Michael Korda: "technology leaps ahead and people simply adapt to it"

 

 

The dire predictions that doom the future of the printed word seem to mount daily. Not to worry: book publishing will adapt in ways undreamed of, and with a quickness that will be astonishing.

 

That's the hopeful forecast in this interview with Michael Korda, author and former editor-in-chief of Simon and Schuster, who's well aware that the book business will respond to the commercial expectations of readers as it always has, even as the idea of "the book" itself changes. He thinks that the role of small-press publishers, always precarious, will benefit from technology in the next five years with "a media that's open to everybody ... how they'll make money, I don't know. But then, how do they make money now?'

 

Korda offers a future business model based on the recent history of the music industry: "Nobody would have guessed that people would be downloading individual songs onto their computers and that record stores would disappear. So, you know, a very similar thing is going to happen to reading." The complete online interview by Rob Couteau, excerpted here, is in Raintaxi.

RC: You were saying the form itself is not so important; it’s the book that’s important, and we can’t compare the book in its present form to an electronic book, like the Kindle, but we have to apply our imagination to it much further, in that it might become something that’s just beyond anything we can imagine today.

MK: Well, I think that that’s true. You know, you’re looking at the Model T Ford and trying to predict what road transportation will be like in 2010 . . . ultimately, it’ll still have four wheels, and some form of propulsion, and a steering wheel, but beyond that, you’re trying to imagine something which is beyond imagination, if you see what I mean.

Now, there are two important differences. One is that the speed of progress is now so rapid, and transition is so quick, that the next step in reading-technology will come very rapidly, rather than very slowly. So that there’s not going to be a long lag between its inception and its development, and any changes that take place. Already, the iPad is a huge step ahead of the Kindle. Although whether it’s a useful step ahead for readers remains to be seen. ... it’s a rather large and cumbersome device, which needs to be replaced with something altogether different. But that is going to happen with such incredible rapidity that we really can’t forecast what it will look like. ...my guess is that, in ten years time, it will be in place and that nobody will have a problem with it. It’s just amazing the degree to which things are changing rapidly.

RC: There are a lot of people who say, “Well, I would miss the feel of the book.” But if you really unleash your imagination, it’s actually quite easy to imagine how digital book producers could appeal to the tactile sense; it doesn’t have to be just a visual innovation.

MK: Yeah, no doubt. But you know, I don’t have a clue. The person to talk to about that is Steve Jobs. [Laughs] Because unless he dies first, he’ll probably be the one who will invent it. But it’ll be something quite different. But I don’t think that that’s in any case something that one should be afraid of. People react the same way about a whole variety of things, ranging from smoking cigarettes to using typewriters or fountain pens. But nevertheless, the technology leaps ahead and people simply adapt to it. ...

RC: But other things, other businesses, will be created.

MK: Right. ... The book will continue to be a major factor for as, certainly as long as I live, and maybe as long as you live. But eventually it’s going, in the form of something else.

RC: What about the future of publishing?

MK: It will have to be reinvented with that in mind. Already, I think it’s evident that the major publishers are looking to find a partner in Apple, (and it) will become, in effect, a kind of publishing house. How that will work remains to be seen. There isn’t anyone in the book publishing business who can tell you, because nobody knows at this point in time. But that’s what everybody is clearly attempting to move towards. ...

JSTOR slowly opens the gates of academy research

If you've ever run into the frustrations of discovering an interesting article is out-of-reach behind JSTOR, the gate-keepers of academia, here's some (limited) good news: JSTOR will make available the beta version of a new program, Register & Read, which will give researchers read-only access to some journal articles, no payment required.

Jennifer Howard at Wired Campus reports that there are some strings attached, and the accessible journals constitute just eighteen percent of JSTOR's annual requests. In the article Howard reports that JSTOR said it turns away almost 150 million individual attempts to gain access to articles yearly.

That is a lot of potential paying customers. Here's the fine print of JSTOR's free beta, from Howard's post:

... Users won’t be able to download the articles; they will be able to access only three at a time, and there will be a minimum viewing time frame of 14 days per article, which means that a user can’t consume lots of content in a short period. Depending on the journal and the publisher, users may have an option to pay for and download an article if they choose.

To start, the program will feature articles from 70 journals. Included in the beta phase are American Anthropologist, the American Historical Review, Ecology, Modern Language Review, PMLA, College English, the Journal of Geology, the Journal of Political Economy, Film Quarterly, Representations, and the American Journal of Psychology .

The 70 journals chosen “represent approximately 18 percent of the annual turn-away traffic on JSTOR,” the organization said in an announcement previewing Register & Read.

Howard also reports that the relative success of JSTOR's 2011 access-test program, Early Journal Content, has been a prompt to further public access, though likely through some kind of eventual paywall.

....In September 2011, JSTOR also opened up global access to its Early Journal Content. According to Heidi McGregor, a spokeswoman for the Ithaka group, JSTOR’s parent organization, there have been 2.35 million accesses of the Early Journal Content from September 2011 through December 2011. ...”We absolutely consider this to be a success. In the first four months after launch, we are seeing over 1 million accesses to this content by people who would not have had access previously. This is at the core of our mission, and we’re thrilled with this result. The Register & Read beta is an exciting next step that we are taking, working closely with our publisher partners who own this content.”

The number of annual denied requests has raised questions -- perhaps mostly among frustrated researchers, or the merely curious who like to read beyond their college years -- that JSTOR has been searching for a pay-tier system, as well as waving away scholarly research criticism.

By offering the new program, JSTOR is making some tentative and potentially lucrative steps to its information access, just at the time when web neutrality is at issue. The key is in McGregor's phrase "our publisher partners who own this content": the answer to JSTOR access, it appears, will be in the paying price for information.

Carbon footprints in the sand: the growing divide between newsprint and digital delivery

Much as the twenty-four hour news cycle and the web have their benefits (the web's attention-span disorder promises a clean slate, or a high boredom quotient, ever more rapidly -- good news for politicians at least), the permanence of the printed word itself continues to inspire hope in some unusual corners -- Jeff Bezos, of Amazon, purchased the venerable Washington Post in a move that promises unexpected surprises in the new year. 

The information on the web can't be piled up for later reading-and-tossing quite like newsprint -- you have to go look for what you want on the web -- but on the other hand, the jury's still out on the environmental impact of pixel vs. newsprint. More than likely the Amazon/Post combine will ultimately seem a good advertising and marketing move for a merchandiser's future, rather than a valiant effort to maintain print media's status quo.

The New York Times recently ran an article in its Paper Cuts blog about the ongoing question of the web's environmental impact versus newspapers' "dead-tree existence" -- Nicholson Baker finds that electronic server farms may have a broader ecological impact than the processing of ink and newsprint, and existing research figures suggest a somewhat-frustrating draw about the relative impact of each.

Until the web can be piled up like the Sunday paper in black, smudgy drifts next to the Barcalounger, it seems like newsprint will survive in some form far more messy than Kindle, and more reliably necessary than cable news. Here's an excerpt from the Jennifer Schuessler article, which can be read in full at The New York Times.

Dave Eggers, the fledgling press baron behind The San Francisco Panorama, the much-ballyhooed (and drop-dead gorgeous) newspaper by the McSweeney’s gang, has been making the rounds with his full-throated argument that the future of the news business can be written not just in pixels but with old-fashioned paper and ink.

“There are a lot of things that newsprint can do uniquely well that the Web cannot,” Eggers recently told The Chicago Tribune. “The two forms could coexist, instead of the zero-sum situation that we seem stuck in.”

As it happens, The Panorama includes an apologia for its own glorious dead-tree existence, in the form of an essay by the novelist Nicholson Baker considering “the strange possibility that the transferring of information digitally is more environmentally destructive than printing it.” (Alas, and perhaps to the point, Baker’s article, along with most of The Panorama, is not available online.)

Baker, who is on record as loving Wikipedia and Google but not the Kindle, visits the Otis paper mill in Jay, Me., which was once the world’s largest but was shut down forever last spring. The shuttering of Otis may seem like good news for trees. But the biggest threat to the Maine woods, Baker suggests, isn’t logging. It’s the kind of low-density development that comes when the logging stops.

As Don Carli, a research fellow at the Institute for Sustainable Communication, put it to Baker, “Hamburgers and condos kill more trees than printed objects ever will.”

As Baker reports, some 18 paper mills closed in the United States in 2009, with more than 34 paper machines permanently shuttered. Meanwhile, the growth rate of the huge server farms needed to fuel the Internet and related gadgets is “metastasizing,” as Carli puts it to Baker.

The carbon footprint of data center server farms — roughly equal to that of paper mills today — is set to double in the next five years. And those server farms are often powered by coal, which tends to be harvested in far less sustainable ways than wood pulp. ...

Right now, there are no good accountings of the environmental impact of pixels versus paper. Until we have a better understanding, Carli said, let’s stop green-bashing the print media.

“It may provide more benefit to the environment and society than you realize,” he said. “Print itself doesn’t have a larger footprint than digital.” Without better measurements, “you can’t really make a case either way.” ...

UbuWeb, still "breaking all the rules, by going about things the wrong way"

UbuWeb has reached its fifteenth anniversary and still rolling -- quite an accomplishment for an arts website run by volunteers, with content skirting copyright requirements, and financed on the proverbial shoestring. If you're unfamiliar with the delights available at UbuWeb, it's worth a browse, always challenging, often surprising, and frequently offbeat: while you won’t find reproductions of Dalí’s paintings on UbuWeb, you will find a 1967 recording of an advertisement he made for a bank.

Here's an excerpt from founder Kenneth Goldsmith's post at Harriet, the blog at Poetry magazine. 

It’s amazing to me that UbuWeb, after fifteen years, is still going. Run with no money and put together pretty much without permission, Ubu has succeeded by breaking all the rules, by going about things the wrong way. UbuWeb can be construed as the Robin Hood of the avant-garde, but instead of taking from one and giving to the other, we feel that in the end, we’re giving to all. ...

The socio-political maintenance of keeping free server space with unlimited bandwidth is a complicated dance, often interfered with by darts thrown at us by individuals calling foul-play on copyright infringement. Undeterred, we keep on: after fifteen years, we’re still going strong. We’re lab rats under a microscope: in exchange for the big-ticket bandwidth, we’ve consented to be objects of university research in the ideology and practice of radical distribution.

But by the time you read this, UbuWeb may be gone. Cobbled together, operating on no money and an all-volunteer staff, UbuWeb has become the unlikely definitive source for all things avant-garde on the internet. Never meant to be a permanent archive, Ubu could vanish for any number of reasons: our ISP pulls the plug, our university support dries up, or we simply grow tired of it.

Acquisition by a larger entity is impossible: nothing is for sale. We don’t touch money. In fact, what we host has never made money. Instead, the site is filled with the detritus and ephemera of great artists—the music of Jean Dubuffet, the poetry of Dan Graham, Julian Schnabel’s country music, the punk rock of Martin Kippenberger, the diaries of John Lennon, the rants of Karen Finley, and pop songs by Joseph Beuys—all of which was originally put out in tiny editions and vanished quickly. ...

How does it all work? Most importantly, UbuWeb functions on no money: all work is done by volunteers. Our server space and bandwidth is donated by several universities, who use UbuWeb as an object of study for ideas related to radical distribution and gift economies on the web. In terms of content, each section has an editor who brings to the site their area of expertise.

Ubu is constantly being updated but the mission is different from the flotsam and jetsam of a blog; rather, we liken it to a library which is ever-expanding in uncanny—and often uncategorizable—directions. Fifteen years into it, UbuWeb hosts over 7,500 artists and several thousand works of art. You’ll never find an advertisement, a logo, or a donation box. UbuWeb has always been and will always be free and open to all...

Kenneth Goldsmith

We’re distressed that there is only one UbuWeb: why aren’t there dozens like it? Looking at the art world, the problem appears to be a combination of an adherence to an old economy (one that is working very well with a booming market) and sense of trepidation, particularly in academic circles, where work on the internet is often not considered valid for academic credit. As long as the art world continues to prize economies of scarcity over those based on plentitude, the change will be a long time coming.

And yet . . . it could vanish any day. Beggars can’t be choosers and we gladly take whatever is offered to us. We don’t run on the most stable of servers or on the swiftest of machines; hacks and crashes eat into the archive on a periodic basis; sometimes the site as a whole goes down for days; occasionally the army of volunteers dwindles to a team of one.

But that’s the beauty of it: UbuWeb is vociferously anti-institutional, eminently fluid, refusing to bow to demands other than what we happen to be moved by at a specific moment, allowing us flexibility and the ability to continually surprise our audience . . . and even ourselves.

Digital Karenina: all of Tolstoy's work will be available online

The Paris Review Daily reports that the 90-volume edition of "all of Tolstoy’s works are going online. 'We wanted to come up with an official website that will contain academically justified information,' explains his great-great-granddaughter. The work on the site will have been triple-proofed by more than three thousand volunteers from some forty-nine countries."

Here's more information about the online resource from the Tolstoy.ru website:

All of his novels, short stories, fairy tales, essays and personal letters will be available online for free and be downloadable in PDF, FB2 and EPUB formats, recognized by most e-book readers and computers, she said.

Tolstoy’s epics “War and Peace” and “Anna Karenina” still top most of the lists of greatest novels of all time, and his controversial views on Christianity earned him excommunication from the Russian Orthodox Church and spawned a short-lived religious movement.

Russia is a well-known haven for online pirates and copyright violators, and Tolstoy’s books were among the first to become available in online libraries in the 1990s.

Tolstoy’s works were part of the obligatory high-school curriculum in the Soviet Union and Russia. Generations of Russian students have had to read the more than 800-page “War and Peace” – with boys preferring the war and girls the peace, according to a popular saying.

"The Filter Bubble," Eli Pariser: only a little knowledge is a dangerous thing

Fifteen years ago the internet seemed like the genie in the lamp, with information accessible for all and free for the query in a search box. These days, like all media before it, the internet is being shaped to serve the needs not just of the user but of the advertiser. Like a point-of-sale impulse item at the check-out counter at your local grocery store, the endless string of an internet search (and many of the resulting sites) now bombards users not only with what they ask for and need, but with much of what they don't want.

Eli Pariser's book The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From You confirms what many internet users have suspected for some time: not only search engines but social sites, online retail businesses and other groups, have specifically tailored results to the online user. While this idea may play into facets of vast conspiracies and suspect motives, directing specific information at the user -- in whatever media -- is the point to advertising.

What makes the new form of information filtering practiced by search engines and other online services different, however, is that in most cases the internet user isn't even aware that search results are being manipulated.

In December 2009, Google began customizing its search results for each user. Instead of giving searches the most broadly popular result, Google now tries to predict what you are most likely to click on. MoveOn.org board president Eli Pariser writes that Google's change in policy is symptomatic of the most significant shift to take place on the Web in recent years: the rise of personalization.

Eli Pariser

This makes advertising more than just a pitch: by selectively determining the information a search engine displays according to the user's past searches (a function of algorithmic programming), Google searches don't allow the user to see all the choices available -- only pre-selected, automated results. Pariser calls this phenomenon a "filter bubble," and it restricts the internet user's access to what would otherwise be available.

Though the phenomenon has gone largely undetected until now, personalized filters are sweeping the Web, creating individual universes of information for each of us. Facebook, which is becoming a primary news source for an increasing number of Americans, prioritizes the links it believes will appeal to you so that if you are a liberal, you can expect to see only progressive links.

There is a real danger in this, according to Pariser. His thesis is that in an information- personalized world, we will increasingly be "typed" by advertisers and content providers, and fed only news that is pleasant, familiar, and confirms our beliefs. Because these filters are invisible, we won't (and most times don't) know what is being hidden from us. Our past interests will determine what we are exposed to in the future, leaving less room for the unexpected encounters that spark creativity, innovation, and the democratic exchange of ideas.

At this point, the off-base advertising a reader might see on his own Facebook page ("Like Donald Trump? Click here!") can sometimes just raise a smile. Now, however, I'm beginning to wonder what small nugget of information is lodged in the mighty search engines of the universe to make Facebook think I'm a fan of The Donald. I only wonder what his hair is made of.

"Ulysses Seen": Bloomsday online in a graphic novelization

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan can now safely come down from his tower with his robe ungirdled. 

 

It appears as though James Joyce's Ulysses, after having won the battle for literary expression in 1933, is continuing to win the war -- this time on the web, and almost ninety years after the book's first publication. Ulysses Seen, the graphic novelization of Ulysses (online, with an accompanying reader's guide, and created by illustrator Robert Berry) ran into trouble when it was submitted as an iPad application. According to business manager Chad Rutkowski at Throwaway Horse, "I don't think the Apple representative that I first spoke with even knew what Ulysses was."



Apple, apparently, at first decided the graphic novel was a little too graphic and requested Throwaway Horse remove several offending panels depicting partial nudity ("partial nudity," of course, is a salacious, tantalizingly vague oxymoron from an era of more delicate sensibilities). Throwaway Horse complied. 

 

Then representatives at Apple -- after having received the modified app -- looked again at Ulysses Seen and reversed their previous decision. Now both apps are available, just in time for Bloomsday, June 16. And in the same spirit, Apple has agreed to publish a graphic novelization app of that other succes d' scandale, "The Importance of Being Earnest," by Oscar Wilde. Molly Bloom would doubtless approve, and waits breathlessly.

Yes.

(images from UlyssesSeen, rendered by Robert Berry at Throwaway Horse, LLC)

Naropa University archive is now online: a list with links, from The Allen Ginsberg Project

THE NAROPA UNIVERSITY DIGITAL ARCHIVE 

Great news! Naropa's extraordinary audio archive (hitherto hosted as part of the estimable Internet Archive) has now been upgraded, refurbished and newly-hosted by Naropa University - The JKS (Jack Kerouac School) audio collection (part of a wider collection held by the university) is now available and ready for on-line exploration and practical use here 

Close to 2,000 (1,925) recordings are now immediately accessible. (A further 1,500 - 1, 800 more have been digitalized and will subsequently be made available - and this is just the JKS component!).

As Naropa, on their web-site, declare:  

"The Naropa University Digital Archive is an ongoing project to preserve the institutional heritage of our university by making available all institutional audio and video files created from our inception in 1974 up through today. This collection will continue to grow as new recordings are created every year and will include audio and video from every program Naropa University offers."

An astonishing trove of material (we'll be drawing from it extensively in the months (years) ahead). We asked Archivist, Nicholas Weiss, and Archival Processor, Ani Thubten Palmo, to come up with a few (select) gems, half a dozen or so, just to give a taste. This is what they selected:

Allen Ginsberg and David Henderson - from the  Naropa Wednesday Night Poetry Series June 24, 1981 - here

Allen Ginsberg, Jim Nisbet and Peter Lamborne Wilson (with Introduction by Anne Waldman and Bobbie Louise Hawkins), June 18, 1996 - here

From The Jack Kerouac Conference: Kerouac in the 80's, June 1, 1982 - Timothy Leary (Introduced by Diane di Prima) here

Letters To The New Century - three talks (given in 2001) by the late great Anselm Hollo, here, here, and here

and, June 18, 2009 - the Summer Writing Program Faculty Reading (with Anselm Hollo, Junior Burke,Janine Pommy Vega, Samuel R Delany and A.B.Spellman  (with Introductions by Bobbie Louise Hawkins and Akilah Oliver) - here

Wonderful to be able to report this news. Happy hunting!

The Paris Review interviews online: re-reading the cool, the hip, and the curmudgeon

That Kentucky man-of-rare-letters Ed McClanahan once remarked of his own method of writing that sometimes he followed his nose, sometimes his muse, and sometimes his muse's nose. One of the continuing pleasures of the internet's endless hall-of-mirrors is that occasionally one is able to reflectively follow all three at the same time. The Paris Review interviews -- sixty years' worth -- are now all available online, and they are a pleasure to have available at last all in a single place to discover, or discover again.

Lorin Stein, the editor at The Paris Review, is building a reputation for rejuvenating the magazine's literary cool -- by recalling the Review's freewheeling past. The New York Times, perhaps with just a bit of hyper-cool hyperbole, describes an office only lacking Terry Southern's expected appearance: "Mr. Stein, 37, is a proud throwback. His desk has an old-fashioned Rolodex, a vintage Lucky Strike case and a neat bowl of paper clips. A small, cream-colored saucer doubled as an ashtray for his Marlboro Reds. A martini glass, mostly drained of Tanqueray, rested near a typed manuscript."

That "mostly drained" martini glass with its Tanqueray -- there's the TS ultra-detail, the put-away.

Those who have wandered bookshops and old magazine stacks and stumbled on stray volumes of The Paris Review Interviewsin their multi-part book form are now free to spend leisurely hours discovering that their literary heroes (and sometimes, villains) are just as they imagined -- or not as the reader imagined them at all.

As expected, Eliot, Marianne Moore, Nabokov, and Faulkner cast long shadows, while Auden, Cheever, Anthony Burgess, and Kingsley Amis best one another's observations sounding as if they had cocktails in hand. (“After fifty, one ceases to digest; as someone once said: ‘I just ferment my food now'": that's Henry Green's witty answer in a 1958 talk with Terry Southern.) In a unexpected wistful moment, tough-guy Hemingway lets his guard down: “. . . the best writing is certainly when you are in love.”

A previously unpublished Ray Bradbury interview from the 1970s: "A conglomerate heap of trash, that’s what I am. But it burns with a high flame." Dorothy Parker, Kurt Vonnegut, and Woody Allen all make appearances. And here's Guy Davenport on his education, sounding a common note of many writers everywhere trying to find their voice: “I learned early on that what I wanted to know wasn’t what I was being taught.”

Aldous Huxley, Reynolds Price, V.S. Naipaul, Joseph Heller, John Steinbeck, Seamus Heaney: for any reader, spending an hour with a great author is easy; far more difficult is stopping at a sane and necessary point amid the sheer volume of interviews. One unexpected idea sparks another and sends a reader scurrying from Shelby Foote's ruminations on dip-pens to Sam Shepard's views on the terrible price of story endings: “I hate endings. Just detest them. Beginnings are definitely the most exciting, middles are perplexing and endings are a disaster.” Much the same can be said of Ted Berrigan's and Aram Saroyan's complete 1968 interview with an increasingly drunken  Jack Kerouac, as the talk literally careens around served drinks and proffered drugs:

INTERVIEWER What do you think about the hippies and the LSD scene?

KEROUAC They're already changing, I shouldn't be able to make a judgment. And they're not all of the same mind. The Diggers are different . . . I don't know one hippie anyhow . . . I think they think I'm a truck-driver. And I am. As for LSD, it's bad for people with incidence of heart disease in the family [knocks microphone off footstool . . . recovers it]. Is there any reason why you can see anything good in this here mortality?

INTERVIEWER Excuse me, would you mind repeating that?

KEROUAC You said you had a little white beard in your belly. Why is there a little white beard in your mortality belly?

INTERVIEWER Let me think about it. Actually it's a little white pill.

KEROUAC A little white pill?

INTERVIEWER It's good.

KEROUAC Give me.

INTERVIEWER We should wait till the scene cools a little.

KEROUAC Right. This little white pill is a little white beard in your mortality which advises you and advertises to you that you will be growing long fingernails in the graves of Peru.

With an online collection as broad as The Paris Review interviews there are many surprises, and readers will bring their own judgements as to what can be glanced at or read in depth after a few interviewer's questions. I might have to read more of the stories of T.C. Boyle after reading his 2000 comments, and there are scores of writers whose work I'm just as eager to discover for the first time.

Other than some well-known names, the group of more recent interviews is less interesting, but that's more than likely due to my own lack of reading than any fault of the writers being interviewed. Still, it may give the reader pause to consider that in the craft of writing, even Stephen King can have his moments of doubt no matter how unexpected:

"Every book is different each time you revise it. Because when you finish the book, you say to yourself, This isn’t what I meant to write at all. At some point, when you’re actually writing the book, you realize that. But if you try to steer it, you’re like a pitcher trying to steer a fastball, and you screw everything up. As the science-fiction writer Alfred Bester used to say, The book is the boss. You’ve got to let the book go where it wants to go, and you just follow along. If it doesn’t do that, it’s a bad book. And I’ve had bad books."

In the new-old era of The Paris Review, maybe that's just King's way of saying he's seeing Kerouac's white beard in his mortality belly.