Books & Poetry

Instructions for use: 1 Pick your author and title 2 Insert paper 3 Little elves inside the machine will bind your chosen book together 4 Bingo! Your stylishly designed novel comes out

Question: is a book more like a table or a computer? That is to say, is a book a sound and virtually timeless piece of hardware, able to accommodate variations, but remaining constant in its basic purpose and design components? Or is a book a device in need of regular upgrades in order to expand and evolve with its times, living by its wits to escape obsolescence?

However you answer this, the book as we know it is in a state of flux. Experiments in collaborative online writing and the promise of the universal digital library are breaking down our notions about how books are read, written and accessed. Though attempts to produce a handheld electronic reader haven’t yet found commercial success, a marketable form of e-books almost certainly awaits. And while old-fashioned paper-and-glue books aren’t going away any time soon, print-on-demand technology is poised to transform how they’re manufactured, sold and distributed.

For instance, if you drop by the InfoShop, the World Bank’s book store in Washington DC as I did recently, you might not take much notice of what appears to be a couple of large photocopiers near the entrance. If you look a bit closer, however, you’ll glimpse the unassuming and, for the moment, unwieldy contraption that could help reshape the publishing industry. This is version 1.0 of the Espresso Book Machine, which allows you to click a screen and, five or ten minutes later, hold in your hands a brand-new soft-cover tome, warm off the press.

On Demand Books, the company backing the Espresso, will unveil a smaller, sleeker model at the New York Public Library this spring. Each machine will be connected to the archive of hundreds of thousands of digitally-stored books held by the Open Content Alliance, which is pursuing a project similar to Google’s global online library. The eventual goal is to whittle down the Espresso to a size and cost (about $50,000, down from the present $100,000 price tag) that many libraries and bookstores can handle. Right now, print on demand is largely the domain of vanity presses and a few small DIY publishers. But the technology could streamline an industry in which economies of scale dictate four- or five-figure print runs, while also ensuring that no book ever has to go out of print. ‘As long as there’s a digital file available, in principle, you can make a copy on a machine like this,’ says Thor Sigvaldason, chief technology officer for On Demand Books, as the InfoShop’s Espresso hums away behind him.

Sigvaldason sees the Espresso as a fulfilment of Chris Anderson’s thesis in his book ‘The Long Tail’. ‘As the content becomes available, a little bookstore could do one or two copies of a whole bunch of obscure books all day long,’ he explains. ‘Those onesies and twosies, according to the long-tail argument, really add up. Think about a world where you could go to your favourite run-down, falling-over bookstore and have a virtual collection of 50 million titles to choose from.’ (Of course, the end of the time-worn indie bookstore has also been foretold, though social bookmarking and virtual card catalogues such as librarything.com are trying to forestall the death of browsing.)

Another project that embraces the ‘less of more’ philosophy is Caravan Books, which has partnered with several publishers and the Borders chain to offer a diverse ‘menu’ of reading options. Through Caravan, which launches in March, books will be available in hardback, paperback, e-book, and audiobook form, either in their entirety or chapter-by-chapter; a print-on-demand option for readers with impaired vision is also in the pipeline. ‘The project will have succeeded if, in a few years, it no longer has to exist,’ says Caravan’s Gene Taft. ‘All we have to do is show that it’s viable and all the publishers will start doing it themselves.’

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?’

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!’

www.ondemandbooks.com