Being a likely (n00b) self-published digital author myself in the near future I will inevitably have to sell my product on Amazon. As a recently retired independent bookseller I’m not entirely comfortable with the paradox that presents.

Closing my bookshop hurt like hell and it was sad to leave without another owner taking over – but who’s buying bookshops these days? When I closed, customers were shocked. People expressed grief, they bemoaned the internet as the purveyor of death and destruction. It’s not really like that. Traditional publishing was riding for a fall.

Here are three business strategies – which one is more effective?

‘Sell ’em what they want for as much as you can charge.’ – Standard model

‘Sell ’em what they want as cheap as you can till you own the game. Then charge what you like.’ – Amazon model

‘Sell ’em enough of what they want to stay in business but try and publish something “good” while you’re at it.’ – Publishing model

Darth Bezos saw this fatal weakness in publishing and exploited it. Digital disruption of retail is a fact of life and traditional publishers were ripe for disruption.

The skills required to own and run a bookshop become more demanding as the digital disruption increases. Successful independent booksellers have to be masterful sales people and great at marketing and PR. More and more they are relying on their skills as event managers too. Booksellers also have to be hard-headed business people with the ability to project cash flows, manage tax issues, negotiate leases and get the best possible deal from suppliers. They have to be HR managers as well. Given the nature of the organised and ruthless competition, is it any wonder we are losing our local bookshops?

Personally I hope my decade owning a bookshop gives me some insight into my new work as a writer. During the helter skelter of Christmas trade two years ago I woke up in the middle of the night with a person in my head. That person was Professor Israel Wren: a hyperactive half-caste amateur sleuth with a penchant for birds (of the feathered kind). He’s since been joined by Gary Warburton, a boofy Aussie foil for a well heeled bloodhound. I’ve finished the first draft of  a murder mystery featuring Israel and Gary called ‘Death on Dangar Island’ and have been putting the second draft up on digital story-sharing platform Wattpad. I’m doing the Wattpad thing to help build an audience, but also to help me fine-tune the manuscript. Knowing my work is about to go live helps me focus on the more mundane aspect of writing – editing it so it’s readable. By the time I’ve finished this draft I’ll hopefully have a better idea about how to sell it. The most likely path will be self-publishing, but hey – I’m open to offers from traditional publishers!

In my last few years as a bookseller I tried to learn as much as I could about the digital world because I could see the changes happening around me. I garnered a passing knowledge of the interwebz and I’m hoping that and my marketing and small business skills will stand me in good stead for my app development venture. I recently started ‘Lazy Dad Studios’ with an old friend. Our first app, ‘Words4Cards’, is a library of phrases and sayings curated into categories for social occasions like birthdays, weddings and funerals.

Because the barriers to entry have dropped so low, the market for apps, like the market for ebooks, is being flooded with n00bz (like myself) pushing out product and competing for attention.  This automatically floods the market and lowers the price while increasing competition. Hopefully, the cream rises to the top and the consumer benefits in terms of both price and quality. There is also an interesting fluidity about what apps are and what they actually do. To build a ‘cut through’ app these days means breaking new ground, not just in content but also in form. Novelty is king and the digital medium is so new and so malleable that surprise has become obligatory. I have a suspicion that some people want to take ebooks in this direction as well.

What are ebooks anyway? – I’m not sure we know yet. I’m not sure Darth Bezos even knows yet. What is immersive reading? Did you just click that link? Did it enhance your experience of this text? To me, the ‘Ooh where does this link go’ type of reading is very different to the sublime sensation of being wholly involved with a text. Does text really have to become something else to survive? Will ‘reading’ become just another multimedia experience?

We need to define reading and set it apart from other types of interwebz entertainment. And booksellers could be just the type of people to help do that. People who understand that text does not have to be digitally interactive to create a memorable ‘user experience’ will be valuable in the battle to maintain a love of the art of the written word. If these people have business, marketing and social skills as well, then this makes them even more valuable.

In conversation the other day I jokingly characterised traditional publishing as the Galactic Empire and digital publishing as the Rebel Alliance. I was immediately corrected by my (nerdier) friend who pointed out that traditional publishing is actually the Rebel Alliance. It’s traditional publishers who are the desperate fragments of  a once great republic banding together to fight an all powerful enemy. (Hence my previous references to Darth Bezos.) The Empire is Amazon and it is already in control.

Amazon sells ‘stuff’. It started with books and now it’s moved on to all sorts of things. I think its initial selection of books as a product was deliberate but not motivated by a love of books. If widgets were a more appropriate choice at the time then it would have chosen widgets. Amazon isn’t about books, its about money.

If Amazon is The Galactic Empire, then The Book Depository are the Sith; the very embodiment of the dark forces that conspire to rule the galaxy. The Book Depository had a very simple business plan: Make itself a big enough pain in the butt that Amazon would  offer to buy it. This is exactly what happened and now The Book Depository is part of Amazon and the people who founded The Book Depository can spend more time skiing at St Moritz or sunning themselves on Martinique. This is money, this is business strategy, this is technology – but this is not books.

I loved stocking good books and convincing people to read them – but they were always a financial risk. It was much easier to simply stock what you knew would sell. Would you prefer to buy a book from someone who wants to show you something new, something different, something ‘good’? Or from someone who is happy for you just to choose something yourself from a zillion titles?

When it all went right I felt like a Jedi! As a bookseller I used to take in everything about a customer; their appearance, their speech, what they claimed to be looking for!. Then I asked a few questions, like: ‘What was the last book you read and enjoyed?’  I’d also try to find out exactly why they enjoyed it. This data was cross-referenced against my product knowledge and hopefully an appropriate title suggested itself. While it’s true I never got someone to buy a book by just gazing silently in their eyes, there was definitely a sense of the ‘light side’ when placing the right book in the right set of hands.

I’ve heard the argument that social media and various book suggestion programs are the equal, if not the better of an expertly suggested book. Should you rely on your Goodreads or Facebook friends to decide which book you need? Should your taste in literature be influenced by an algorithm or worse still by an Amazonian sock puppet? This question has become even more important recently with Goodreads  being subsumed into the Galactic Empire of Amazon.

What will become of all the wonderful, knowledgeable, socially skilled curators of literature I know as fellow booksellers? For those of us already heading in a new direction it’s a wide open road and we have the skill set to thrive in the new digital world. For those still walking the floor, doing their best to put good books in the right hands – ‘May the Force be with you.’

Greg Field owned and managed an independent bookstore of the “dead tree” variety for more than a decade. Recently, he’s changed direction and founded app development company Lazy Dad Studio. He’s also writing the first in a series of murder mysteries: Death on Dangar Island. Greg is @GregPField on Twitter.

Romy Ash is a Noob at story creation via Twitter. Her essay will be published on the 3rd of June.

Memory Makes Us

In the first stage of Memory Makes Us, we need your help. We’re looking for long-term memories: the moments, thoughts, objects and feelings that stay with you. They might be significant, funny, strange or simply mundane: if it’s yours and you’re willing to share, then we want to see it.

What we’re looking for:

• Short texts (about a paragraph long)
• Photos or images
• Videos (something you’ve captured or just talk to the camera)

We’re putting together an online repository of memories which will contain many of the submissions to this site. Take a look. We’re posting new work to the repository manually, so please be aware your work won’t appear there instantly. Also please note that the work you submit must be your own. If you use any copyrighted material (images or songs in particular), we won’t be able to use it for the project.

Submit your memory here.

You can post your memories to the if:book web site from now until early July.

On 9th July, celebrated author Kate Pullinger will write a new work live and in public at the State Library of Queensland. Your collected memories will form Kate’s source material.

On the day, you will able to read her work online as it develops or you can drop in to the library if you’re in town. We will post more details about this even as the time draws nearer.

More details about Memory Makes Us.

I fed the paper through the roller, flicked the bar down and sat, staring at it. It flashed its metallic grin back at me. Starting has always been the hardest part. A blank screen and the rhythmic blink of the cursor has long been a kind of nemesis of mine: …come…on…come…on. But this was different. The page was just as blank as the screen, but there was no cursor. No prompt.

I sat before a 1969 Underwood 310 manual typewriter. Made in Spain by Olivetti, these portable devices were once ubiquitous: the notebook computers of their age. This one was a donation to the Queensland Writers Centre, courtesy of a member who wanted to be rid of it. It was the first one I had seen in a while. My parents had a similar model at home when I was a kid¹; they even dug it out of a shed and brought over for me to try, dried out ribbon and all. So, though I suddenly had access to two machines, only the Underwood was up to the task².

A moment passed between the machine and me and I was given to wonder why I had volunteered for this in the first place. Why would anyone willingly eschew their still new MacBook Air and commence writing on this antiquated piece of kit in 2013?

The answer came in the almost universal responses to my announcement of this experiment. Whenever I mentioned I was working on a typewriter, I was met with a flurry of positive responses. And everyone had a story: memories of handwritten school or university assignments passed over to hapless mums and their machines, long hours spent pounding out text, and a lot of mentions of whiteout.

Like many lost technologies, a certain romance now surrounds the typewriter. Even in a digitally saturated age, when we picture a writer, a classic writer, we picture someone hunched over a hunk of metal and enamel, squirreled away from the world, sitting beside a pile of balled up pages in a wastepaper basket, probably chain smoking.

As evidence, take a look at the workspace of one of my literary heroes, Kurt Vonnegut:

The new studio smelled of cigarette smoke and the ashtrays were stuffed with butts…Tiger, studying his uncle’s nicotine-stained Smith-Corona typewriter, noticed the space bar had an indentation in the middle, grooved by Kurt’s thumb striking it thousands of times over the years.

From Charles J Shields’ excellent And So It Goes, Kurt Vonnegut: A Life.

It’s a compelling scene, even without reference to the statues and copies of Playboy nearby. And it’s hard to imagine anything like that kind of aura descending on a modern word processor and its essentially disposable chiclet keyboard. Indeed, a fledgling movement of typewriter aficionados scurry around the edges of hipster culture.

Some beardy kid in Brooklyn wants to use a typewriter as a kind of talisman against writers block, another to make her love letters more … lovely … I guess. Others wrap up their type-love in pop psychology: ‘I felt the need to be grounded.’ Now that typewriter use happens almost entirely by choice, the clichéd classic writer haunts almost every contemporary reference: ‘[It makes] you feel like a real writer.’

Ugh. Spare me.

But by sitting at my desk in front of a blank page was I just feeding into this romance? Do I have an inner hipster dying to make me more magically ‘grounded’ by restricting my ability to cut and paste text?

After careful consideration, I had selected the first piece I would write on the Underwood: a self-contained column with a short word count and an understanding editor. But I began with a few tests, getting the feel of the machine without thinking too much about what it was I was putting on the page. I was reminded of my first encounter with computer keyboards where I typed random gobbledegook onto the ominous green-on-black monitor and hit enter to see what would happen.

Gobbledegook evolved into junky practice sentences and I marvelled at how familiar this process was. Sure you had to push the keys down harder, but there was nothing alien about working on this machine. My fingers navigated the keyboard with practised ease and the hammers hit the page with authority … mostly. My ‘E’s for some reason were always a little faint. The ‘A’ was also problematic. It sometimes connected with the page and sometimes straight up refused to work.

Then I hit the end of the first line. The carriage stopped dead but my fingers kept moving until I was faced with a clump of hammers forming a fist over the stage. Wait a minute. There was supposed to be a bell. Where was the ding? I untangled the hammers and tried again. Nope. Nothing.

Okay. Frustrating, but okay. I typed on, keeping a close eye on where I was up to on each line of the page until it became almost second nature and I was able to relax properly into the process.

The first pleasure of using a typewriter is almost certainly the sound. Oh, that sound. It’s loud, much louder than I had expected and problematic for someone accustomed to writing late at night in a house full of sleeping family members. Compared to the anaemic clack of a computer keyboard, this was brawny, visceral. When you press a key, something moves and it strikes something else. I set the typewriter up on my deck for a while, enjoying the lack of glare and inadvertently broadcasting my work to the neighbourhood. And it was work. I couldn’t flap about on the web or check email or click my way down Wikipedia or Twitter rabbit holes. Hell, I couldn’t even doodle. On this machine, you write.

And while I wouldn’t say I felt more ‘grounded’ (given I don’t even know what it really means in that context), the romance began to creep under my skin. Despite myself, I did feel like more of a writer. I was at the forge, summoning words and turning them into marks on paper that left an impression, quite literally. When I turned the page over, I could run my fingers over text embossed on the page in reverse. There are fake typing sounds you can get for your computer, but they’re not the same, I suspect because it’s not the sound you’re actually connecting with, but the physicality of the act. The only software involved was in my head.

So there I was, hunched over a hunk of metal and enamel (well, plastic), muttering to myself and working. People who didn’t know me would point and say, ‘hey, that guy must be writer.’ And so I was.

I did, however, draw the line at smoking.

*

I’m a cut-and-paste writer. This sentence has been cut-and-pasted at least half a dozen times in the creation of this essay (Actually, I lost count). My approach to writing is to throw sentences down, and use a little C & P magic to fashion them into something with flow and form.

Pages created on a typewriter, in contrast, are filled with permanently disjointed thoughts.

Without the ability to shift the words around, I had little choice but to forge on, embracing the disjointedness. Eventually an idea that was suitable for the beginning of the piece took shape. At that point I ripped the paper out—if you’ve never done this, it’s satisfying and I highly recommend it—and marked it up in pencil to identify the section using arrows, asterisks, scribbles, whatever to allude to its ultimate form and destination.

Then I fed a new page in and started typing it out again.

At this point, it’s probably necessary to note that I wasn’t using whiteout. That wasn’t a stylistic choice, at least not initially. I didn’t use whiteout because frankly I’d forgotten all about it until about the third draft, by which time I had already refined my workflow to an iterative process: type, mark up, type again.

Not every typewriter user works this way. Though she worked primarily in longhand during the 1980s, Dale Spender placed single paragraphs on individual pages. It’s a technique that would translate easily to typescript, allowing for the easy movement of text, but it creates a gargantuan overall document in the process. Woody Allen, who to this day writes on the same Olympia SM-3 he has since the early 1950s, literally ‘cuts’ and ‘pastes’ his typewritten scripts with scissors and staplers.

Allen’s approach makes sense as an alternative to extreme redrafting, though it would seem likely that his technique requires the occasional complete rewrite. Either way, we’re a long way from rapid fire Command-C and Command-V³.

When we use a word processor, we rarely actually redraft in the most literal sense—we don’t start again at a blank page and retype what was already there on the screen. Redrafting a text on screen primarily means re-reading. Then comes tweaking, dropping in new passages, and (of course) cutting and pasting. Then repeat. Each new draft on screen is an adaptation from the previous draft. It’s an evolutionary process.

On the typewriter each of my drafts began the same way: as a single blank sheet of paper which I proceeded to fill with the same text, sometimes subtly reworking and refining the sentences, more often typing them verbatim. After only four drafts, I could recite the opening paragraph word for word. This is writing as a deliberate act. Every word ended up carefully considered, perhaps just as carefully as its computer-generated counterpart, but the experience felt otherwise.

I won’t deny the process was tedious, but it forced me to slow down. After a while I even began to enjoy the repetition. Well, sort of.

*

As I closed in on the final text, the reality of contemporary publishing became more and more apparent. A beautifully typed manuscript was a lovely thing to create, but I had an editor at the other end of an email address waiting for his 400-odd words. Digital words. The world has moved on. You can live and write in your bespoke grounded hermetically sealed hipster echo chamber, but if you want to reach anyone else, sooner or later you have to engage with the digital world.

There was no time to send the raw text via post (how quaint) and even if I did, what would the editor do with it? Similarly, abandoning the typewriter and turning to a computer for the finished product felt like cheating.

I needed OCR.

For the uninitiated, OCR stands for optical character recognition. It’s the technology that allows you to photographically scan pages and have the computer interpret the text into an editable document. The first OCR I came across was an awful lump of software from about 1994 that apparently thought humans communicated primarily in Wingdings hieroglyphs. I’d had little do with it since.

I downloaded a few free OCR applications for the Mac and set to work. Let this be a warning to you: you get what you pay for. While the contemporary free OCR application might have moved on from Wingdings, it has a long way to go before being fit for actual human consumption. It certainly made a fist of my accompanying blog post, also written on the Underwood.

Ev:en@th:iia1`h£log post has been dmafc-acl om, the Underwood 3I0, as though I’1n
trying ‘b€o prove some arcane poinnt. -Wa.ii’lf’, :Es iifléfbf what I’-rn &oiix-rg?
As- promiised :En-=‘|:1f1:Is mon“th’s WQ, -lirere are the draits for -my ‘B;ypeje:t’i’t’lien, ‘
column. The text has been d:‘§.gi‘bisec1» using a sceannei* with _op+:l:1_ci.1 charaet-er
zfecogni’b”ion_ (cr OCR). Because retgypping it’ for screens wo&1d£ Eeel like cheating

Somewhat deflated, I took my freshly mangled digitised wreck of a column and manually tended to it on screen, correcting the egregious errors, but leaving in the charming accuracies (the Underwood has no numeral 1 so the final text maintains the use of the uppercase I in its place). Then it was off through the ether.

And—for the briefest of moments—the simple act of sending an email regained its old wonder.

*

At some point, it occurred to me that I was writing on a machine older than me by a solid few years. I wondered at times who else might have used it, what words have passed through its ribbons, what it might have meant to its various writers over the past 44 years. In an age where a six-year-old computer is a relic and people feel the need to apologise for not owning a smartphone less than two years old, here was a device older than me, in near perfect working condition, ready for whatever I chose to throw at it. Planned obsolescence may make economic sense, but it breaks the emotional bond we form with our tools. Only a few of the endless parade of computers I’ve worked on over the years have broken through that barrier.

The machines themselves echo the permanence of their product. Woody Allen says of his Olympia: ‘I bought this when I was sixteen. It still works like a tank.’ Few writers today will leave behind an object that has acted as singular midwife to a career, celebrated or otherwise. I still have my old indigo iMac that for some reason I can’t bear to part with, but I’ve written nothing on it since about 2005. I don’t think I could write on it now, even if I wanted to. In our move to a more disposable culture, something has been lost. Whether it matters is another thing entirely.

The Writing Ball, a blog built from typed and scanned entries (though not with OCR), takes an archival view on the pages produced:

Typing lasts. It’s about addressing the future. Digital text addresses the present, ever fluid and changing.

Typing lasts, but it exists for one reader at a time. It does not allow ideas to grow or find a broad audience. Without access to blogs, I would never have known that the Writing Ball exists.

*

I used the Underwood almost exclusively for a month. I wrote thousands of words on the thing and over time, the experience felt more and more natural to me. I even toyed with the idea of turning back to the typewriter for final drafts of this essay. But, with the pressure of meeting competing deadlines, it was an indulgence I couldn’t afford.

In my day job, I talk with many innovative people who work at the intersection of technology and publishing. When I ask them how they prefer to read, a common response might be paraphrased as: ‘I love to immerse myself deeply in books and for that I love print, but most of my reading happens in brief chunks online’. The parallel between the containers in which we read and the tools with which we write is compelling. The word processor is convenient in the way an ereader or a tablet is convenient. Convenience doesn’t necessarily give us more free time. Sometimes, it just makes room for more convenience.

But that’s a conscious choice, isn’t it?

This is the thinking behind the Universal Babel Service, a group that espouses the benefits of slow communication. Taking a cue from various other ‘slow’ movements (food, cities, sex, travel), slow communication maintains that the conditions for deeper and richer engagement with text begin with allowing more time both for writing and reading.

By shutting off distraction and slowly iterating my text over and over on page after page, did I engage more deeply with it? I think so. But how deeply did I really need to engage with a 400-word column anyway? It has no pretence to being ‘for the ages’. If it had, I might have been more tempted to carve it on stone tablets instead.

So where does this leave the experiment? And what does any of this have to do with the future of books, writing and reading? A big part of the future of the book, the future that all writers face, is about understanding tools. It’s as important as knowing your medium and knowing your audience. It’s about knowing how things are made.

After a month on the Underwood 310, do I have a better understanding of how Vonnegut made Slaughterhouse-Five or how Woody Allen made Love and Death? Perhaps. But I can’t shake the feeling that whatever lessons I’ve learned will stay with the machine. This essential workhorse of the writing industry for nearly a hundred years has been reduced to a plaything, an indulgence. I have placed the typewriter to one side of my desk where, for the moment, it remains. As my MacBook deftly handles its melange of twitter feeds, email, browser tabs and a bewildering array of open word processor documents, the Underwood watches, gathering dust.

But still grinning.

Simon Groth’s stories can go anywhere from tangled relationships and virtual writers to rock music and sleep disorders. His books include Concentrate, Here Today, and Off The Record: 25 Years of Music Street Press. As director of if:book Australia, Simon writes regularly on the future of the book and took the role of lead writer for the 24-Hour Book. On Twitter, he’s @simongroth and his website is simongroth.com.

Greg Field is a n00b at both writing and app development. His essay will be published on 13 May.

One day in 1987 I had lunch in Fitzroy with Diana Gribble, my publisher at McPhee Gribble. As we crossed busy Brunswick Street on our way back to the McPhee Gribble office, Diana said she thought it would be a good idea if I were to write a book on how to write fiction. This moment has remained with me, vivid in my memory, an illumination in heavy traffic. Diana died in 2011, and at her funeral the thought of that instant in Brunswick Street kept flashing into my mind.

This happened in the days before writing courses had come into being in Australian universities; there were no such things as writers’ centres. However there were some initiatives from state governments in the area of the arts, and I was involved in a program of manuscript assessment. I was Assessor Number Eight. I was anonymous and so were the writers whose work I assessed. I had been writing letters to the authors – yes, I typed them out and put them in the mail. I wonder now which designs were on the postage stamps. The letters went to people I referred to as ‘Dear Writer’. I kept copies of these letters – possibly some of them still exist in my files – and I realised I already had the core of my book on writing.

So in 1988, Dear Writer was published. I licensed it to McPhee Gribble, which in 1989 became an imprint of Penguin. The book was published by Virago in London. By the time the licence came up for renewal in 1995 my publisher was Random House and so I licensed it to them, and wrote a revised version of the text. Between the end of the Penguin licence and the beginning of the Random one, I had a request from a university for fifty copies. There were not fifty copies in existence so I printed a limited edition of a hundred copies in a plain cover with Wild and Woolley, a Sydney publisher who specialised in producing small fast print runs. In 2010, Random decided not to renew the licence and the book went out of print. Since then I have had many requests from universities for copies of Dear Writer. It occurred to me that perhaps the time had come to see it as an ebook.

The file of the proofs from Random House (which was soon to merge with Penguin) had not survived the various transfers from one computer to another. I realised I would first need to scan the text. It so happened that I had only one copy in my possession. If I tore it apart for the purpose of scanning, I would end up with no copies at all. It seemed wrong not to have at least one copy of my own book. You’d think that I could find one somewhere, at least online, but no. Although there were plenty of copies in Indonesian. So I persuaded a friend to relinquish her copy in exchange for a copy of the limited Wild and Woolley edition (which uses the original, not the revised text). The process of scanning, while being perhaps elegant and astonishing, was tedious. As the book on my left shrank page by page and the pile of loose pages on my right grew, the data on my laptop lay in between the two.

When the scanned pages at last became a file, I began an exhaustive revision of the text. While the basics of writing fiction remain constant, the vast and rapid changes and developments in technology, publishing, and teaching had to be acknowledged, reflected and addressed in the new version of the book. After all, today people write novels on twitter. The notion of the letters is now quaint in its formality, but to abandon it would mean losing the tone of the book, and it was this tone that students and readers found particularly helpful and engaging. I say ‘readers’ because this is a book that can be read as a piece of fiction as well as a manual of instruction. It isn’t simply a matter of tone; Dear Writer is an enactment of its own principles. Interestingly, people frequently refer to Dear Writer as Dear Reader. I assume they feel the text speaks to them, that they, the readers, are the writer being addressed.

There are two characters: Writer and Virginia. Writer is a middle-aged woman living somewhere in rural Australia and writing short stories which she sends to Virginia for assessment. The novelist Virginia, as it happens, is a character from my novel The Bluebird Café . The readers of Dear Writer never see the script of the story under review, but must build it up in their imaginations. There are no letters from Writer. Because the characters are of their time, which was long ago in 1988, they think about the virtues of writing with pens compared with working on a typewriter, and then on a computer. I remember being resistant to the image of the old Royal typewriter on the cover of the Random House edition, because I thought it was suggesting the text was nostalgic and ossified. Yet people said they loved the image. The cover of the Virago version was never admired by anyone I ever heard of; it suggests, with its blood red woman at a typewriter, that writing fiction is something to do with menstruation.

It seemed wrong not to have at least one copy of my own book. You’d think that I could find one somewhere, at least online, but no. Although there were plenty of copies in Indonesian.

You can see some of the problems that changes in technology have introduced to the revision and re-presentation of a book like this. Often when I see the phrase ‘changes in technology’, the image of Tess of the d’Urbervilles comes to mind; that tragic emblem of a young woman trapped in social revolution, destroyed. Writing, revising takes courage; I am brave enough to do this.

I must now switch to a present tense narrative, because as I write this essay I am still working on the revision of Dear Writer in preparation for its new appearance. I say ‘appearance’ rather than ‘publication’ because I have a sense that something dramatic and revolutionary is happening to it, and that ‘publication’ is not a term that serves the purpose.

I have considered the fact that most of the students of writing today (2013) are very young, that they use social media, that they are probably keen to by-pass traditional publishing, that traditional publishing is also morphing even I sit here at my laptop, that those young students of writing are probably writing novels with their forefingers and thumbs on their iPhones, that possibly anything Virginia might say to Writer about, say, the agreement of a verb with its subject, is not going to matter to anybody much.

Yet I know that it does matter, and that it will continue to matter. I am not talking about rigidity and inflexibility and fossilisation, but about clarity and freedom. The more you know about how language behaves, the better equipped you are to use it, the more power you have over your own thoughts and ideas. Not so long ago I was teaching a university course. At the end of the second session I asked the students what areas of writing they would like me to cover in the course. They asked me to teach them grammar. In the early nineties I taught a course at an American college where the students wrote all their work, including their journals, on computers. A group of them came to me after class and said they were going to England for a semester and would have to write their journals by hand. They asked me to teach them how to do that. I know, and not just from those examples, that the things Virginia and Writer are able to convey are still important to people learning to write fiction, and I am keen to re-fashion the book in such a way that the original flavour is preserved, while the nature of the world into which it will go continues to change.

The challenges I face are not just those presented by the current technologies, or by the changes in publishing, or the changes in hardware and software, but the changes in the whole climate and make-up of readers and students and writers themselves.

So I think I am going to make an ebook. By the time it is done, ebooks might be obsolete, might be the luxury houses built on the edge of the cliff, only to disappear beneath the waves as the level of the sea rises in the heat of the blazing sun.

To be continued.

Carmel Bird‘s classic text on how to write (Dear Writer) is used in writing schools in many countries. It complements her Writing the Story of Your Life, and both books underscore Carmel’s many works of fiction. Her website is carmelbird.com.

Simon Groth is a N00b at writing on a typewriter. His essay will be published on 22nd April.

What is an ebook? Well, we don’t know yet. We don’t know how to talk about the future of the book without constantly referring to past models of the book. – Kylie Mirmohamadi

I’d rather redefine what a book is than try to come up with another word for this strange experimental pond that we’re working in. – Bob Stein

The media of the future will flow, it will always be in process. – Bob Stein

The social part [of book annotation] is secondary to the desire we have as a reader to be marking up, underlining, dogearing…that’s the impulse, our own desire to interact with that information in a deeper and more active way. – Hugh McGuire

The future is not necessarily being designed in there space where I come from. – Bob Stein.

Follow this link to listen to the show.

Regardless of how well designed or how beautiful its content, The City We Build is unlikely to ever reach some readers. This is because it has been designed for one digital platform alone.

Writers and publishers alike want their content accessible and available to as many readers as possible, but in the digital world this means taking into account a wide variety of devices. Some have high colour screens that can handle video and other content. Some have more simple ‘eink’ black and white screens that are simply not fast enough to handle anything other than page turns (and even those are too slow for some readers). Some devices are connected to the internet and handle much more than just reading; others are largely unaware of anything on the web other than their own bookstore. Some devices use highly response touch-sensitive surfaces, others opt for physical buttons.

Some devices are available in Australia, others are not.

It’s entirely appropriate there should be no one-size-fits-all reading device. But, for creators of content, this incredible diversity of devices presents a challenge of first principle.

What kind of book are we making here?

To suit as many readers as possible, books must be designed for the simplest of devices. To a large extent, this means text only. The simplest ereaders replicate the basic book experience as closely as possible. This means no colour, no video, no hyperlinking. Of course, for many books, this presents no problem at all.

The original poems from The City We Build were written for a Choose Your Own locative project. To read the poems, you had to stand there, on the corner of Brunswick and Ann, smartphone or tablet in hand. Your phone connected you to the poem via the web. You read or listened along, while juggling your phone, searching for references, and looking strange to passers by. That was part of the fun.

The purpose of The City We Build was to adapt the locative project into book form, without losing its sense of place or its multimedia origins. We wanted you to feel as though you were still wandering the Valley streets, maybe minus the heat and the legwork. This meant incorporating images and audio. Most of all, to replicate the reader’s choice of experience, jumping from poem to poem, we needed hyperlinks.

In Australia, right now, the platform that meets all those needs is Apple’s iPad.

So who has iPads anyway? There’s some debate over exactly what market share the iPad enjoys globally, but the most recent (and apparently dourest) estimates still hit more than 40%. In Australia, without competition from the Kindle Fire or the Nook, the share would almost certainly be higher. In real numbers, apparently 22.9 million of the things were sold in the last quarter alone (if you have specific figures for Australia, let me know). Man, that’s a lot of tablets. And, although Android tablets (most of the remaining 60%) make perfectly fine reading devices, the platform is yet to emphasise the kind of extra features needed for this project.

Although that’s the picture today, don’t forget this is likely to change at any time. Already we’re seeing some projects that could revolutionise the way digital art books are made in the near future, but for the moment (and with our resources), The City We Build is a project with but one destination.

It’s a trade off publishers and writers face all the time. Do you make a work suitable for a range of devices or do you exploit the features of a single device to make as rich an experience as possible? The direction you choose will depend on a myriad of factors, but the guiding principle should always be to serve the work itself first.

Last session from TOC 2013!

Firstly, a big congrats to the Startup Showcase winners:

• Paperight (yay, Arthur!)
• CartoDB
• Borne Digital

Keynotes from Mark Waid: Thrillbent

‘It’s Valentines Day, and this is is my love letter to comics.’

Mark writes comics and graphic novels, and addresses the challenges they face going into digital media:

• Format leading the eye down the page in portrait style doesn’t work in landscape style ie on screens
• You don’t get the canvass as it was intended, nor is it taking advantage of the things digital can do – akin to reading a book or watching a movie through a cardboard tube
• Motion comics are the devil – mini things with voiceover, but not comics – cheap animiation that leads you by the nose through the story

The north star philiosophy about what makes comcs comics and graphic novels a unique reading experience is that you are in charge of the pace of reading.

Thrillbent gives away free web comics that experiment with digital tools that retain what makes comics special but retains the unique and valuable properties of comics:

• Sequence pages – adding and substracting new images to give whole new context to the sequence – different elements give more or less weight to the story and need more or less time on the page
• Writers know putting exposition across is the worst thing in the world, especially in comics which is visual based – so exposition needs to be visual, not balloon after balloon of dialogue with no attention to the art – not page after page of guys in business suits standing around talking about stuff – that might be an awesome use of TV screen time, but a terrible use of comic book real estate because as a reader you’ve just paid a few bucks to watch a bunch of guys sit around
• Every word is a diamond, but use images from previous installments in a segment of the image sequence to recap exposition
• Taking advantage of what digital does – you can do this in print but it takes up a lot of real estate and doesn’t look as good
• Formatted especially for browser space – landscape optimised fonts, responsive size and shape depending on platform, panels load dynamically no page reloading.

Business models:

• Comics are doing well in print but the problem has been production costs, the same with all print – a comic selling for $3.99 – publisher gets $1.60 return from distributer – then the main cost is the printing (not marketing, overheads etc) and that cost keep going up – printing costs $1 of $1.60, so 50c has to cover all other costs.
• Thrillbent gives away free web comics so gets exposure: model is weekly, packaging them 4 weeks at a time with a little bonus material eg new cover and selling them through comiXology (main distributor) and those sales alone recoup production costs – not making a billion dollars but everybody gets paid, and that’s just one revenue stream – nobody gets rich, but everybody gets paid.
• Also iPad apps, Kickstarter – other revenue streams to explore – comics are not a high-overheads medium so they can play around. Do it for free online and find revenue elsewhere – three guys doing it in the spare time.

Comics are made of static images – on a craft level, what an entire industry has been doing since the 30s – but at Thrillbent, function doesn’t have to follow form, form now follows function

Take what you’re doing and think outside what the print page loks like – the beauty of digital devices is we are not selling you pictures of books, we are selling you a whole ‘nother publishing and reading experience

Try some stuff that fails, some succeeds – worst case scenario: no money, hit by a bus – if the next guys in digital comics go through the Thrillbent wreckage and find and used what works, then that’s fine – Mark just wants to take the football the next 30 feet down the field.

(mv: This keynote made me love both comics and Mark Waid. Awesome. Go check out Thrillbent right now! I’ll wait right here for you. Then you can come back and read Maria Popova’s Brainpicking goodness.)

*

Keynotes Maria Popova: Brain Pickings

(MV: Okay you have to visualise Maria wearing a bright yellow shirt – yes, that’s Brain Prickings yellow – if you don’t know what I’m talking about, check out her twitter avatar. SG: I can picture that.)

Maria is discussing ad-supported media and sponsored feature stories – the history, dangers and alternatives:

• Xerox paid $55,000 in 1976 to sponsor an Esquire story – a lot of money, and Esquire were very proud to usher in this new future for journalism >> EB White said it was the “end of free press” and “an introduction to corruption and abuse”, especially for “a pubilcaiton having a hard time to making times meet” – just like publications today.
• The Atlantic – sponsored content on scientology – tried it, got flack, pulled it down and apologized, explaining they are trying >> Andrew Sullivan said it was “Ad-whoredom of a particularly aggregious variety”
• recently in the NY Times online, an ad company had been hacked, which led to a malware warning when you tried to visit the site

We see online the same ad supported news that has been going for decades – tension between editorial and advertising departments:

• Decades ago, Brice Bliven was writing about syndicated material with more ads and more dumbed-down more pictures – all still contemporary topics
• Alissa Walker “The 5 things that bother me about this headline” – the success of bulleted lists, evidenced by user metrics, changes the way she approached her writing, and made her question whether she was a writer vs ‘content creator’

“A writer has a duty to be good…lively…accurate – shape life, not just report it” – EB White

When that dynamic is inverted so that public opinion shapes journalism, it’s dangerous.

Digital publishing is simple but neither easy nor cheap, see beautiful handmade pic of slide of Brainpickings costs:

• web hosting
• email delivering
• design etc

Brainpickings: running costs

Interesting revenue models and tools:

• RadioLab
• Flattr
• Science studio
• Spot us
• 99% invisible
• its okay to be smart
• Atravesado

The new ways are up to young people coming up – it is vital we give them the hope that there are other ways of earning a living and that they can invent them.

*

Okay, TOC 2103 is a wrap. Thanks for sharing it with me by reading along (SG: No, thank you). There were a lot of heavily tech streams that I didn’t cover here because they were mostly over my head (SG: Boo!), although they did present lots of great opportunities to follow Kate Pullinger’s advice and hug a technologist!

The main session I would have loved to cover (but got caught in a meeting) was Hugh Maguire’s ‘Book as API’ – I hope the slides go up at toccon.com – otherwise, you can read his book, written with Brian O’Leary, Book: A Futurist Manifesto. Also, check out this great example of the potential of book as API: Dracula Dissected.(SG: Also keep watching if:book, we’ll have more to show you on this topic soon).

Ubergeek Kirk Biglione assures me that at TOC this year, tech-wise, the general tenor was one of ‘getting down to business’ – the attending publishers no longer require convincing of the need for digital strategies – they are now interested in practical solutions to the issues at hand. Hopefully Australian publishers will be at that point soon, too.

I’m off to for a post-TOC drink and debrief, and then some ice-skating in Bryant Park. At sunset. On Valentines Day.

Now that’s a damn fine end to a damn fine TOC.

One of the great features of TOC 2013 is a stronger emphasis on the tools of change that relate to the creative development space, like the panel on Creators and Technology Converging: When Tech Becomes Part of the Story.

Here’s a couple of quick snips from the panel:

Kate Pullinger

Started writing what she termed digital fiction ten years ago – collaborative multimedia projects where text is primary – literary works, new hybrid forms of literature.

Definition of digital fiction: works that combine text with images, videos, animation, games and all the other elements that digitl platforms allow.

Flight Paths:

• Began the research phase of a novel by opening it up online – 100 particpants in conversation and created 6 stories for Flight Paths
• Next iteration of project – novel called Landing Gear – Flight aths is the digital prologue – novel will exist in 2014
• Multimedia epilogue: Duel (in collaboration with Andy Campbell of Dreaming Methods, fusing writing and new media eg. parallax views and 3D)

Three components work together to tell the story – if you really enjoy a novel you wonder what else is out there to enjoy the story – digital companions – bring readers in through spreadable media components – early days as to how they’ll be published – an interesting experiment.

Readers still look for the sustaining longform narrative, as well as what else can exist around that.

Kate spent 10 years writing for screens – collaboration, structuring story, dialogue, images, etc conveying information – shifted how she thinks about witing as a novelist – film language.

Digital handmade – in the digital age people crave the handmade – the digital literature that Kate makes is not machine-made – technologists are artists, and their code is handmade.

Changes in metrics as schools become digitally savvy, a new trend of whole-classroom viewing of the Inanimate Alice: audience is growing exponentially – shelf life of a digital project to a novel is very different.

Motion Poems: A non-profit that works to broaden the audience for poetry by turning great contemporary poems into short films

The Alpine Review: Subcompact publishing – a biannual mag that follows covers changes in systems, thought and creations around the world.

Alpine: Tech amplifies so much we are now flooded with sterile information – we need perspective:

• think in terms of systems as well as nodes: perspectives to understand change
• view: peaks (world view) + crevasses (niches)
• disruptions, tectonic shifts, changing landscapes

Print product instead of digital – tactile pleasures, hard copies, permanence, multiple senses – a consequence of technology is we have lost use of some of our senses – our senses have been on a diet.

The Silent History: a collaborative, serial, geolocative app book.

Notes from Douglas Rushkoff 

Present Shock – a free sample of Rushkoff’s new book is available here.

What is it like to be a human that evolved within time to now live in a world that is outside time, or that is only interested in the present moment? You’re trying to catch up on your twitter feed while your twitter feed is trying to catch up with you.

Presentism:

• for 1000 years society leaned towards the future
• now, the Mayans got it right – not the end of Time, but the end of time.

Text created lineality: the oldest text we have is contracts, an agreement to do something later – text creates a story to move forward with, and produced goal-oriented gods in place of chaotic, random ancient gods– be good now, get to heaven later.

Book as form:

The book is the perfect industrial age object – produced, measured, numbered. Digital happens in the now – more durable than book or scroll, but extremely presentist and ephemeral. In a digital age we become aware of the temporal compression in different forms of writing – you shouldn’t sweat 6 months on a tweet – the outcome isn’t balanced with the effort – time is compressed.

• Writing a book – 5 years of work – paid an advance – hours of reading
• Now, no advance – live flow – young people don’t read books (MV: oh, really? SG: be wary of anyone who makes claims such as this) – you can read a paragraph and it’s a fractal representation of the whole

Reading is more textual, like a rave, it’s not about the arc and the payoff anymore.

Books as business:

Digital is affecting both writing and books in the same way. Transition from industrial age banking, currency and transaction to digital age banking, currency and transaction industrial currency – store value over time, at interest. Digital currency – more peer-to-peer economy – more about its transactional value than storage value.

Big companies bought publishers as a growth industry, but it’s not, books are a sustainable industry.

Corporate capital, start-ups, Random House buying Penguin – create the illusion of growth by buying other companies – but on the ground, buying and selling books is becoming peer-to-peer, storified – people will supplied to “books” – all choice, all the time.

But the problem is, people end up reading in order to dismiss – not to ‘get’ it, but to dismiss it ‘oh I don’t need that’.

Books can be extended experiences of voluntary non-agency – surrender our authority to an author – our challenge is showing people that choice is entertaining and valuable

Notes from Evan Williams

Medium is Evan’s new project is a collaborative publishing platform. Medium – not ‘message’ but ‘medium length of time’.

It’s still in beta for posting, but you can have a look around.

Posts are organised into collections – topic or themed collections – posts not ordered by latest on top because Medium is moving way from the emphasis on the new so that things disappear really quickly, and instead invest in ideas that stick around because they’re good – ranked based on people’s reactions – posts can live in more than one collection to maximise discoverability – readers can make paragraph level comments.

Matter – long-form journalism through subscription, currently on Kickstarter – if it works, that’s great.

Many people don’t want a commitment to maintaining a blog and building an audience, but want a beautiful and meaningful place to record stories occasionally – maybe an idea or an event – and then other people are writing about that same idea or event, and on it goes – there’ll be a place for professional writers on Medium further down the track.

Professional publishing: what’s possible in digital is not just making distribution costs lower. There’s something possible about making it richer and more dynamic, and getting it into people’s hands sooner after it’s produced, allow more routes to discover and share ideas – don’t trap it in a book – doesn’t mean put it all out the for free – but embrace tools, change formats, increase efficiency and the surface area of the idea.

Henry Jenkins (HJ) in conversation with Cory Doctorow (CD) and Brian David Johnson (BDJ)

HJ

What happens when computing becomes so widespread we begin to wonder why we need it. Same question for publishing.

How do we think about the choices for different media – should content be film, book, etc?

Spreadable Media – rapid circulation – people have the capacity to pass content along – how we make those decisions?

New project: comics and graphic novels – visually dense and complex – colour and shifts in scale – 9 essays each published separately and serially – it at the end of the project it will be bundled and sold – all digital, never a print book.

CD

What we need to do pedagogy through literature is keywords – you need search words and also literacy about how to parse out the search results. Words in novels that have “just Google it” implied with it:

• The first inkling of what a 21st century novel looks like – always assuming there’s access to a search engine
• The old fear that using a calculator would make children’s brains lazy – now, good contemporary maths teaching always assumes there’s a calculator handy
• Movies that weren’t just a stage play, that weren’t just a play with a camera pointed at it

BDJ

The Vintage Tomorrow project is done, now there’s an opportunity to expand and continue as an ebook.

How can we have these conversations about the future? Goal: to get as many people having these conversations as possible – through conferences, sci fi, non fi, videos etc, moving from fiction to non-fiction to video and so on.

HJ

Content travels through different ways

1. Distribution: top down, controlled, corporations, paid
2. Circulation: bottom up, messy, free, ‘unauthorized’ (cf piracy – short cut the arguments about value – unauthorized spreading of media means creator may lose cultural control, but gain cultural value)

(eg Susan Boyle, Gangnam Style – circulation far surpassed other media that had traditional distribution)

• Circulation will surpass distribution as a way spread media

We need to change the way we think about how content travels – and every type of media moves differently.

CD

As mammals we are very invested in our reproductive system and progeny. This is very different to the reproductive strategies that Doctorow uses for his intellectual progeny.

We need to replace mammalian with dandelion reproductive strategies: dandelions don’t care about each seed, they care that every crack in the sidewalk has a dandelion seed in it. Doctorow wants to make sure everyone in the market to pay for a book has a chance to read his book.

BDJ

The type of stories we are talking about also talk back. Beatniks, hippies, each had a place where they went to express their identity (eg. San Francisco):

• If you want to be a steampunk you just go online – embedded in steampunk is the ability to talk back and be heard – spreading  and broadening the conversation –the ability to personalize and share opinions is baked into steampunk

CD

Spreadable media relies on the cost of reproduction being so cheap as to be indistinguishable from free. It’s crazy that Facebook charges you to spread media to people who have already said they like you.

BDJ

Distribution/circulation is only going to increase because in the future everything can be a device – cars, buildings, our bodies.

HJ

Viral versus spreadable: viral implies irrationality, susceptibility, vulnerability, and leads to two reactions:

1. The shrug – ‘I dunno, it just went viral’
2. Monetising – people who will charge you to make it viral

SciFi was built as a genre to talk about ideas – it assumed a fan elite that is going to ask questions.

CD

Doctorow produces Sci Fi that predicts the present – he takes a ubiquitous tech that’s so huge, it’s hard to say what’s happening to each of us as a result (eg computer networks), then he makes that the totalising factor that affects the world – puts it in a petri dish to see what happens.

HDJ

The future is not an accident – Doctorow uses fiction and nonfiction to create a platform to express and explore opinion: SciFi with intent of having a point of view can have a huge effect.