Books & Poetry

Indeed, though initiatives such as On Demand and Caravan reformulate how publishing monoliths do business, the big houses have little to fear in terms of eroded profits or potential piracy. ‘We represent just another way for them to sell books,’ Sigvaldason says. ‘And unlike a Napster or iTunes kind of story, what the customer ends up with is a physical thing, not a digital thing.’

But what about those digital things? It seems e-books have been ‘just around the corner’ for a long time now and, last year, the Sony Reader debuted with much fanfare but relatively little consumer interest. ‘They’re trying to fix something that isn’t broken,’ says Ben Vershbow of the Institute for the Future of the Book, a think tank located in New York City. ‘Publishing is looking for its iPod. In terms of media that the iPod handles, it’s not a good analogy, but it’s an analogy they’re stuck in.’

You can’t easily flip through an e-book or pencil in notes; nor can you search the text or connect to the internet to cross-reference what’s on your screen. In other words, Vershbow says, ‘The e-readers do what the print book does worse, and they don’t do what the electronic technology does well or at all, except that they can hold a bunch of books at one time. But was being able to carry 80 books around really a problem?’
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The Institute for the Future of the Book is less interested in hardware prognostications and more in fostering what Vershbow has called ‘the social life of books’ – a virtual space where books can spontaneously interact with each other and develop through online collaboration. In March, the Institute will unveil a Beta version of its ‘Sophie’ software for multimedia writing, and in April, Harvard University Press will publish the dead-tree edition of McKenzie Wark’s ‘Gamer Theory’ (or ‘GAM3R 7H30RY’), which began life at a Wikipedia-like ‘networked book’, written, edited and, of course, available to be read in an online environment. ‘The different forms enlarge the overall universe of the book; they’re not in competition with each other,’ Vershbow says.

For a work of scholarly non-fiction, the networked book format makes terrific sense, allowing for a more dynamic and inclusive version of peer review. But this methodology ruptures the essentially private experience of fiction writing, which partly explains the free-for-all that ensued when Penguin and De Montfort University launched their ‘wikinovel’ experiment, ‘A Million Penguins’, at the start of February. One week after the site went live, it had registered 63,000 unique visitors and the novel had mushroomed into an intermittently-readable, 520-page game of Surrealist word game Exquisite Corpse.

Just as the e-reader/iPod analogy doesn’t hold up, ‘wikinovel’ may be a misnomer – an awkward adaptation of a familiar term to introduce an unfamiliar concept. ‘I think it’s a new thing entirely,’ says Kate Pullinger, an instructor in the online MA in creative writing and new media programme at De Montfort, who helped oversee the march of the million penguins. ‘It doesn’t bear much relation to the novel model we know, which is well-loved, well-understood and isn’t in danger of going away. This is completely different, but what it is, and whether it has any artistic merit, remains to be seen.’

Perhaps even the novel can accommodate the wiki, and vice versa; Walter Kirn built his novel ‘The Unbinding’ (recently published by Anchor Books), in real time on the web, and it’s easy to imagine a networked novel emerging out of the combined efforts of a writing workshop. And even when we shut off our laptops and curl up in bed with a trusty old piece of treeware, the brainwaves that process any long, sustained narrative have been made forever choppier by our hyperlinked social context. Even if books remain the same, reading has already changed.

‘Knowledge has always been collaborative and social networks of discourse have always existed,’ Vershbow says. ‘The internet just makes these connections more explicit, revealing – almost in a hallucinogenic way – centuries of underlying structure in the culture of the book while at the same time announcing its demise. Reading and writing are dead. Long live reading and writing!’

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