Nehemiah Blake
restoring England’s Christian literary traditionArchive for Publishing industry
the internet ≈ the medieval manuscript
a theory:
the internet vs. the book
the book vs. the medieval manuscript
ergo, the internet ≈ the medieval manuscript
…
Much is going on around the blogosphere regarding Nick Carr’s essay in Atlantic magazine, “Is Google making us stupid?“. Nehemiah & Blake has commented. Kevin Kelly’s post, Fate of the Book, provides a very useful perspective of the internet vs. the book debate as it has developed since the mid 1990s. Sven Birkerts, to whom Kelly’s post was directed, makes the interesting point that “[c]yberspace is centrifugal; reading is centripetal. Nehemiah & Blake, however, would like to refocus the internet/book debate somewhat by considering the medieval manuscript. (btw, the start of this interesting train of links comes from booktwo.org, a wonderful site focussed on the future on the book.)
There is a lot to be said for considering old technologies in order to get one’s head around new technologies, particularly if one takes a circular view of history. Consider the following.
Each medieval manuscript was made up of folios or pages to create an individual object. No two manuscripts were the same. Furthermore, manuscripts often linked together otherwise unrelated narratives for the pleasure of the reader. For instance, the only surviving manuscript of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is bound together with two Latin treatises and the Christian narrative poems Pearl, Purity and Patience. A manuscript would also have been transcribed, glossed and illuminated by one or more scribes, each of whom would have made errors in their work. The work of the rubicators – those who would write the glosses and headings – would furthermore have reflected their individual idiosyncrasies, as would the transcribing methods of the scribes and the artistic methods of the illuminators.
Altogether, the medieval manuscript would be everything a printed book was not: non-uniform. It was print culture that imposed upon our reading habits the conventions of uniformity that we demand of our books today. No publisher today publishes more than one version of a novel. Imagine the furore today if Bloomsbury published two versions of a Harry Potter book simultaneously. Readers would want to know which was the “authorative” version.
Now consider the web site. It too is made up of individual pages (each with its own url) that are (hyper)linked together to form an individual object. The web site is non-reproducible. The idea of reproducing an identical web site elsewhere on the web is not only pointless (one home url is sufficient for anyone to access your page), but impossible (any copy requires different url’s for each page it duplicates). Moreover, the website can link together any number of disparate web pages from across the internet through the use of the hyperlink. But no website is very likely to have the same agglomeration of links.
Carrying on the similarities, while many websites do aim to reproduce the uniformity of the book across its pages, particularly those with dedicated webmasters, the majority of the deep web is produced by content creators who are less concerned with uniformity and more interested in the delivery of information, allowing for a vast scope for error, idiosyncrasy, opinion and design ethic to enter into the flow of information.
There are other similarities, just as their are many dissimilarities between the medieval manuscript and the internet. Feel free to comment and mention any you might think of. Nevertheless, the similarities in terms of production between the respective technologies I think warrants the investigation of the older technology that Nehemiah & Blake seeks to pursue.
Why “not-for-profit”?
It is commonly known that there is enough food in this world to feed everyone comfortably. The problem is not a shortage of food. The problem is the distribution system. People go hungry because they live outside or on the extremities of the distribution system. They starve because they are unable to use (for a number of varying reasons) their talents and resources to enter into that system.
It is the same case for many many good writers. The problem is not a shortage of publishers. The problem is the distribution system whose focus is on bottom line. Writers, as a result, go unpublished because they live outside or on the extremities of the distribution system. Their God-given gift to write starves because they are unable to use (for a number of varying reasons) their talents and resources to enter into that system. If they are able to enter it, they receive next to nothing from it.
Nehemiah & Blake believes however that to be hindered or not allowed to exercise one’s God-given talents for an equitable wage on the basis on market economics is wrong. In other words, Nehemiah & Blake believes that if you discover your primary vocation to be that of a writer, but find out that your writing does not conform to the wants of market economics, you should nevertheless be allowed to practice, develop, master and live by your writing. Nehemiah & Blake believes this on the basis that your gift for writing is God-given, and would have not been so given, unless it was meant to be the work by which to sustain your life.
While many independent publishers exist that do a fine job of publishing “difficult” writers, very few can provide their writers a “working wage”. It is for this reason that Nehemiah & Blake is setting up a “not-for-profit” publishing venture focussed on investigating the medieval monastery model as a means by which writers can primarily write for a living while being supported by a community, so that the writers can in turn support the community through the fruit of their writing.
21st century writer
Very interesting set of articles and interviews at The Futurist on the future of the book. I thought I would pull a few quotes and offer a few comments.
“For book publishers, the mission is to make an industry built on a fifteenth-century technology viable in the twenty-first century. That means reinventing the concept of the book for the digital age.”
The book is the object. That does not change. It is how the book is conceptualised that makes all the difference. Is a book a bunch of printed pages bound within a cover? Or is a book a touchstone for a community to gather around, or build on, or circulate?
“…are emoticon-laden screeds and homemade YouTube videos going to save “the book” or just further our cultural transition away from print literacy?”
In other words, will readers of “books” create the internet-based user-generated content based on the book to provide the community with what it needs to survive, and thus for books to survive? Or will that very user-generated content sever whatever tenuous link to print culture there may have been?
“The book is a souvenir.”
One buys a souvenir to remember a place visited or an event attended. In the case of book, one is often led to buy a book by virtue of a conversation with an empassioned reader, or in response to being exposed to a book or author during some form of human communication. Ray Bradbury will indelibly be linked in this memory to an English class at high school.
“[Readers are] seeking an intellectual connection with an author and a community experience organized around an idea.
I think there is a lot of validity to this point. Many people must have read Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code not because they thought it was going to be a great read but because they wanted to part of that phenomenon.
“‘I always thought that publishing was about, first of all, understanding what matters, figuring out how to gather information, and then gathering readers who that information matters to. There’s a kind of curation process.’” – Tim O’ Reilly
The idea of curating a book rather than publishing a book is quite neat. It widens it beyond just the printing and binding of paper. A book is an event which needs to be curated, involving many of the aspects that would go into curating an arts show.
“…the writers of the future (both fiction and nonfiction) will work with Web designers, software writers, and other professionals to create product.”
This is inevitable. As internet fiction finds its voice, different programs and applications are going to be needed to meet the demands of the “text” in conveying the story. Even for Apocalypse of Jude, a web designer was used to create the site.
“The idea that the practice and craft of writing can simply retool itself for the digital age overlooks the fact that the Web is giving rise to totally unique forms of expression, a writing that is different from the kind traditionally found in books.”
It’s true that the novel will never “retool” itself for the web. New forms of writing will emerge. But I still believe that the practice and craft of writing remains as core. The writer needs to find new forms of expression. The practice and craft of writing will adapt to those new forms. But they will remain as practice and craft.
“…written material will likely never regain the cultural primacy it enjoyed in earlier centuries.”
Agreed.
“Just because things became written down, we didn’t lose oral culture.”
Also true.
“Arguing against the forces of digitalization is as much a losing battle as cursing the coming of the evening tide. But before we invest ourselves too deeply in this future, consider this: If new technologies expose the biases inherent in print and text, so the converse is true as well; that the written word is uniquely suitable for revealing the myopias of our digital age. If poor old Oliver Goldsmith were alive today, he might argue that critical reading abilities, cultural literacy, and traditional literacy were never more vital than the present.”
An interesting thing about early Medieval culture is that it was the monks who safeguarded much of the knowledge of the time with their literacy skills, conveying that knowledge through a visual literacy coded into the liturgy, stone carvings, frescoes and stained-glass windows. Perhaps there is a sense in which the same is happening again, in which a highly literate minority need to code that knowledge into visual literacies of a post-literate world. Writers need coders.
“However, before we make the mistake of convincing ourselves that a knack for writing software is more valuable than the ability to simply write well, we might consider looking anew at the souvenir that is the book.”
Hopefully, these short comments on the quotes pulled will encourage that looking anew.
“The Story So Far” is the story we are beginning
The best bits of the part online game, “part competition, part creative-writing exercise” entitled The Story So Far end up as “rare hand-stitched hardbacks.” It is also Cory Doctorow’s fictional envisioning of a community-driven publishing future. The quote below comes from Doctorow’s story (published by The Bookseller) and couldn’t more aptly and succinctly describe the story Nehemiah & Blake finds itself wanting to begin:
“I’ll tell you how,” Arthur said again, clearly enjoying the chance to unfurl one of his old, well-oiled stories. “It was all about connecting kids up with their local neighbourhoods and the tastes there. Kids know what their friends want to read. We had them curate their own anthologies of the best, most suitable material from The Story So Far, put all that local knowledge to work. The right book for the right person in the right place. You’ve got to give them a religious experience before you can lure them into coming to church regular.”
Reflections on “Deep Reading”
Is Deep Reading under threat? Is Google making us stupid? I start with these two questions for very good reason. The first is a post heading from readysteadybook.com. The second is a headline to an Atlantic.com article. I came by the first link via Nehemiah & Blake’s bloglines subscriptions, which led me to the second, which, by virtue of reading, has led me to write this post. What we have here then is a tangible chain of associations that suggests a number of relations going on in my head in a way that it is impossible for a bibliography at the end of a book to show. What makes this chain even more tangible is that the reader can follow this chain (via hyperlinks) and so engage with a neural pathway, again in the way a well-indexed bibliography does not allow. What is engaged in this process of online reading is not a reading that seeks to make sense of a well-structured narrative, or argument. Rather it is a reading that seeks to make sense of what lies in the hyperspace between jumps.
The former type of reading is what Nicholas Carr, the writer of Is Google making us stupid?, would understand as “Deep Reading”. While the latter is what he might term as a distracted reading, a reading that developmental psychologist Maryanne Wolf, author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. would argue promotes a style of reading that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above content. This, Carr argues, favours Google:
In Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.
The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network’s reigning business model as well. The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements. Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.
It would take a naive fool to dismiss this analysis of what the Googleplex desires of us. The same can be said for old-fashioned publishers: It’s in their economic interest to drive us towards books baked like cheap supermarket bread that leave us far less than satisfied in the depths of the human heart. But while Google may desire that we “flit from link to link,” it is important to remember that Google is a function of the hyperlink, not the other way around! Without the hyperlink, no Google. In fact, it is curious that many people, including Carr, track the development of civilisation as following this pattern: development of writing, the printing press, the internet. This is how Carr outlines the current way of thinking:
In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates bemoaned the development of writing. He feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the words of one of the dialogue’s characters, “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.” And because they would be able to “receive a quantity of information without proper instruction,” they would “be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.” They would be “filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom.” Socrates wasn’t wrong—the new technology did often have the effects he feared—but he was shortsighted. He couldn’t foresee the many ways that writing and reading would serve to spread information, spur fresh ideas, and expand human knowledge (if not wisdom).
The arrival of Gutenberg’s printing press, in the 15th century, set off another round of teeth gnashing. The Italian humanist Hieronimo Squarciafico worried that the easy availability of books would lead to intellectual laziness, making men “less studious” and weakening their minds. Others argued that cheaply printed books and broadsheets would undermine religious authority, demean the work of scholars and scribes, and spread sedition and debauchery. As New York University professor Clay Shirky notes, “Most of the arguments made against the printing press were correct, even prescient.” But, again, the doomsayers were unable to imagine the myriad blessings that the printed word would deliver.
So, yes, you should be skeptical of my skepticism. Perhaps those who dismiss critics of the Internet as Luddites or nostalgists will be proved correct, and from our hyperactive, data-stoked minds will spring a golden age of intellectual discovery and universal wisdom.
I enjoin with that scepticism and suggest that perhaps this sequence should rather read as follows: development of writing, movable type (of which the typewriter/keyboard is the final end), the hyperlink. I don’t doubt that much will be, and already has been lost in this new shift and can sympathise with Carr when he opines that “[T]he Net isn’t the alphabet, and although it may replace the printing press, it produces something altogether different.” I am, after all, born of that culture of the printed book. Yet I am also one who is born again into the hyperlinked text. Just like for anyone who is born again, for one born of the book, there is a tough casting off of the past, and a just as tough taking on the new hyperlinked text. But rather than merely offering a “flit-ful” type of reading encouraged by the economics of the Googleplex, the hyperlinked text offers a dynamic new type of reading that offers a tangible map of what Carr calls “the intellectual vibrations” that reading “set[s] off within our own minds” so that when “we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas” from what we read, there is a trackback available, that allows us to “see” how these mental jumps were made, and provide the basis for a radical reinterpretation of the knowledge that the printed book has given us. Moreover, this hyperlinked method of reading will impact the printed book, whereby “books” will emerge that will “mimic” the hyperlinked nature of the Internet by providing “cross-referenced texts” that allow the reader to jump from one part of the text to another to see how it interlinks as a text. In fact, this book has already been around with us from a long time in the form of the cross-reference Bible, where verses of one text are cross-referenced with verses of another text, so that the reader can have a greater insight to the full Bible itself.
It is ironic in the literary sphere where the Bible is often seen as little more than an obtuse, irrelevant reference scarcely referenced any longer, that the Bible presents it with a model for future works of fiction. It is upon this biblical model which Nehemiah & Blake’s forthcoming printed version of Apocalypse of Jude is based. In its current online form, Apocalypse of Jude is a hyperlinked fiction that offers the reader two mixes to choose from: The Wasteland Mix and The Purgatory Mix, the former following the trajectory of T.S. Eliot’s poem, the latter, the plot of Dante’s Purgatory. The intention is for one mix to illuminate the other mix so that the reader feels the vibrations of both mixes working to the depths of the heart, while allowing the reader a tangible link to the source of those vibrations so that exploration can take place. Nehemiah & Blake trusts that the printed work will have the same effect.
What’s in a book that I should buy it?
There’s a trick to the question asked in the post title. It lies with the verb. It should be “read”. But it isn’t. It’s “buy”. Why? Because to read a book, one by and large has to buy it. Reading is intrinsically bound up in the economic cycle. It is a fact not lost on Italo Calvino in If on a winter’s night a traveller. There are as many ways to buy a book as there are to skin a cat. Charles Lambert on the Guardian book blog describes a delightful, idiosyncratic method of buying books in Italy 30 years ago that was akin to visiting your grocer:
“Customers were served by an assistant behind a wide bare wooden counter. They would tell the assistant what they wanted and he or she (usually he) would disappear into the back of the shop, wrap the book exquisitely in sheets of pre-cut paper and tie it with ribbon.”
As Nehemiah & Blake was reading this, it struck that this is not dissimilar from buying a book online from say, Amazon. You go to Amazon in the same sense Lambert once might have gone to his book-grocer: if you don’t know the book you want, you don’t go there. Then you buy the book, Amazon goes to its warehouse to find and wrap it, and then dispatches it to you.
The advantage for Amazon over the book-grocer is, as Robert McCrum recently pointed out, that Amazon is a global book-grocer that has united a global book market and changed the way books are marketed, and hence the way books are bought.
But what’s in a book that I should buy it? And is it to be found in a book trade that functions as a signifier of the market economy? In such an economy, the book is a commodity and a statistic on a logistics database set up to ensure the most cost-effective production with the largest possible profit. A book’s content is irrelevant in all aspects but perhaps in its ability to make a sale. As to what sells however, is a very imprecise science. Selling books then is a system of probabilities. Some forms of content, because of a proven genre- or author-driven track record, present book publishers with higher percentage odds. The greater the number of high-percentage books published, the less room for risk to be taken on perceived low-percentage books.
The first thing that is in a book to make me buy it then is low risk. Low risk for the publisher in terms of securing a profit on the book, and low risk for the reader, whose reading enjoyment has a higher probability of being satisfied with a book that conforms by and large to established convention. The publisher desires the money in order to publish more books. The reader desires value for pounds spent, and thus relies on the publishing industry to provide that sense of money being well spent.
As books are seen as commodities by the market economy, those working within the requirements of the market economy take up this definition for books. The OED defines commodity in two senses, one, as a raw or primary product that can be traded, like sugar, and two, as a useful or valuable thing, such as time. One might add to this definition, a product that is ubiquitous and affordable to almost all, such as a computer, or car. Thus the book in developed societies has become a cheap, ubiquitous raw, primary product of inestimable value and use.
The second thing then that is in a book to make me buy it is its social equivalence to food. In fact, the food trade and the book trade are almost synonymous: 2-for-1 battery-farmed chickens at Tesco = 2-for-1 battery-farmed books at Tesco; an organic, free change chicken at Waitrose = An “original, free-thinking” book from Waterstones; your weekly veg box ordered online = your monthly shopping cart from Amazon, etc etc. Of course, the organic/mass-farmed, free-range/battery-farmed debate has yet to deliver its verdict on whether there is a significant difference in nutrition. But the growing problem of obesity in Britain, the environmental issues, the food miles, the rich/poor divide in the affordability of quality food, the education about food, the school dinners all make for interesting comparison when applied to the book trade: the growing problem of illiteracy, the environmental impact of publishing, the rich/poor literacy divide that streams our children into varying levels of education, and the role of books in schools. The difference is that the food industry’s role in the politics of food has been pushed high onto the media agenda. The book publishing trade’s role in the politics of reading remains by and large a small in-house debate. And as far as I can account for, very little has been done, compared to food, to raise the awareness of what role the publishing trade plays in perpetuating a cycle of unsustainable pulping and paper-manufacturing that in turn leads to entrenched forms of poverty in countries where these processes take place.
Moreover, if the book is a commodity, then it will not go unnoticed that many current commodity prices are sky high – gold, copper, oil, food. So is paper, and that means books will continue to be dearer. When that happens, major companies seek to offset rising commodity prices by driving down labour cost so that they can continue to pass on discounted prices to customers. Which in turn means, more higher percentage books at supermarket prices with supermarket quality at the expense of human quality of life for those who work in the physical production of books. This is not to mention the environmental impact of books.
The thesis behind mass production has always been that it is cheaper to make more than less, even if you sell less than you make. This is particularly true of book publishing, where there are always returns. James Bridle of booktwo.org estimates that for some publishers this return rate is as high as 50 percent. He notes that:
“half of all books printed in the UK are never read. And they’re not redistributed either, but returned to the publishers or otherwise disposed of, usually pulped or simply placed in landfill.”
On top of this, Bridle quotes David Reay, an environmental scientist who estimated that “in terms of its contribution to global warming, UK publishing in effect puts an extra 100,000 cars on our roads.
On the basis of all this then, it would at least appear that there is not much in a book that would make me buy it: not much in the way of risk-taking content that might force me to reevaluate my position on the world and its goings-on; nor much in the way of that would alleviate those goings-on. To conclude, Nehemiah & Blake concedes that much of this essay is an oversimplification of the book publishing industry, and that there is much afoot in the way of confronting these issues. The purpose of this essay is simply to put forward a perspective on the issue in the hope that it will contribute to the ground swell of seeing the publishing industry radically interrogate its own wheel in the hope of it being sustainably re-invented.
