digital

This month Azar Nafisi’s new memoir Things I’ve Been Silent About is published in the UK by Random House. In the following interview with Sarah O’Reilly she talks about her first – the best-selling Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books.

The Secret of ‘Durable Pigments’

Azar Nafisi talks to Sarah O’Reilly

Your book has sold over a million copies worldwide, has been translated into 32 languages and spent an amazing 117 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Did you anticipate such success?

It is very difficult to determine why a book becomes popular. I certainly did not expect mine to be so. But I can draw some conclusions from my interaction with readers, and their responses to the book. I think its success is mainly due to two factors, the first being readers’ love of books. On one level Reading Lolita in Tehran is a celebration of both the act of reading as well as writing: I wanted to show how the two acts are connected. The enduring value of books is as much due to writers as it is to readers from different times, places and perspectives, who are constantly reinterpreting books and giving them new life. I would like to believe that is one reason for my book’s popularity. Linked to this idea is the fact that many readers, when learning about literature classes in Tehran through my book, discovered a new way of relating to a people who they felt they had very little in common with. This shared passion for literature provided a mutual space, connecting a young girl who had never left the Islamic Republic to, say, a woman in the United States or Italy who had never visited Iran. This common passion became a means of communication and empathy between seemingly different cultures and peoples.

A second reason for the unexpected popularity of Reading Lolita in Tehran is, I believe, the fact that it provided an alternative view of Iran to the dominant political one. The main characters in the book were not the political elite but ‘ordinary’ people who, through their creative resistance to repression, demonstrated that while their leaders can be very banal and predictable, they, on the other hand, are not so ordinary after all.

In general, the book hasn’t fared particularly well in our multimedia age. Why, in your opinion, should we read? Why is it important?

No experience can be simply replaced by another. New means of communication should complement and not eliminate the unique means we already have at our disposal; they should help broaden our horizons and sharpen our senses rather than diminish them. Reading a book has an important physical component to it that is both tactile and visual and cannot be recreated through the virtual reality of the Internet (for example) which minimizes the actuality and intimacy required by the act of reading books. Like the separate imaginative worlds they contain, books gain a character and specificity of their own through the ways each reader treats them. Because of this physicality they become an organic part of our actual world, both public and private. For me, a world without books is a world that is mutilated and orphaned beyond hope.

Reading is an exchange, a constant conversation between the reader, the text and the writer. It is a way of interpreting and connecting to the world. We read because of our urge to know, because we are curious about others and aspects of ourselves that we have little knowledge of. Through this curiosity we gain the empathy that defines us as human. While reading is a private and intimate act it also becomes a way of connecting and empathizing with those we have never seen; it makes it possible for us to belong to a community of invisible interlocutors who engage us in endless conversations, constantly providing us with new experiences.

One of the themes in Reading Lolita in Tehran is exile: your sense of being an Iranian exile in the US, but also of being alienated by your own country after the revolution. Where is home for you? And what meaning does the word hold for you – is it the place you were born, or does it refer to something less tangible?

I learnt very early in life how fragile what goes by the name of ‘home’ could be. Revolution and the war are only the extreme examples of that fragility. The place I was born in will, in one sense, always be my home, but the only way I can preserve it is through memory – and the best way to preserve that memory is through language and literature. I have learnt to rely only on what Nabokov has called the secret of ‘durable pigments’; that which can be preserved through the portable home we create out of our memories and imagination. In that portable home, none of us will define ourselves by our given identities: nationality, geography, race, religion, class or gender. This is the home I feel most at home in.

You’ve said that you’re interested in ‘how we retrieve through writing, through imagination, what we lose’. What did you lose in Iran?

I lost my parents, friends, students and the land that I had been born in. But I also discovered that because nothing endures, and because we are constantly betrayed by time, loss is at the heart of life. Real loss is when we forget; I agree with Tzvetan Todorov that, ‘Only total oblivion calls for total despair’. One reason we write is to resist and to protest the inevitable sense of loss and despair that comes with the realization of life’s transience.

Can you describe what effect taking the veil had on you?

Because the veil has become such a politically charged issue I would like to reaffirm that for me – as for many Iranians – the issue of the veil is not about whether it is good or bad. That belongs to the domain of free debate and discussion. I also believe we cannot argue against a person’s religious beliefs if they do not harm others. But in countries like Iran, the veil symbolizes the confiscation of religion and its use as an ideology to control the citizens. In Iran, the state took the veil and imposed it on Muslims and non-Muslims alike, in the same way that communist China or the Soviet Union imposed a uniformity of appearance upon their citizens. That is why so many women who had worn the veil before the revolution objected to the state using it for its political purposes; for them this protest was not against the veil. It was about the freedom of choice.

For me, the imposition became a symbol of the state’s attempt to redefine and reshape me in its own image, denying my individuality and personal integrity. In one sense, through confiscating religion, the state has taken away the rights of both those women who wore the veil because of their faith and those who did not wish to wear it. One of the worst results of such an attempt is that the victims become complicit in the crime committed against them: for traditional Muslim women, their veil became a political and not a religious sign. For those who did not believe in wearing the veil it meant accepting a lie, participating in a lie, becoming a lie.

In Iran, exposing your girls to ‘illicit’ literature, and creating a space in which to discuss it, put them in danger. Was this something that troubled you?

The kind of danger you mention was part of our daily life. When we were most ‘ourselves’ – acting the way that we wanted to, listening to music, having parties, watching the forbidden videos and films – we became dangerous, and therefore punishable. Our class was not political; its subversive nature was defined by our attempt to create an atmosphere in which we retrieved what we lacked in public, open spaces and open relations. It was an assertion that life had not stopped because the state had ordered it to. This existential resistance to the imposition of power is also one of the most potent ways of resisting tyranny. It is much easier for the state to arrest and destroy political groups, but how can it arrest and eliminate millions of citizens, those who resist through being who they are?

Your book reveals the dangers of using religion as ideology. When you look around the world today, particularly the Middle East, do you fear that this danger is only increasing?

I do see the dangers of the abuse of religion as ideology which has lead to the current politicization and polarization of private and civil spaces. But that does not mean that I am without hope. I agree with Hannah Arendt that even in the most repressive societies our hope rests with the endless potential of human beings to find creative and inventive ways of resistance. Iran is a good example of this: after 27 years of ideological rule and repression, the young Iranians, the children of the revolution and the old revolutionaries, the former ardent Islamists share the same passion for an open and secular society. They have realized that the only way to create such a society is not only through a change of the regime but a change of minds, and that democratic goals can only be realized through democratic means. I am hopeful because for the majority of people, the urge to resist repression is not merely political but existential.

After you were first sent away from Iran, aged 13, you say that it was ‘the point to which all my desires and dreams returned’. But in post-revolutionary Iran, where did your dreams and desires go? To another country, as Nassrin’s did? Or to somewhere interior?

I greatly appreciate my present life in a generous country that has provided me with the opportunity to express myself freely; we need that openness in order to fulfill and articulate our interior world. But that does not mean I have no criticism of this other world, or do not feel restless living in it. Freedom, like happiness, is never achieved; it is always pursued from one stage to another. For this reason my main source of nourishment and strength is that interior space.

Did you benefit from having an inspirational teacher when you were growing up?

My first teacher was my father. He told my brother and me stories from the moment we could understand them and rewarded us with books. My best childhood memories belong to the time he made up stories with me or told me stories. Another early influence was my husky-voiced, cigarette-smoking English teacher, Mrs Weaver, when I first came to England.

Have you visited any book groups yourself since Reading Lolita in Tehran’s publication?

Yes! I had no idea about the range and potential of book groups until I published this book. I learnt many things through my exchanges with them – including the fact that my class in Tehran was one! I believe we need to create subversive book groups everywhere, including the academy. The idea that groups of people put aside a portion of their time to simply enjoy books is a fantastic one that can be turned into a subversive activity against the reigning imaginative and intellectual dementia.

When you left Iran you moved to a society where literature is more marginal. Do you have any ideas as to why this is the case?

As Bellow reminds us, in repressive societies brutality and banality are obvious and tangible but in democratic societies what threatens us is ‘our sleeping consciousness’ and the ‘atrophy of feeling’. Within these societies imagination and thought, like freedom, can be taken too much for granted. It is easier to live in a hazy forgetfulness, where a form of tabloid intellectualism and reliance on sound bites replace the challenges of imagination. Thought and imagination demand from us that we take risks, to pose not just the world but ourselves as question marks. They become marginalized by the smugness that shuns thought and questioning, the polarization and politicization that represses debate and genuine political interaction, the commercialism and lazy mentality that chooses short cuts and ready-made solutions.

Can you describe your life now – what’s changed since you left Iran?

Now I feel more in control and, in a sense, more fulfilled. But our past never goes away; both the nightmares and the dreams have remained with me. Nor do I wish to forget them. Forgetting would mean negating experiences that – despite the pain and the anguish, or because of them – have been so central to the shaping of my life. What I value is the new freedom to express both the nightmares and the dreams, the space through which I can have conversations about them openly and without fear.

Are you still in touch with ‘your girls’?

I have been in touch with most of them. My book in fact has provided me with the opportunity to reconnect to my other students as well.

You seem drawn to write from a place where fiction and reality meet. Can you talk a little about why this is the case?

Well, perhaps the most obvious reason is the fact that literature is a meeting and a confrontation between imagination and reality, a manner of retrieving and rearranging reality. I am curious about how this relationship works. Fiction’s influence on reality is invisible and intangible but essential. How can fiction open the spaces that reality closes to us? How dangerous is it when we replace reality with fiction, when we impose our fictions upon reality? What does the inability to produce genuine works of fiction imply about our inability to cope with reality?  These are some of the questions I constantly return to.

Read more about literary classics – old and new:

• Moby Redux by author Leviathan, Philip Hoare
• Mark Johnson’s Secret Weapon, Le Grand Meaulnes
• Netherland
• Has The Catcher in the Rye lost it’s importance?
• Press Books: Publisher of the Noughties

So there you have it.  After months of speculation, the bandying about of countless names and an almost endless stream of media hype, the iPad has arrived.  Boasting a 9.7 inch screen, it has all the simplicity of the iPhone with a whole lot more functionality: a cross between a laptop and smartphone, it runs all the apps available on the iPhone and will surely be yet another fillip for developers’ coffers.

The basic device will cost $499 (just over £300) in the US and should be available across the world by July.  But what will this new mystical device mean for publishing?

It’ll almost certainly offer us a central point of distribution for e-books – or iBooks as Jobs would have it – a one stop virtual bookshelf.  With the absence of Random House, almost all major world trade publishers have struck a deal with Apple to sell their books in the new iTunes bookstore.  Those that haven’t will surely be scrambling to do so as of today.  This is how Apple would like us to see things: with them as the go-to store for e-books of every description, effectively a cicumlocution of all other e-readers.

But let’s not label it a Kindle-killer just yet.  Some reviewers have lamented that the backlit screen doesn’t come close to emulating the e-ink of Amazon’s competitor product.  That said, it does have a lot more to offer in terms of the general multimedia experience – a point in which the Kindle is sadly lacking.  The new larger screen allows the iPad to present itself as perfect platform for video and games material a point on which Jobs was strangely silent in his speech.

Further, having another big beast alongside Amazon and Google cannot be a bad thing, a point Steve Jobs sought to underline when unveiling the product.  125 million people worldwide have one-click buying with Apple, and this sort of market – even if we reach only a small part of it – has to be a good thing for publishers.  And with the competititve price point – relatively low for one of Apple’s new releases – Apple have sought to place themselves right at the centre of the e-reader market.

Only time will tell whether or not this represents the  publishing industry’s ‘iPod moment’, but Jobs et al have given us the perfect platform from which to experiment in the future,and probably made software developers fantastically happy in the process.

Read more Digital Diary entries:

• Clash of the Techno-Titans: Nexus One versus iSlate
• Time Out’s city guides
• Duck Duck Moose iPhone app
• The Zehnseiten app

2009 was most definitely the year of the iPhone, with publishers and other media outlets alike all competing for their slice of the iStore pie. With rapid technological advancement this could all have changed by the end of 2010, but for now the iStore remains the first place to launch new smartphone content. In recognition of this, in the first of a series of pieces, Digital Diary will look at how different publishers have sought to grapple with the new platform – and what sort of content they have launched off the back of it.

Penguin kicked off the new year by offering loss-leading excerpts from the e-book version of Paul Hoffmann’s haunting novel The Left Hand of God – which plays out in a Mervyn Peake-esque imaginary world stuffed with absolutely terrifying characters. Perhaps because of the genre, this loss-leader concept seems to have served them well as a means of attracting new readers to the novel – with countless reviewers who claim to not normally buy Penguin books saying that they clicked through from the app. It’ll be interesting to see how it pans out with other texts.

Alongside this new foray into suck-in iBooks, Penguin also seem to have recognised the huge marketing potential of the iPhone. Their umbrella app – last updated in late Novemeber – seeks to update readers regularly on Penguin release and upcoming titles, therein building their fan base. Potential click-through is always in mind though, with a stylised shopping trolley on each page.

With genre-specific searching and the weekly Penguin podacst, readers are able to move throughout Penguin’s content. The app itself – with a free price point reflecting its status as a marketing platform – is largely concentrated on Penguin US at the moment, though it does have numerous reviews of books published in the UK.

While it remains to be seen whether publishers will be able to develop the sort of brand loyalty seen in other industries, these are intriguing new ways of engaging with readers.

Read more Digital Diary entries:

• Clash of the Techno-Titans: Nexus One versus iSlate
• Time Out’s city guides
• Duck Duck Moose iPhone app
• The Zehnseiten app

Anyone interested in the ongoing debate about ebooks and how (or whether) to enhance them may be interested in this site:

What are books? 

We feel passionately drawn to them.  We fall in love with them.  But a book is usually nothing more than text on paper.  Sometimes there are pictures, perhaps even a few maps.  The constraints of book technology rule out anything more.

Until now.

At Book Drum, we believe even the most wonderful books can be enhanced through selective use of the images, sounds, video and information available on the Web. 

Isn’t Captain Corelli’s Mandolin all the more moving when you can listen to the music the Captain plays on his beloved Antonia?  Aren’t John Harrison’s inventions more impressive when you can see the actual mechanisms described in Longitude?  And don’t videos about the Taliban and kite fighting in Kabul add depth to a reading of The Kite Runner?

The idea of outsourcing the job of enhancement, wikipedia-style, to a willing community of avid book-lovers is certainly a novel one (geddit? groan). In fact, it’s sort of genius  - putting the emphasis of providing additional material back on the book fans not only saves time and money, it increases the likelihood of choosing material the  core community of book readers would like.

Book Drum is currently hosting a tournament “for writers and editors all over the English-speaking world to help us assemble a collection of Profiles that illustrate and illuminate great books.” Sound like fun? Click here to pick your favourite and find out how to enter.

Meanwhile stay tuned for announcements and exclusives from our own forays into the world of book enhancement.

Read more about digital publishing:

• The Future of Publishing
• Long live the Tablet
• HarperCollins Books on the Nintendo DS

The Christmas of 2009 was like nothing ever before seen in the industry. On Christmas day, ebook sales from Amazon.com outsold physical books. Perhaps this, combined with the fact  that we are at the start of the first week in a new decade, is behind the waves of bloggers and commentators taking a moment to peek into their crystal ball to try to predict what publishing will look like in the future.

Richard Curtis predicts that

At least one major publishing company will be acquired by a retailer. For instance (and this is NOT a prediction, just a for-instance), Amazon could acquire Random House or Apple could buy Simon & Schuster.

I don’t know whether this would be a good or bad thing for the industry as a whole, but Curtis certainly makes a convincing argument for how this could bring stability to the publisher in question.

Meanwhile, over on Brave New World, the involvement of Google is viewed as a major deciding factor in the future of  publishing, regardless of the success of their book settlement.

A while back, we did our own survey of predictions by industry insiders for a feature entitled Publishing in 2025. To read what MD of Press Books, John Bond; Peter Collingridge, MD of Apt Studio and Enhanced Editions; and Scott Pack, Publisher of The Friday Project, as well as many others, think the future of publishing will look like, click on the links below.

Publishing in 2025

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

After a short break to visit the HC Warehouse in Glasgow, Sam Hancock is back again this week, looking at the latest developments in digital publishing.

With the runaway success of Lonely Planet’s digitized guides firmly in their sights -  the LP’s language guides, despite offering only 600 words and not a great deal of interactivity, have repeatedly reached the top 20 paid travel apps ranking – Time Out have begun launching their range of city travel guides as apps.

The first app – initially only covering New York – has married mapping from Google with Time Out’s own extensive content, offering a constantly-updated guide to the city.  The app manages to be both highly simplistic and very effective: using the iPhone’s GPS in combination with the myriad reviews and listings Time Out have to offer on a city’s cultural landscape.

Interestingly, the Time Outers have offered up their app for free – attempting to draw out a strong dividing line between themselves and Lonely Planet.  For more discerning customers – read those with a thicker wallet – the app offers a ‘Critics Choice’ filter, whilst those looking to get more for their dollar can make use of the ‘Free and Cheap’ criterion.  Other added features are the ability to send recommendations to friends and the fact that the app works even when you’re not connected.

Whilst the graphics aren’t great and Time Out are hardly going to blow the world away with their functionality, they have crossed one big hurdle: combining mapping data with creative content and have thus outdone LP on this front – time will tell who’ll be more successful.

Anyone watching the X factor on Saturday would have caught this during the advert break - a pretty funny iPhone parody advertising The Sun newspaper.

I thought I’d repost it here for those among you who didn’t manage to catch the live XFactor final. And although I’m sure you wouldn’t dream of judging me for this concession to low-brow entertainment, perhaps you should read this brilliant article in Sunday’s Guardian blog, comparing the Costa Prize to that same television show:

On closer inspection, there are many aspects of posh culture that are, essentially, X Factor Redux. The imminent Costa prize, for example, is a literary event of some consequence. This year it will pit Hilary Mantel against Colm Tóibín. You might think you could hardly get more exalted. Yet the grammar of Costa’s sponsorship and presentation would be utterly familiar to Cheryl Cole.

Is this the future of magazine publishing? And if so, what does it mean for books?

Meanwhile, PC World, in their article ‘The Apple Tablet is Dead’ speculates :

the Apple tablet is a mirage created by legions of fanboys and tech dreamers. The closer you get to that mirage, the more you realize it’s not going to be there when you arrive. But then, off in the distance, an even brighter and more beautiful tablet is envisioned for a day that will never come. It’s a nice dream, but it’s just not going to happen.

Whatever the truth of the matter, it makes sense – to me at least – not to get too hung up on iphone applications for books, when a bigger, better, friendlier reading (and multimedia) experience could be just around the corner. Price will be the deciding factor – if the Apple Tablet is going to retail at the sub £500 price point, it could be a game changer. After all, this is only about the same that most people pay for their iphones on contract over a year. Sports Illustrated and Conde Nast with their rumoured tablet version of Wired are ahead of the game with this one.

Following on from Sam’s Digital Diary post yesterday, I thought I’d share this.

The concept, dreamed up by Mobile Art Labs, Japan, is the perfect solution to the problem of the Iphone being too small for tiny child hands. But the real gem here is how technology is used to add value to books, and keep kids interested in them, rather than setting itself up in opposition to them.

As the website explains,

The keyword of Phone Book is “Analog on the Digital Technology”; it combines digital value of iPhone and analogue advantage of books.

It’s true, there are some things the book is better suited for. In our technological excitement, it seems that we sometimes forget that the book is perfect in many ways. If it were a riddle, it would seem nigh impossible to fit so much information in such a small space. That was before microchips, though.

In a month which has seen a huge profileration of apps aimed at children – presumably a result of many parents recognising the calming qualities of their handy multi-media smartphone – one app has taken off spectacularly: Duck Duck Moose’s ‘Wheels on the Bus’. 

So much so, in fact, that its developer – the Duck Duck Moose Partnership – has released another two apps to sit alongside their runaway seller, an Old Macdonald app and Itsy Bitsy Spider version – the developer’s latest offering.

Hot off the back of an Apple Staff recommendation, the app has attracted rave reviews from the likes of the New York Times and U.S.A Today.  A musical book, based on the perennially popular song, Duck Duck Moose’s ‘Wheels on the Bus’ creation manages to be both incredible fun and a valid educational tool at the same time.  Alongside a recording facility, the book app allows playback in five different languages, squeezing more educational value in just for good measure.  ‘Itsy Bitsy’, the latest installment, asserts to offer more interactivity and more educational value, with a fly acting as a tutor teaching children about nature and the environment.

Ultimately, the success of these apps has thrown the playing field wide open for developers and publishers alike, confirming a market which many had long thought existed: parents looking to use the iPhone as a means of entertaining/pacifiying their children, in much the same way as a childrens’ book long has.

In a fortnight that witnessed another outpouring of apps, app related paraphenalia, and plenty more products masquerading as apps, one set sticks out amongst the rest for its simplistic brilliance: the Wallace and Gromit Digital Comics series produced by Titan Publishing.

The set comprises one free app and four paid offerings (’The W Files’; ‘Parts and Labour’; ‘Big in Japan’; and ‘Where there’s Muck there’s Brass,’ respectively), all launched to celebrate the 20th birthday of the plasticine pair.

The free comic – transparently named ‘The W Files’, sees everyone’s favourite crackpot inventor and his canine friend come up against a group of alien interlopers.  Public spirited as ever – the pair set off in search of the aliens, kitted out with Wallace’s various bizzare contraptions, only to be mistaken for aliens themselves and interviewed by the military staff of ‘Unitwit’. 

The comic comes complete with all the accoutrements one might expect: thinly veiled parodic episodes, brilliantly understated lines and slapstick humour.  The app’s creators have taken advantage of the new promotional pricing function of the App Store with ‘The W-Files’- making it available free for a limited time.   The others – which offer variously a glimpse into Wallace’s mad world of inventions, a trip to Japan and a misguided attempt by Wallace to bring brass music back to the local community – are available at the lowest priced tier of £0.59.

Developed by Titan Publishing, the apps are amongst the first in a long line of comic book and graphic novel releases – a frenzy that looks set to throw up more exciting creative content.  Watch this space.

Starting this week, Sam Hancock will be joining us to in the form of a weekly column, DigitalDiary – frontline reportage from the cutting edge of digital technology. Each week he will explore one new, big digital idea in the realm of publishing. First up: The Zehnseiten App

With The Bookseller talking about an ‘explosion in the number of apps’ available for the iPhone, and Apple’s device starting to be taken seriously as a challenger to Amazon’s Kindle, a small German start-up has set the running with the cross-publisher project ‘Zehnseiten.’

Brought to the world from the depths of Bavaria, Zehnseiten (ten pages), have combined the iPhone platform with that most traditional mainstay of publishing publicity – the public reading, presenting authors reading the first ten pages of their works, filmed in black and white and with only a glass of water for company.

The app’s brilliantly user-friendly layout and simple biographies mean that they largely succeed in their aim of giving both author and book centrality, ‘in a measured fashion.’  The aim, presumably, it to whet the reading public’s appetite for these new works – spurring them on to buy the whole physical product in response.  The paradoxical result is that the audio-visual mastery of the iPhone brings the words on the page back to centre stage.

Impressively, the app’s developers have managed to secure the involvement of a cross-section of publishers, from big names such as Suhrkamp – Herman Hesse’s publisher and the publishing house that brought T.S.Eliot to German speakers, to the old East German publisher Aufbau which in its heyday published greats such as Christa Wolf – to smaller niche publishers, such as the Swiss imprint Sanssoucci.  It’s range of authors is also extensive, covering the evocative migrant literature of Rafik Schami to the satirical non-fiction of Christoph Süβ.

Though the future looks bright for Zehnseiten, the app does have its draw backs – constructed entirely with flash, you can’t link to specific extracts; access too, can be painfully slow.  And, conspicuously lacking an English-language section, it’s difficult to see the app’s plucky developers making waves outsides of German speaking Europe.  But with their unusual combination of the multimedia functions of the iPhone app with the monochrome of the traditional public reading, Zehnseiten have kicked the app race off with something quite special.

October 2009 sees the publication of Phyllida Law’s wildly inventive Notes to my Mother-in-Law.  The book explores Phyllida’s relationship with her husband’s mother through a series of notes she began leaving for the elderly woman after her hearing started to deteoriate. The notes became a kind found poetry.

Found poets, such as Phyllida, who take words or phrases from one arena of life and reframe them as poetry or literature, have a sort of alchemistic power to transform the daily and banal simply by changing the context. These notes – which began as a practicality – are more than the sum of their parts: when viewed together they reveal powerful truths about  the complexity of human conversation. By keeping Annie, her mother-in-law, in the loop about the day to day goings on, Phyllida is able to give voice to the now silenced hustle and bustle of family life.

These notes become the bread and butter of the older woman’s existence and reveal what we always suspect, that what keeps us alive and relevant is communication – a lesson never more powerfully realised than in our increasing reliance on the plugged-in world of instant message, chat, and Twitter.

But this found poetry is at one end of the spectrum – these notes were written by the author for a deliberate purpose -  sometimes to comfort, sometimes to cheer, sometimes just to catch up – and all the while their artifice is undeniably intentional, they were notes intended to be read (just not – initially – by us.)

The full spectrum of found poetry encompasses a whole range of less carefully constructed work, including tickets, receipts, love letters, shopping lists, speeches, post cards and notes. The ‘author’ may not have intended them to be read, especially not read in the realm of poetry.

But does this kind of found poetry have any real worth – or is just one post-modernist joke? Its roots can be found in that most notorious trickster, Marcel Duchamp, and his objets trouvés. 

This sculpture, for example, entitled ‘The Fountain’, sees a urinal placed out of context to give it a new meaning. At its most basic, this is the essence of ‘found art.’

Davy Rothbart, founder of FOUND Magazine, certainly thinks it does have worth. The publication collects and catalogues ‘FOUND stuff: love letters, birthday cards, kids’ homework, to-do lists, ticket stubs, poetry on napkins, telephone bills, doodles’ and publishes them in an irregularly-issued magazine, in books, and on its website. The point? To get ‘a glimpse into someone else’s life. Anything goes…’ The project clearly taps into something in the Zeitgeist, as Rothbart has never been short on material – the majority of which is submitted by readers.

What often struck me about the work in Found was that the writing seemed truer to life than a best novel’s fiction – as well it should - and that there was no faking this sort of rawness. The same quality is palpable in Phyllida’s collection – the words just rings true.

Here are a couple of examples of work from FOUND magazine:

Slate magazine found poetry in the words Donald Rumsfeld, such as these below (although I suspect they added the titles):

The Unknown

As we know,

There are known knowns.

There are things we know we know.

We also know

There are known unknowns.

That is to say

We know there are some things

We do not know.

But there are also unknown unknowns,

The ones we don’t know

We don’t know.

—Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing

 

The Digital Revolution

Oh my goodness gracious,

What you can buy off the Internet

In terms of overhead photography!

A trained ape can know an awful lot

Of what is going on in this world,

Just by punching on his mouse

For a relatively modest cost!

—June 9, 2001, following European trip

By calling this ‘poetry’ Slate seems to be drawing a parrelel between vaguesness in bad poetry and the obtuseness in Rumsfeld speeches.  The poetry here is being found ironically – by transposing them from the realm of rhethoric to the poetic Slate intends to expose their lack of substance.

This poetry from William Carlos Williams apes the style of found poetry, and also has something in common with Phyllida’s collection – taking on the form of a fridge note.

This Is Just To Say
by William Carlos Williams
I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox and which you were probably saving for breakfast Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold

The appearance of the thing being hastily written, thrown together belies the craft and artifice of the piece. Does this make it less truthful than Phyllida’s genuine notes? Or are there some kind of truths that are better contained within poetic form?

I tried to think of some times in my life when I’ve come across ‘found poetry.’  These two are probably the best I can think of:

Doomsday

 

I found this on the fridge one morning and falsely assumed it was a warning of the apocalypse that would be brought about by large rodent-headed terror bearers. It was in fact a note from my mum advising when to expect Pest Control.

No Class

This was a genuine part of my university syllabus. I summarised it into this Haiku.

Idealism

Week Five: a basic

Intro to Karl Marx. Week Six:

Reading Week. No Class.

In conclusion, found poetry is oft debated and much disputed, even on occasion, bringing charges of laziness and plagiarism to bear upon the artist. But are found poets really that different to any other – whose supreme talent it could be argued lies not so much in their ability to render the world afresh with their own particular vision but in their incitefulness – and their gift to see the truth and profundity in day-to-day life that others miss.

Why not send in your examples of found poetry. The best will win a copy of Notes to my Mother-in-Law and one other book published by Press Books this month.

Here are some tips for ‘finding poetry’… Please feel free to add your own in the comments box:

• Translations. Try putting a sentence into Babelfish – translating it into Chinese and then back into English – you might find more poetry than you intend.
• Pads in shops used for testing pens – the automatic writing these inspire often leads to unexpected and amazing revelations.
• And of course, the perennial favourite – notes left on the fridge.

Over the weekend the iPhone came to Britain – and we announced our own mobile publishing initiative.

We’ve made fifteen of our newest titles available on Apple’s hottest gadget. Along with sample chapters to read, there’s also plenty of audio and a few interviews too, and you can find it all at http://mobile.harpercollins.co.uk.

Wild statements seem to fly thick and fast in the brave new world of the eBook. End of the Page! Print is dead! The ecstatic tone of more than a few press features suggests the whole ebook debate is just one long shoot-out between print and screen – that the entire discussion boils down to one (meaningless) question: “Which is better?”

A shame, really – because it means the book trade has been led into some fairly pointless comparisons. Can you put ebooks on a shelf? Can you make them smell of paper? Most often, and most persistent: can you read them in the bath? If e-books aren’t definitely ‘as good’ as paperbacks – so the current wisdom goes – there can be little point in them at all.

The British launch of the iphone offers a somewhat different perspective. It’s striking to notice that the device’s menu offers single touch access to two of the largest banks of entertainment on the planet. One tap on the screen brings up YouTube’s enviable mountain of free video. Another tap pulls up iTunes — not only delivering music but now movies, games and educational materials. Despite its shortcomings, the iPhone really does offer a glimpse of a completely new way of consuming all kinds of content.

The iPhone — and the new iPod — are just the first in a new wave of devices and services that within a few years will see consumers look instinctively to their pockets for instant entertainment and information. Suddenly the ebook question seems less about ‘fixing’ something that isn’t broken, and more about making sure that the book industry can take a proper stake in a rapidly shifting media world – in which the public might prove increasingly averse to products that aren’t available ‘on demand’; in which media companies of all description will be able to serve their wares directly into the pockets of their customers.

The music, film and gaming industries are all lining up to serve travellers in the very same airports, train stations and tube carriages that the book world has always owned — and directly into the hands of those members of the public now less and less likely to visit bookshops.

Book content might not seem to make the digital transition as easily, or as obviously, as the movies and music of competing media. But if the book world is late to this party, wont publishers and authors have more to worry about than dropping their e-readers in the bath?

Thanks to James, over at BookTwo, for heralding the imminent European arrival of this strange beast — the QR code.

QR codes are barcodes designed to be read by the camera in your mobile phone. Hover over the image, and the phone identifies the information within — perhaps a short text or an internet link, or even an instruction to your mobile to fetch a download or ring a phone number. In Japan, these codes are already cropping up in the most mundane places: on business cards; in ad campaigns; even on McDonald’s wrappers.

But could you use it in a book? A code like this might certainly offer easy access to all sorts of complimentary materials that can’t be put on paper. Watch video of the author; read the latest reviews or responses from other readers; listen to the calls of all the birds pictured in your spotter’s guide, as one example. All direct to your mobile — and all without the hassle of laboriously thumbing in a web address.

And for the cannier publishers, here perhaps is a new way to sell books: using a code printed on the inside cover, it’s not impossible to imagine readers ordering another title from their favourite author the moment they finish a book – all with a click of their camera phone.

In the Far East, many phones are now sold with a code reader built in: for now, adventurous readers in the West will have to download a free programme here. Try it out for yourself.

For several years all our Perennial paperbacks have contained additional articles about our authors, their books, and their passions — but if paper were no obstacle what else might you want to see? Video? Audio? Web links — or maybe something else entirely?

Many stories have taken place on the streets of San Francisco. Dirty Harry took on the dirtiest cases. Oedipa Mass followed the post horn of the Tristero. Sal Paradise chased Dean Moriarty. But here’s a story that took place literally on the road, if you’ll pardon the pun.

A few months ago a strange story started to appear on the pavements of San Fran. People found themselves following a romance through a series of spray-painted stencils connected to each other by arrows (more photos here). Starting at two different places, the choices made by readers along the way determined whether the romance had a happy or unhappy ending. In a great little twist, the story used the city surroundings as an illustration to accompany each piece of text — a truly immersive tale.

The authors of this sidewalk novella chose initially to remain anonymous, but soon semi-revealed themselves as ‘The Strangers’, two stencil artists who see their work in philanthropic terms; “Part of what we find really interesting about it is it connects people to public space and gets them walking around the neighbourhood and interacting with other people.” Read the full story here.

Whether you see this as vandalism or art, it’s a novel way to tell a story; a ‘choose your own adventure’ short story for the Banksy generation. I’d be fascinated to see this idea taken a step further (and I’ve no doubt somebody somewhere is doing just that), and made even more interactive through the use of something like Grafedia:

“Grafedia is hyperlinked text, written by hand onto physical surfaces and linking to rich media content – images, video, sound files, and so forth. It can be written anywhere – on walls, in the streets, or on sidewalks. Grafedia can also be written in letters or postcards, on the body as tattoos, or anywhere you feel like putting it. Viewers “click” on these grafedia hyperlinks with their cell phones by sending a message addressed to the word + “@grafedia.net” to get the content behind the link.”

Imagine an interactive narrative literally linking the real world, web or mobile content (audio, video, text…) and even, god forbid, a book. What do you think?

Penguin have been in experimental mode recently. They obviously weren’t content with the mash-up of Dickens-style serialisation and the e-commerce of The Glass Book of the Dream Eaters by G.W. Dahlquist. Now they’ve gone one-step further from publication method alone, and opened up the writing of novels themselves to the wiles of digital culture.

Their A Million Penguins project, launched with De Montfort University, is based on the ‘Wiki’ mechanism of collective writing which has seen millions of self-appointed editors and contributors produce the endlessly brilliant, and sometimes controversial, Wikipedia. Rather than writing encyclopedia-style entries however, this project is about the collective production of a novel, and it’s certainly an interesting concept.

Novel-writing has historically been one of the least collaborative processes imaginable. Reaching its full expression during the Romantic period’s veneration of the solitary artist hero, it has been from Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy to Pynchon and McCarthy a grand task played out in what Pascal called “the horror of the empty room”. What Penguin have done is turn that on its head, and try to see if opening up the writing of novels to the unknown masses can produce something of value.

Interesting? Absolutely. Unexpected? Fairly, although many less high-profile organisations have dipped their toe into these mysterious waters. But well conceived in this context? The execution so far suggests something is seriously missing: with hundreds of characters and ever-mutating situations, there is some evident will to impose discipline and order, but the building blocks to do it are hard to place.

It is still early in the process, and something brilliant may emerge, but right now it feels like a Thomas Pynchon book gone horribly wrong: the Chaos (theory) of narrative sequences too elaborate to follow bewildering both reader and wannabe writer. I think that’s simply the case because the novel is the very last medium in which the power of collective wisdom that has driven digital culture can operate.

Storytelling has always been intensively collaborative. All myths and religions, which are the backbone of the art, developed out of iterative telling and re-telling of base materials. The Gods started out as men and became legends through long millennia of Chinese whispers. What happens to that iteration of stories is that at some point it reaches stability. That happens through the codification of diverse beginnings, middles and endings into a commonly accepted version of events.

Entire cultures can hang off this version, from the Fall of Troy in Homer, to the Christian version of the Flood myth that’s found virtually everywhere in the ancient world. From this point of stability new revisions can take place, but they tend to become complexly reactive to those sources, rather than simply ignoring them and starting again, as the example of Joyce’s Ulysses in relation to Homer’s Odyssey demonstrates.

This process of iterative storytelling that leads inexorably towards stability is something at the core of the Wikipedia project — but it is impossible at this stage to see how it might be introduced into the Penguin version. The endless writing and rewriting of encyclopedia entries by nameless contributors on Wikipedia tends towards an end-point at which the subjective content of opinion is removed and pure fact remains. Everyone’s heard the stories of people slandered on Wikipedia — what not everyone’s heard is that these are filtered out over time to leave a body of diverse reference materials behind matchless in the history of publishing.

How can that happen in novel-writing though, where there is no “fact” to tend towards? A culture can accept a myth as true, but how can a website audience except an invented story as final without some central voice that says, “it’s finished”, or even “this is what the story will be?”. Wikipedia will never be finished, because the truth is always changing — a story has to stop at some point, sometime.

Could it work? What’s missing from this process is something both the Ancient Greeks, and more recently software development practises have found to be vital: the focus-imposing pressure of competition. Sophocles, Euripides and Aeschylus come down the pipes of history because they won writing competitions — in a hot-house X-Factor atmosphere of the festivals of Dionysus they competed with others to be the main act. They won because they were the best, and fighting off others made them better. Similarly, one of the best ever uses of the internet is TopCoder, which sets programming tasks for high-value prizes from highly-skilled competitors.

Competition works, and A Million Penguins badly need it. As William C. Taylor and Polly LaBarre lay out in their brilliant Mavericks at Work, the Open Source culture which produced Wikipedia is served very well by the survivalist strategies of the marketplace: the best man or woman wins and produces better work by being placed head to head with others. HarperCollins in the States have profited from this through their Avon Fanlit writing competitions. Simplifying the entry process and raising the stakes for submitters, has argubaly produced work of a higher standard than Penguins bold conceptual effort can match.

It is ironic that Penguin has invested in Wiki culture at this moment, because the inventor of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, is currently organising a “publication” that may be amongst the most important to yet emerge from the internet age. Wikipedia itself has always been limited by being a new version of an encyclopedia concept with roots in Diderot and the Enlightenment era. That concept of single articles about single subjects never quite harnesses the full power of the internet in the way that Google and the Search Engines have done. So Jimmy Wales has decided to take on the power of search head on with the Wikia project currently in development. As he has boldly put it:

Search is part of the fundamental infrastructure of the Internet. And, it is currently broken.

Why is it broken? It is broken for the same reason that proprietary software is always broken: lack of freedom, lack of community, lack of accountability, lack of transparency. Here, we will change all that

He and those who collaborate with him, will do it through replacing the corporate-controlled algorithms that power Google, Yahoo! and the rest with the power of people-powered information. They aim to increase responsivity, usefulness and confidence in the relevance of results: either grand tasks or just very techy depending on your point of view, but based on definite goals. Maybe it’s not as sexy for us literary types, but if we should laud one project coming out of this culture as changing the definition of what “writing” is, it is this. As a true tale for our times, the rise of Wikia might just be the one most worth hearing as it gets told.

Being a new author, and naïve to the ways of the industry, this week’s great excitement was the arrival of the Photographer to capture the Author’s likeness. I felt about this rather like remote tribes are said to feel — a vague unease suggesting my soul was to be stolen. I hate having my picture taken.

Why? Just about every photograph through my career as a broadcaster has revealed that I am in the wrong profession. Instead of a sensitive but tough-minded journalist, the face beaming back at me from the picture is unmistakeably that of a jolly barmaid.

She often seems a bit tired — I think she probably owns the pub and works long hours — and these days she’s definitely worn around the edges, but you can tell she likes nothing better than downing a couple of babychams and having a laugh over a naughty joke. On a very jolly evening, she might even jump on the bartop and lead the company in a chorus of Down at The Old Bull and Bush, because there’s something just a bit Ealing Comedy about her and her pub, one of those hostelries where the ceiling is nicotine yellow and the soles of your shoes leave the floor with a slight sucking sensation.

Lately she’s had her hair highlighted in that shade known to us Bristolians as Bedminster Blonde, and her bosom requires roughly the same amount of engineering genius to support it as the Clifton Suspension Bridge. She’s a lot of fun and she doesn’t put up with troublemakers — but I’m not sure she’s ever read a book.

The trouble is that regardless of the evidence in the mirror every day, I persist in thinking of myself as a thin, dark-eyed, soulful type. I know I’m not, in fact never have been — at no time in the history of the known universe did the Mills bum squeeze itself into anything smaller than a size 14 pair of jeans, and to be truthful it doesn’t even manage that now. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t particularly want to be thin, certainly not enough anyway to suffer to become so — but actual jeans size is irrelevant because I know my soul is that of a thin woman. Until I look at a photo, that is, and find the Changeling Pint-Puller grinning back.

Jolly Barmaid was, surprisingly, an asset in my broadcasting career. I would turn up to do an interview and people would be lulled into a false sense of security. I’m sure that’s why so many were prepared to pour their hearts out. (“How do you do it?” asked a friend when I came back from recording a rather moving chat with the actor George Lazenby. “Dammit, you even made James Bond cry.”)

But to return to the question of the Author Photograph — clearly we needed to call time, gentlemen, please, on Jolly Barmaid. No way could I allow her on the cover of Crow Stone for strangers to say: blimey, how did she write this? Although the narrator Kit can find humour in the grimmest circumstances, it does end up very dark indeed.

No, I had to find a photographer so brilliant he would allow my Inner Soulfulness to emerge, instead of carelessly snapping away and catching me giggling at all the wrong moments. Besides, I had my Instructions. “Mysterious,” said Annabel, my editor. “Moody. Atmospheric. Remember, the book jacket will be black and gold.”

So earlier this week a very nice man called Charlie Hopkinson turned up. “Black leather coat, I think,” he said. “Smile? Of course you don’t have to smile. Writers don’t, usually.”

Not smiling is harder than you think. The very first photo Charlie took, I was grinning like a hyena, Jolly Barmaid yo-ho-hoing from my eyes in spite of a trip to the hairdressers to tone down the highlights and give me a more sober, writerly appearance. It didn’t help that in the middle of autumn’s rainiest week, Charlie had somehow brought the sunshine with him. We spotted some abandoned railway tracks and a looming, black brick warehouse. Charlie led me through mud and knee high brambles — that took the smile off my face as I realised what it was doing to my suede boots. In the next few pictures, Jolly Barmaid metamorphosed into Rosa Klebb, part-time concentration camp guard, with tight lips and a mad hostile stare. “You’re scaring me,” said Charlie.

The problem, as Frances Wilson wrote last year in a Guardian article about author photographs, and why they should be abolished altogether, is that women have no clear role models in this department. “Male authors, like dentists, should be both trusted and feared…the face is crevassed with shadow, propped up on a fist, the brow furled…We have almost no idea what a generic female author should look like, short of wearing a mob cap like Jane Austen.”

Oh how true. I knew what I didn’t want to look like — J.B. — but who to aspire to? I’ve worked in television and I know that what a woman looks like there is, depressingly, a factor in her eventual success. You don’t actually have to be young — witness how many articles the Daily Mail runs on icons like Felicity Kendal at sixty — but you’d damn well better look well-preserved.

I really wanted the smooth sculpted loveliness (alas, unattainable) of a Zadie Smith, but should I aim towards a UK version of Patricia Cornwell’s groomed, ageless gloss? Unattainable as well, I decided, unless I employed the services of an image consultant and a TV make-up artist. Interestingly, one of my television friends tried to persuade me to do exactly that, and I really was tempted, but then I realised it might be seen as a bit sad. Besides, he worked for Casualty, so I could have ended up with a bleeding wound and a bruise or two — appropriate, but not flattering.

Luckily Charlie proved to be rather clever at his job, and by Location 3 I had stopped worrying so much what I looked like, and was concentrating instead on what he told me to do. “Turn your head to the right, collar up, sweep that strand of hair off your face — now hold the position but let your eyes look into the lens…” If I thought at all about anything, I remembered what Kit in the novel says about looking at Gary: “There are miles of tunnels in that look.”

As Annabel remarked when she saw the pictures: “Not a jolly barmaid in sight.” Vanity is served, my best friends will still recognise me, and the Author will gaze intensely at her readers from the back flap, not hostile, not mad, not grinning inanely, but looking as if she might actually have written the book.

So why did I get so het up? Does it really matter? Afterwards, Mally in Publicity came up with the Guardian article — not a hint, I hope, that everyone at HC thinks I’m a pain in the ass about having my picture taken — and I found myself wondering whether Frances Wilson is right to call for the abolition of author pictures.

Are we moving into an era where the way a writer looks really will determine her ability to sell? (Not, I think, his ability, but then I am an old-fashioned feminist — that’s Ms. Mills, please – and therefore historically jaundiced in my view.)

I do hope not. It’s bad enough for female authors to know Posh and Jordan can outsell us, admitting to have read nothing much heavier than Hello magazine since they left school.

But one of the cheering things about publishing — unless I am being very unperceptive — is that nobody seems to give a toss about age. In television, you are effectively dead once you reach 35, and I have grown used to being treated like a walking corpse. It was a breath of fresh air to realise I certainly wouldn’t be the oldest first-timer ever published, by at least a couple of decades, and even if I can never aspire to join the Best of British Young Novelists, some of those who do are close to if not past their TV sell-by-date. Anyway, didn’t I hear they’ve got a Best of British Wrinkly Novelists list now?

Charlie, trying to make me feel better, I think, or at least prepare me for the fact that he wasn’t going to be bribed to retouch the photos, said: “I’d much rather photograph an older woman. There’s so much more in the face.” He must have seen that didn’t quite do the trick. So he added, bravely: “And read a book by an older writer, too.”

Actually, for me the point is that in writing, age doesn’t matter. It’s the book that counts. I admit I couldn’t have written Crow Stone at twenty, or thirty, but that’s me — late developer in the writing department. Some authors do their best work when young, others grow into it.

But there is still a curiosity to know something more about an author than the book gives away — background, married, kids? Are they like us? Might they even be twin souls? (The answer is probably not on your nelly, but I always hope my favourite authors are the kind of people I’d feel comfortable having a coffee with.) So I can’t quite bring myself to agree with Frances Wilson. I want to know what the writer looks like, though it would never be a determining factor in whether to buy the book.

By the way, anyone who has visited this site before might notice that a certain Jolly Barmaid has done (or is about to do) a vanishing trick. Kate, get that photo of me replaced pronto.

Ed: Righty-ho Jenni, it’s done. Unfortunately, and this is perhaps a worse crime than even the make-up artist on Casualty could enact, it has to be square, so I’ve chopped the top of your head off. Publishers: harsh.
In the interests of doing your photo justice, and for those fans who can’t wait for Crow Stone to appear, here it is, in full:

This weekend I accidentally and very vigorously washed and tumble-dried my 2GB USB stick. The stick is carries most of the digital photo archive for fifthestate, as well as a couple of manuscripts containing my edits, and some open source software, essential for the smooth running of this blog. Of course, it’s absolutely fine, and everything still works perfectly. A normal occurence now, but cast your mind back 3 years and consider the likely effects of a gallon of water and a dose of persil would have on a hard drive.

Whilst I waited for half of fifthestate’s work in progress to finish soapily clanking around behind the glass window of the washing machine, here’s what was spinning though my mind:

Wikipedia on flash memory (as opposed to a conventional hard drive with moving parts):

flash memory is non-volatile, which means that it does not need power to maintain … Another allure of flash memory is that when packaged in a ‘memory card’, it is nearly indestructible by ordinary physical means, being able to withstand intense pressure and boiling water.

One of the most convincing arguments I’ve held in my armoury for the superiority of the physical book is that you can do almost anything to it (drop it, write in it, tear pages out, bang nails into the wall with it) and it survives in a useable form. This is more than you can say for most pieces of prototype hardware designed for e-books, especially if my 1998 laptop is anything to go by.

Well, you’ll still have a long way to convince me that specialised (dedicated) hardware for ebooks is a winner. But times are changing, as anyone with an iPod nano (also uses flash memory, unlike the full size iPod which has a hard drive) will tell you. Electronic media hardware is getting about as robust as a baby elephant. FutureoftheBook have been efficiently tracking this, seemingly since before the days when email replaced letters.

Storage space and volatility no longer such an issue, and battery life improving, we can concentrate on more qualitative barriers to bringing books to a fresh audience, such as conflicting form-factor requirements (Large amounts of text require large screens to be read comfortably, right? While market pressure for portable devices is for them to be smaller…)

So with the stretch of flash improving on an almost daily basis, even the dawn of an age where it is no longer necessary to store/house anything locally, and the widescreen iPod just around the corner, the answer is probably sitting within 4 feet of us. Given the widespread adoption of the video-MP3 player it is slightly baffling why we publishers don’t experiment with the iPod (and Microsoft’s forthcoming rival player Zune) more thoroughly. Who knows, maybe Apple and Microsoft would be even quicker off the mark in developing on a competive platform for books if sample content was already there to meet them?

Here’s 4 suggestions/thoughts from the laundrette. By no means an expert opinion, but more a snapshot of the mind of an editor who’s a very recent but willing recruit to the 21st Century:

You could say the speech Victoria Barnsley made at the end of last year put a bit of a stake in the ground for HC. In the coming months, Fifthestate hopes it is really going to be putting Vicky’s words to the test.

Are we really commited to developing a direct relationship between author and the community (that’s you, dear reader)?

Are we truly prepared to follow the enlightened Free Culture agenda, even to the extent proposed by Cory Doctorow> and Larry Lessig through, in order to protect the author from obscurity?

Personally, most of us at fifthestate hope so…and we hope you will pull us up for harsh questioning if you feel we are failing in that, or alternatively if you disagree with the wisdom of this agenda. Watch this space…and send your comments here.

(This is a summary of the speech Victoria Barnsley gave at the London Business School, at their media summit on 4/11/05. This text also appeared in The Bookseller.)

If publishing was once a business of mass production, where one sold ever-increasing print runs of ever-decreasing titles to more and more people, the digital age will reverse this. It offers a world in which individual consumers will increasingly be heard, where publishers and authors can, for the first time, have direct contact and relationships with consumers.

At HarperCollins we’re pouring resources into online and relationship marketing and moving our blanket, one-size-fits-all, print promotions to targeted on-line communities.

It’s the interactive nature of the on-line world that we need to harness – a world where authors and readers communicate via websites, blogs and podcasts, where readers start influencing authors’ content and start generating their own. Where whole new genres emerge, such as fan-fiction. As a publisher, I’ve always known that as many people want to write a book as read one. So how do we leverage this?

Consumers these days want experiences as much as things. They want to be part of communities. We only need to look at the chart success of the Arctic Monkeys for proof. Here’s a band that reached the top of the charts, not through the savvy marketing of a record company, but via a self-generated forum on MySpace.com, that created an online community and forged an impressive fanbase. As one marketing company put it to me the other day: “Consumers aren’t listening to us any more, they’re listening to each other.”

Publishers must make sure they occupy this space. We can no longer see ourselves as simply the sellers of products – we need to muster all our creative talent so we can enhance, and manage, the relationships between authors and consumers as they interact in an on-line community.

Traditionally we’ve always acted as middle men, between the author and consumer. There is a view that in the virtual world, the intermediary’s no longer needed, that the publisher’s role is superfluous. The fear instilled in publishers by Google and Amazon is partly that they see them as having the capacity to supplant us in some way. Amazon, in particular, is already cultivating the agent and author community and, in a world where the traditional roles of retailer/publisher/marketeer/author and reader are blurring, it seems fairly clear that Amazon would like to occupy that relational space between author and reader. Why else have they launched Amazon Shorts - original commissioned short stories for which they charge 50 cents a download?

Meanwhile, Google is intent on digitising the world’s content, whether it’s in copyright or not. The search engine’s changing our world. Google estimate that 28 million people used a search engine to find a book in the last six months, and more than half of them went through Google.

I remain confident that the publisher’s role can’t be replaced by these internet giants. Their businesses are retail and search and they lack the creative skills to enhance the authors’ own work in the way that we do. However in the last few months many publishers and authors have become very exercised about search. So what are the issues?

First up, there are obvious concerns about security and copyright. I’m probably in a minority in that I’m fairly relaxed about this – without the hardware, I don’t really believe illegal copying is a big issue. Or not a big enough one to outweigh the obvious benefits of search. Or, to put it as an author did recently: “The biggest threat we face isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity”.

There are also doubts about the business models. Google’s is based on splitting advertising revenue with publishers. But if the experience of the US publishing companies who’ve already participated in the Google Print programme is anything to go by, advertising will not be a significant source of revenue, not in the short term. MSN, Yahoo and Amazon Pages are all talking versions of pay-per-view, and we feel this is potentially more attractive. However, until this model is tested, the real benefit seems to be in title promotion and the ‘buy the book’ link.

Mind you, it’s quite a price to pay to hand over all your content to be digitised by the likes of Google or Microsoft. To many publishers, this feels too much like handing over control. Obviously we want to work with the likes of Google and Amazon. We’d be mad not to. But we need to operate a fire-wall between the search-engines and our content, so that we can control its use and exploit its value for our authors.

With this in mind HarperCollins Worldwide has announced plans to create a global digital warehouse for our titles, which search engines will be able to visit by means of an index. This will allow us to meet the demands of the digital age while retaining control of our own digital files and thereby our intellectual property.

It’s by this kind of thinking that I hope publishing will take advantage of the fact that it’s rather late to the digital party. We might not’ve been catapulted into it as abruptly as the music industry, but it will fundamentally change our business, and we need to be as prepared as possible.

For me there are two big questions facing publishers in the 21st Century. How we bring added value to the author/consumer relationship in the on-line world – which still isn’t yet clear – and how we’ll make money out of it, which is even less clear.

Our USP has to be the linking of content and community, and somehow, we have to wrap this together with a viable business model. This is the space that we need to focus on, because whether the genuinely user-friendly e-book is developed this year (and Sony have come pretty close), or in 20 years – the internet is fundamentally changing the relationship between authors, readers and content.