Writing and Reading Technologies

Remington Typewriter Commercial (1958)

Secretary’s Day (1947, interesting gender dynamics about typewriters etc.)

Twenty-Six Characters (1947 documentary about the history of the alphabet)

Basic Typewriting Methods and History from US Navy (1944)

A Video About Civilization and the Alphabet (1968)

Print Culture & Books

Opportunities for Work in Printing(1947)

Film about Student Journalism Censorship (1963) 

Sending Pictures by Wire (1937)

Making Books (1947)

Journalism (1940)

Schools and Literacy

The Children Must Learn (1940)

Build your Vocabulary (1948)

Writing Better Social Letters (1950)

Computing and information technologies

Word Processing Discussion (1984)

Sharp Calculator Advert (1970s)

Computers and Illiteracy (1980s)

Commodore 64 Profile 

The Information Machine (IBM Video, 1958)

Is contemporary self-publishing really self-publishing? 

Not really. First, I think the discussion would take a giant leap forward if everyone began referring to self-publishing as *commons-based publishing* or even social publishing. There’s simply nothing self or individual about self-publishing. Most successful self-publishing authors rely on extensive networks of peer production. They rely on peers (often internet friends) to help them edit their work, to help them with various stages of book production, and to help them with reviewing, marketing, and spreading word-of-mouth.

I’m deriving the term “commons-based publishing” from the work of Yochai Benkler and his theory of nonmarket social production. Commons-based production refers to the systems of sharing on the internet. When an author gets a blogger to review her book, the author is essentially leveraging value from social sharing to help create word-of-mouth publicity. Benkler’s work helps explain why “commons-based publishing” is now a viable option for certain kinds of authorship. CBP doesn’t mean authors give their work away for free because in CBP, the market can interface with the nonmarket in valuable ways. If you want a full explanation, Benkler’s Wealth of Networks is a dense book but worth the read. You need some imagination to relate it to contemporary publishing, but it can be done productively. He’s got a TED talk here and I hope to provide a primer to his work and its relationship to publishing in my next post.

Second, we need to remember that there’s no such thing as publishing. Publishing is contextual. There’s textbook publishing, academic publishing, big six trade publishing, religious publishing, independent publishing, small press publishing, etc. There’s also social authorship/publishing, which as a Margaret Ezell has shown, has been around for hundreds of years.

Publishing varies according to the nature of the book’s information and the targeted audience. The flexibility of digital publishing will highlight these differences in the long run, with different sectors of publishing settling on different business models, with some probably folding altogether (see below).

Just as there is no good way to talk about “publishing” as a monolith, there’s no good way to talk about commons-based authors as a monolith. There are recreational authors, niche content authors, hobbyists, academics, first-book authors, published authors who have decided to go the DIY route, etc…

Are we in a commons-based publishing bubble?  

We’ve seen lots of utopian language about the coming of self-publishing and how it will liberate us from publishers. There’s an explosion of self-publishing yada yada yada. Most of this language just rehashes utopian ideas from debates about the internet in the 1990s. Much of this language creates over-excitement about self-publishing, and much of this language is actually produced by companies who sell services to self-publishers. Surprise. For the record, I found similar language in advertisements about “commission publishing” in England from as early as 1845.

If we are in a bubble, then so what? The dotcom bubble burst, but the internet stuck around. Commons-based publishing is not going anywhere, and neither are the millions of people who write books for fun and want to share them. Those writers have been around for well more than 100+ years. What’s different now is that authors have widespread access to distribution technologies and the potential of the commons. That doesn’t mean most will find more than 100 readers. What it means is that they have access to distribution technologies and the potential of the commons. The poor economy is probably also inflating the number of books written at the moment. People have time to write when they are unemployed.

Does the internet with its $.99 self-published ebooks make it impossible for professionals to earn a living as an author? 

Could be yes. Could be no. But in either case let’s remember there was no magical time when authors were flush. The point: it has always been almost freaking impossible to earn a living solely as a book author. That is why so many writers are also academics, editors, journalists, etc. We have really limited data about these questions, but what I have seen suggests that when we talk about the “representative” author of the 20^thcentury, we are talking about someone who published a single book, made just over minimum wage doing it, then disappeared into the ether. By nature authorship is mostly ephemeral, and that’s why it has been mostly an avocation or hobby. This is the standard we need to use to measure the success of authors who publish work through the internet.

Does the flood of amateur writers hurt the wages of professional writers? 

I don’t think we know yet. But this question has been asked before, and it has an interesting history, especially because the internet has been a huge boon to amateur writers looking to have some fun. As Ann Fabian has pointed out, when authorship in America became more professional in the 19th century, professionals often systematically dismissed or devalued the work of amateurs. There’s been a thin blurry line between amateur authorship and professional authorship. And that blurry line has pissed professional authors off something fierce. As a consequence, the longstanding beef professional authors have with amateurs is almost as robust as the longstanding beef they have with publishers.

Will the flood of user-generated books overwhelm readers? 

Meh. Readers have been finding ways to deal with the flood for a long time. There’s nothing more overwhelming than walking through a research library. You get a huge sense of panic once you realize you could scarcely read a single floor’s worth of information in your life, and yet we still rightly venerate those institutions.

Writers began overwhelming publishers with manuscripts as early as the 19^th century as paper became cheaper. According to Michael Winship, the slush pile of the legendary American publishing house Ticknor and Fields grew so big in the 19^th century that they began offering to publish books at the author’s expense to earn income from it. In short, this flood of writing seems to have has its origins in the 19^th century with cheap paper, although complaints about it go back much further. The internet lets us see and quantify a phenomenon that used to hide in desk drawers.

Will this flood tick off readers? First, the twentieth century was pretty damn saturated with books to begin with. Second, from what I can tell, most readers understand user-generated content as user-generated content, and adapt accordingly. In a wonderful bit of irony sure to please those panicked by the flood, many authors I have interviewed have been inspired to write after coming across a bad book and deciding they could do better. Writing begets writing, a wonderful thing for those of us fascinated by the writing lives of ordinary people.

Will commons-based authors become disillusioned when they don’t acquire fame and fortune? 

Answer: Only if they are deeply misinformed about the probability of success to begin with. Morrison’s article says self-publishers will become disillusioned when they only sell 100 books. Actually of the 75 or so self-publishers I interviewed for a research project I am working on, many just enjoyed the writing process and wanted to share their work. They had other jobs and other hobbies. Some had tens of thousands of readers, and others were excited about having 100 readers. I suspect these recreational authors still comprise the bulk of self-publishers. Some authors I interviewed had dreams of fame and fortune, but they were in the minority.

Wasn’t Amanda Hocking’s success an anomaly? 

Duh. Well-paid authors are mostly anomalies. The significance of the Hocking story is that she created a self-publishing dream that authors can chase. Because commons-based publishing is now mostly free using POD and ereaders, she will spawn thousands of would-be imitators trying to replicate her success. This seems more like a banal point than something to get excited about.

Will commons-based publishing and the internet kill the publishing industry? 

Answer: 42. I think what we mean to ask is this: how will the internet and commons-based publishing reconfigure the publishing industry over time?  The work of publishing has not gone away. It’s important. It still needs to be done. It’s just not likely to be done using 20^th century divisons of labor. When a book is successful it creates far more work than the author can handle, and that work needs to be distributed somewhere. At the end of the day, publishers provide enormous value to the production of high quality books by doing this work. At the end of the day, though, durable & high quality books comprise only a tiny fraction of all books ever produced. And that has been the case since well before the interwebz.

“Once he [the writer] enjoyed the small prestige accruing from the possession of talents not generally possessed. Today, though the real writer is still numerically rare, he does not seem to be. Universal literacy has made him appear as pervasive as light and air”

“Universal literacy is an American passion with serious–almost religious–overtones. This passion has been so fervently cultivated that now everybody can ‘read’ and ‘write.’ What were formerly activities whose essential connection was with thinking have now become universally practiced small-muscle movements of the eyes and fingers, movements into which thought may or may not enter”

“We have all become ‘readers’ and ‘writers’ in that we are all proficient in these small-muscle gestures. Hence the writer and the ‘writer’ are confused in the public mind. [...] Amid this flurry of wholesale small-muscle activity, the voice of the old-fashioned writer, who works with real emotions and real ideas and struggles with exacting techniques, may be lost. His value depreciates because he seems to be doing only what everybody else is doing. His value is further depreciated by the inevitable consequence of mass literacy–easy printability. Everything gets into print.”

EDIT: After a few days to think I am pretty sure I have seen this recur as a joke across the history of the 20th century. I wonder how far back it goes…

Cliff Notes of the post: It is an amazing seminar.

What I hear Reid saying, though, is that even if presses find sustainable ways to continue producing monographs, there is still no guarantee of a readership for a published book. Much humanities research goes unread and uncited. One of Reid’s solutions is fewer books and more co-authorship, something I would love to see. Other solutions exist too, including R1 departments dropping the monograph as a requirement for tenure so books can incubate in the minds of scholars for decades before they are published if need be, or more importantly finding ways to value the wonderful kinds of digital scholarship derived from the potential of new information technologies.

I want to linger on the book rather than take up digital scholarship, though, because I want to extend Reid’s thoughts on books beyond the academy to draw some parallels to contemporary book culture. The phenomena he identified—the book read by only a few hundred people—is experiencing explosive growth. Contemporary statistics of books and reading are notoriously unreliable, but in 2004 Nielson Bookscan suggested 93% of ISBNs sell less than 1000 copies, and that number is dated and it doesn’t account for the self-publishing authors that I discussed in my #CWCON presentation, whose numbers have soared over the last six years. Writing books is an unacknowledged American pastime, and now that POD and e-reader distribution means publication can happen quite easily without the capital investment of a third party, writing books is the new reading books. We’re talking millions of amateur and quasi-professional book writers here looking for readers.

These conditions have prompted my current project that asks how such abundance is going to affect how we understand authorship. And there are some provocative questions to be asked, many of which translate well into our current monograph problems in academics: When the means of producing books become radically distributed, is readership an appropriate metric of a book’s value? And what is it about the legacy of the book that induces us to register one that reaches 300 people as a failure? I think, perhaps, the book that reaches 300 people might be the representative book, although we still think this problematic because we conceptualize the book as a public good, with assumptions about the public tied to the nation-state and the cultural authority of the author.

What is clear is that notion of book and author from the age of print do not provide appropriate conceptual categories to talk about contemporary authorship and book culture. Seen from traditional print publishing, books that only reach 300 people register as failures. But I have a slew of evidence that books that reach 300-1500 people are doing profound, localized cultural work. How do we recalibrate our expectations of books in the midst of such abundance? Authorship is no longer scarce, and most books won’t find a widespread readership, so how can we understand them for the work they are doing rather than the work they aren’t?

When: April 15th from 4:10 to 5:30

Where: 320B Pardee Hall

Roxane Gay has a fairly extensive post about self-publishing. I agree with many of her points, but I want to discuss her assessment of how writers should value their writing because I’ve been doing some qualitative research in this area lately.

Gay mentions that she bought a number of self-published books from Amazon, and that only one of them was “excellent.” Some of them, according to Gay, were terrible and error-ridden. Fair enough. More on this point later.

Then she moves on to talk about some contemporary trends in self-published ebook pricing:

“There is also the matter of price which seems a little out of control for self publishers. Particularly where e-books are concerned, many self published writers are basically giving their writing away for $.99-$2.99. Lincoln Michel wrote a really great article for the Faster Times about e-book pricing. The $.99 price point is a terrible, terrible idea and it sets a terrible, terrible precedent. It makes no sense to sell a 300 page book for the same price as a three minute song. If we as writers don’t value our craft enough to price our work appropriately, how can we expect readers to want to pay appropriate prices? If you have to basically give your writing away, what does that tell you?”

What I see here is part of a general trend in discussion of self-publishers: tacit assumptions that self-publishers want to be professional writers, or that they are aspiring professional writers who want their writing valued in monetary terms. That may be the case with many. But in the dozens of interviews I have conducted with independent authors, many have told me they write for fun, for recreation. For these writers, who can now compete with professional writers for the attention of readers, it makes lots of sense to sell their writing for $.99 or even give it away for free.  In fact many recreational writers I have interviewed distribute their work for free under the same ethic of sharing that pervades the open-access software movement. They care far more about being read than making money. They care about the feedback and the social solidarity that comes with publishing into online communities. The value these writers extract from their books does not come from money. Being read is more important than being published for them.

I think in the long run self-publishing might de-professionalize mid-list writers, especially those without entrepreneurial savvy. (Actually, economic analysis from the twentieth century shows most mid-list American authors weren’t full time writers anyway). At the very least, easy publishing puts a burden on would-be professionals to compete with writers who don’t particularly care about making money as writers. Many will give their writing away to anyone who will read it, and with good cause.

Let’s keep this in mind as we return to Gay’s article and her point that she found an “excellent” self-published book on Amazon. The point is not that Gay found ONLY one excellent self-published book among those she bought. The point is that Gay managed to FIND one excellent book among those she bought. That is enormously important. If only 1% of self-published fiction books are good, that still leaves readers with thousands upon thousands of good, cheap, self-published books to choose from. That number will probably only grow.  It’s a consequence of authorship no longer being scarce.

I will post a full review soon, but I will say that I am struggling with the text. The issues of commons-based peer production that Cummings confronts have barely been broached in our field, and Cummings is already trying to develop a full FYC pedagogy from it. In writing studies at least, we have barely had a conversation about it, and I don’t see why it should start at pedagogy, given the very little we know about how writers outside the academy work with CBPP.

I began reading this book while grading papers for an FYC class I am teaching, the focus of which is writing in digital environments. We spent three weeks talking about the web and collaboration, and we talked about Wikipedia too. I did not take the same approach as Cummings, though. Rather than have my students write for Wikipedia, we used it as a primary data source to understand how writers collaboratively work through issues of writing and knowledge production. We spent three weeks on it, and the assignment I gave the students was difficult. They had to conduct original research using the talk pages of Wikipedia and the revision histories to understand how writing on wikis works.

The students mostly did a superb job. Because so few articles have been published about Wikipedia from a writing studies standpoint, in almost every class I have students raise questions that could lead to a publishable paper, and this is coming from first-year composition. Some of the questions students have addressed: How do wiki awards influence the dynamics of revision? How do Wikipedians negotiate international language standards? And how does the language used to represent people change in response to media converge? (Someone looked at the introduction to Michael Jackson’s entry at crucial times across the past decade, and unsurprisingly, the tone grew much more laudatory after his death).

So in contrast to Cummings advocating that students write on Wikipedia, I am having success getting students to do original research about Wikipedia. I suspect having students write on Wikipedia definitely has value, but it pigeonholes students into working in a single genre. There’s the rub with exploiting CBPP for composition classes: it requires finding sustainable locations with participation robust enough to produce the rhetorical dynamics in multiple genres that produce feedback for students, dynamics that aren’t homophobic, misogynistic, or racist because, after all, we are talking about students writing on the internets. And the internets, as we know, are serious business