Who *reads* fiction on teh internetz, anyway?

or, Two More Meaty Ways in Which the Platform Changes, but the Song Remains the Same.

by digi-jay < partially x-posted from impoverished artifices >

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Discussed:

BBC's Digital Planet discusses a South African mobile web app story serialization project.

NPR's All Things Considered compiled a story about the "wovel", which is, in essence, a roughly interactive serialization of a novel on a blog or on the web (web + novel = wovel).

Questions:

How interactive does interactivity have to be?

Are physical spaces that sell books doomed?

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Listening to the very good Digital Planet podcast from the BBC World Service on the iPhone at the grocery store, I heard about a South African story project, Novel Idea. It's sent to subscribers over mobile texts, but it is not like the Japanese mobile text novels that the NYT had a feature on in January 2008. Rather than being a story in a text message, the text delivers a link to a WAP site that hosts the stories. There are several authors working on the project, with a variety of types of work (I *so* resist the word "genre" here...).

The form mimics serialization, as it condenses the space of composition into a word limit. The WAP rather than SMS, though, increases the amount of text that can be published per installment. "Punchy" was one term used to describe the mode of creative composition, as the author needs to hook the reader in a small space.

The manager of the project, Emma Kaye, mentioned that mobile technology in South Africa is more prolific than internet access. According to Kaye, mobile phones have a penetration rate of 90% in South Africa. One reason for this could be that, again according to Kaye, SMS is cheaper than voice rates. Thus, this form of literature can have a greater reach than the form that I'll discuss next.

The form, while not interactive, is certainly portable and a result of adaptation to new technologies. It can also be shared with friends, by forwarding the text link - though a believe the R$1.50 charge for establishing a subscription. It's also a competition: readers vote on the best story, until only one author remains. So, I suppose, in a way it is interactive--readers can end stories.

The "wovel" First World, as featured on NPR's All Things Considered is a similar development of writing meeting new modes of reading. Published in blog format--though, really, one could say published on the web, with abilities for comments; blog is just a catch word--this serialization offers readers a collective interactivity. They are allowed to vote for a binary option of how the story unfolds in the next installment. Through comments, they are given the opportunity for a digital rhetorical discourse on how the story should unfold.

The most interesting aspect of Novel Idea and the wovel to me, as an author, is how the act of writing is being adapted to fit new methods of reading and publishing media. Neither of these styles of publishing are necessarily new, as the serialization of fiction has a very long history and has been far more interesting. For instance, sensation fiction publications in Victorian England purposely blended fiction and nonfiction to break down lines of categorization. These tehno-forms are just plain storytelling--on a new platform that may require some new limitations on length, predominantly.

I'm interested in the interactivity offered by the wovel, in that it is collective rather than individual. I would tend to prefer the individual choose your own adventure style of reading, rather than being offered a binary decision in which I only have a small say. Reading has traditionally (to me and in "Western" culture, I'd venture) been an individual act. Thus, this collective is both interesting and limiting. The limiting almost makes it identical to authorial decision-making, though that power is spread out. Again, I'd be interested in seeing that power dissolve, by offering infinite outcomes.

Why not paper? If we're talking about brevity, there are plenty of excellent flash fiction collections out there, such as Flash Fiction Forward (< /bayard_plug >). With paper, you do lose the technological convergence of the hand-held: voice, data, network -- and everything that accompanies these. Paper does have the advantage of the brain's mode of memory, however, in that the rigid layer of paper offers a static spatial sequence that can be internalized -- the paragraph at the top, the sentence on the left-hand page.

As bookseller, electronic distribution of texts is usually a generally threatening proposition. What happens when War & Peace is available for download on my iPhone or your Curve? OMG, we're all going to disappear!!1!

And, while this *is* slowly happening -- indies closing, chains starting down that road, Project Gutenberg delivers War & Peace to my phone for free, what I'm sure is a majority of reading now being done online (Lessig says so...) -- I don't think it's because I've actually read or would prefer to read The Society of the Spectacle or even Free Culture on my mobile, rather than in bound paper form. (For starters, I can't highlight my touch screen and write marginalia.) Rather, one giant reason is that readers are individually living online and letting the evil A and their superior algorithm tell readers what they might like. It isn't e-texts that are being distributed to problematize paper and bricks-and-mortar, it's paper being distributed from an electronic source that endangers your neighborhood bookshop.

Does that mean that the "real" is doomed to succumb to the "virtual"? I don't think so, and not just because I think that binary isn't accurate ("real" and "virtual" overlap and bleed and are much more porous than a binary realtionship allows -- see this blog and the bookshop we all happen to work at where we talk about this blog).

My hope lies in the fact that the evil A doesn't really offer a place for readers to organize or form commnunity. They are very much about commerce and have not been able to hide or complement that with a social aspect. In fact, there isn't a predominant or set of predominant social networks for readers -- at least that I've found. They all seem partial or don't offer the community we come to expect from more popular social networking experiences, like Facebook.

One speculation for this might sound something like the long tail of media consumption. TV and film have limited programming options to offer, due to methods of distribution (networks, basic cable, expanded cable, web-only, in a descending manner for TV). While this has grown with Web 2.0/RW/remix culture, the number of offerings for TV and film must be dwarved by the number of books published yearly by major houses. Add in small presses and academic publishers and that number probably doubles. (And that's not including self-publication outfits, as the RW culture has not crossed into the book world. "Self-published" and "vanity press" are very dirty words.)

So what, dude? you're asking. My point here is that it's easier to form community around a show like Lost, as so many more people view it, as their viewing options are intrinsicly less on TV than they are in a bookshop. Where's that message board for Gone Away World, Jordan? It's harder to find people who want to talk about the same books that you've read, as, not only is reading ficiton less common than watching TV, the number of ficticious books you can choose to read is far greater than the number of TV series you can choose to watch.

What's this have to do with bookshops with front doors, that pay local taxes to support schools and infrastructure and employ members of your community? In theory, it should hurt them, as ecnomies of scale and the long tail should make it easier and cheaper for small groups to connect online. (I'm sure there is a group of three people talking about Gone Away World somewhere in some corner of the internetz -- and I'd like you to give me the names of the other two folks, Jordan, so I can properly cite them.) But -- and here's the turn -- there's a difference between talking about and selling things, no matter how closely they're related. And, personally, this is where I see the advantage of the community bookseller over the evil A or equivalent.

The bookseller(s) is better than the algorithm.

The good bookseller can tell you what people enjoy, what's new to the shelf, what people who read are enjoying -- and why.

The algorithm can tell you what other people bought.

Pick up your mobile and find out where your nearest (indie) bookseller is and start a conversation with anyone: a bookseller, that girl in the "science fiction" section or that weird guy over in the corner by magazines.

Rules for Radical Readers

As someone who is more frequently exploring the interweaving of social networking and bookselling, I can't say that I've ever found a sentence more exciting than this:

In one heavily trafficked thread entitled “Unhappy with Breaking Dawn? Don’t burn it—RETURN it!,” commenters debated whether returning the book was a valid way to express unhappiness with the book. <PW Daily, 7 Aug 08>

The above is referring to the less-than-enthusiastic reception of Stephanie Meyer's Breaking Dawn, the fourth book in the hottest YA series since that wizard kid (read Sarah's thoughts here). I can't honestly write that I've seen anyone return a copy to us this week - and if you're thinking of it, I recommend returning it to a megastore, instead.

Back to my interest in this story, though. I've recently finished Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody, a book on sharing, collaboration and collective actions through online social networking. It's a good intro to the rise of netroots actions across the spectrum - politics, business, creativity to name a few broad arenas - if less than critical. Still, I recommend.

In Shirky's world, collective action is the endpoint of successful online social groupings. As the chief advocate for our Ning network of book readers, I tend to concentrate on how the internets can facilitate sharing and collaboration - in essence, I'm hoping to initiate a conversation on books, etc. This blog, too, is an exercise in collaboration. Ideally, the collective action part of the equation is the translation from joining the network to helping independent booksellers keep their doors open by buying books from us (which you can do by clicking on a title or book cover).

In the 4 Aug 08 print edition of Publishers Weekly, (lo-and-behold!) Clay Shirky has a little piece on digital publishing, "Mattering to Readers", in which he predominantly argues for a more accessible publishing world to listen to and reach out to their readers, in order to form more personal relationships, or "to matter" to them. Shirky holds up Big Music as what not to do: don't become faceless, homogenized blobs, or folks won't have a problem digitally reproducing and redistributing your products without giving a damn about your coin purse.

The publishing industry has an advantage, maybe two: books are still not digitally-distributed to the extent that they can be "pirated". The second might be that mega-publishers haven't become blobs of homogenization, yet. I think there are more than a few arguments against that, though. Regardless, Shirky's claim only requires the first condition: folks can't rip off the publishers yet without the digital media; thus, the publishers still have time to become relevant to their readers. They'd better hurry, as some small publishers already are relevant to many readers.

What does this have to do with online social networking, besides the preferred method of distribution of digital media, you might ask? Two things: the writing process and the bi-directionality of networks.

Shirky writes that he wanted to write a book "to work with a publisher", rather than, say, make some money, share some knowledge, etc. Those things, I assume he knows, he can do - and foes - online. He goes for print due to a books ability to share and collaborate ("focus a conversation, creating social capital" are his exact words) across large scales and longer periods of time. (It talks longer to read and share a physical book, than forward an email, online story or blogpost.)

The conversation we want is one of sharing ideas, collaborating and collective action. Shirky, as a writer and communications theorist, understands the collaborative process inherent in bringing a finished book to the shelf - and how this is similar to what online communities can sometimes achieve. Here Comes Everybody, though, is published by one of the largest conglomerates in the publishing world - Penguin. (One can understand why he might not be interested in declaring that big publishing houses *are* exactly the same as their nameless, faceless music industry anaologs.) I can also understand why explicitly writing about the potential consequences of this conversation didn't make it into this article.

As Breaking Dawn is showing us, hosting that conversation can result in your readers trashing your products, for all to read, for some (if not most) to participate in, all at your hosting expense and their time. While there willingness to spend their free time is a strong sign of the readers' committment to the series, what I find more interesting is the power that the readers have wrested from the publishers, utilizing the tools the publisher has provided to organize a campaign to return the books. While I'm sure Little, Brown/Hachette was counting on kids flosking to their site to talk about Meyer's saga, I bet they weren't counting on losing their monopolistic power structure in the process.

And, to me, that is the power of the reader who is connected to other readers. The temporal and physical structures of our society may keep us divided - suburban sprawl, homogenization of commerce, lack of mass transit, ad inifinitum - but we can build social capital in spaces that are more resiliant to these pressures.

Join the conversation.

(And, if you're in SE Wisco, you can join our siblings at 800-CEO-READ for their second Pecha Kucha night on 26 Aug 08.)

Homogenization, now available second hand

credit

From Publishers Weekly:

Amazon has reached an agreement to acquire AbeBooks, the British Columbia-based online marketplace that has over 110 million titles for sale through its bookseller network. The purchase, which is expected to close in the fourth quarter, will strengthen Amazon's already dominate position in the used book field. Terms weren't disclosed.

I'm generally not a fan of consolidation of power in any form; as a second hand book buyer, who reluctantly lists some books at the big A, this news is particularly sad. While it's a marketplace expansion issue (the same reason I list a few), it still homogenizes the way online consumers will view and purchase books. And, it seems, Abe Books (or the executives at Abe Books) is one bookseller who will benefit financially. I doubt that other, similar services will get the same (or any offers) from Amazon. Likely, they'll wither. Now, we'll exclusively send folks to Alibris, I suppose.

This isn't an online v. "real" world divide for me, as I don't necessarily believe that those spaces are separate for most people. That's why I blog. About books. And, more and more, about online community. That's why we Ning. The thought is that we can build social capital together, exchange thoughts on books. If you're in Milwaukee, you might stop into the shop on Downer to talk with us. If not in SE Wisco, you might leave a comment on the blog, join the Ning, follow our twitter and even buy a book from us online. Or, you might have cause to stop into your local independent bookseller to start a conversation there.

Rather, this is Amazon gobbling up competitors and consolidating the marketplace, which will only allow them to further dictate how (and which!) books are sold. Or, as smaller networks and brick-and-mortar shops disappear from your neighborhood, they will be able to control the flow of information in printed form, as they see fit.

Sure, pure free markets reward the most efficient, but we don't live in a pure free market (regardless of anyone's thoughts on the merits of capitalism). We can vote with our dollars, choose to support our friends and neighbors and form social connections, rather than exchange goods and services in bland transactions. In short, we can be a community: of geography, of interests, of taste, whatever.

Thanks for reading.

Hang out and build some social capital with us.