielded themselves to the euphoria and hysteria of the moment.

New media developments may assist in increasing a mainstream newspaper's audience, but they won't save the newspaper industry from its own growing corruption and incompetence. I am myself a daily reader of the New York Times online, but I entertain no illusions that I'm getting more accurate information or improved coverage from the electronic version. It's still the Times, limited in what it can report and predetermined in its outlook by its old political and corporate affiliations.

Never mind the joys of listening to the rustle of the pages and the feel of ink smudging your fingertips. If you're not getting complete, balanced, independent reporting from your newspaper, you're wasting your time. The online press is beginning to flex its muscle and prove its potential for wedding professional journalism with citizen journalism.

Huffington herself points out that "breaking a big story isn't always about getting the inside tip from a Deep Throat -- many times it's simply the piecing together of seemingly random bits of information there for everybody to see. But when they are assembled together, suddenly a big story can emerge. The blogosphere excels at this."