• Objectius
• Membres del Comitè
• Redacció de la revista VISAT
• Trobada del T&LRC (Juny 2010)

The book in the diffusion new cultural market

When it seemed that all the possible paths in the arts had already been taken, it transpires – at least with regard to books, if I limit myself to literature only – that new ways have appeared of reaching the reader. Moreover, not only new ways but also new readers, different readers, who either do not want or do not have the time to page through thick books of the kind that we have known since Gutenberg. However, it does seem that the traditional book is very resilient and in spite of the forecasts of its demise it lives on, in spite of announcements of its death, it is very much alive. Of course, the traditional book will survive, at least among book lovers and there has never been a shortage of those and never shall be. Or it will be printed on demand, which is already happening and will, according to a Slovene expert in the book trade, the executive director of publishing at the largest Slovene publishing house and a lecturer at the Department of Library and Information Science and Book Studies at the Ljubljana Faculty of Arts, look like a scene from the well-known popular cartoon series Profesor Baltazar: an “Espresso Book Machine”, which spews out books. At the same time, book production is moving to China, thus reducing production costs; books will be even more varied and accessible to readers, who will read more and more. There is already an increasing number of books available, so that we cannot help but ask who will manage to sell them all.

These issues and many like them are what all those involved in books on the global market, be it on the business side or as authors or readers, are probably wondering about. The market characteristics are not greatly different in countries with a large, well-developed market from those with a smaller market. Globalisation and technological development have brought with them digitalisation. Suddenly literature is reaching readers through the internet. Completely new technological and social phenomena are appearing. The thick book that our parents were familiar with first changed into a small, pocket-size book to be read whilst travelling, which is becoming the e-book or e-reader, attempting to do away with the traditional manner of production and appearance of books, and the traditional way of reading. This new form is, in addition to the traditional reader, also seeking out new readers, connected through their e-readers or via a computer to the world wide web. And all this is not far from the e-reader, which will demand from the reader – or the reader himself will paradoxically demand – that he is actively included in the process. We already talk about electronic literature, hypertextual literature and literary texts facilitated by Flash and other platforms, novels in the form of e-mails, poetry in the form of mobile phone texts, blogs and even texts created by computers and literature connected with computer games.

This reminds me of the literary theoretical discussions in the past about the difference between a modern avant-garde poem and a text that was shaped into a poem by random computer selection.
The expressions hypertext and hypermedia were introduced as early as the 1960s by Theodor Holm Nelson, thirty years prior to hypertext becoming an active text through the mass use of computers, internet connections and the world wide web, thus becoming a part of our daily experience. The manner of reading is changing radically. Experts talk about so-called fast reading, which will have consequences in scientific, humanist and social terms. The phrase “turning the pages of a book” will be replaced by “typing and clicking” and the reader will eventually come up with his own ending to a book.

This leads us to the fact that we will no longer go to a bookshop to get a book, perhaps we will still go to a library, but we will access what we want via a browser and click our way into the virtual space. The internet is affecting not only the human attention span, which is getting increasingly shorter, the perception of time and space and the understanding of what is happening in society, but also constantly touches upon the very concept of books and the place they occupy on the cultural market, the marketing itself and selling methods, as well as the creation of these methods – in short, everything that is involved with a book and its journey from the author to the reader. The process has thus already begun, in a certain sense with the influence of other media such as radio and television. Publishing houses, libraries and, above all, the famous Google are already reacting to the process. Google wishes to make reading and the knowledge squeezed between two book covers accessible to everyone who wants to access it, irrespective of their purchasing power. A noble gesture, indeed, but it will still not reach the underdeveloped world quite so soon; the same happened with the traditional book. Google talks about a noble mission as it plans to digitalise 10 million book titles, which will be available by 2015. This was welcomed by many, but writers’ associations and publishers rebelled against it because the system ignores copyright. They are accusing Google of colonial motives and manners. Even the European Union was stirred into creating Europeana, a European digital library, which will include not only printed works, but also music recordings and works of fine art. All this is supposed to be available at the www.europeana.eu portal this autumn.

Initially, I was going to focus in this paper on Slovene conditions, but I realised that we are included in all these processes much more than I had imagined. We can, however, in connection with this, talk about Slovene libraries and publishing houses. Even in Slovenia publishers offering e-books are beginning to appear, among them Ruslica. But as there are not enough books in Slovene, readers and consequently also libraries are turning to English, which is the obvious solution, and librarians are powerless to stop it. The first libraries have already bought e-readers as surveys showed that readers want them. While taking into account copyright, they have offered their borrowers the chance to borrow e-readers. These are taken by students for the mandatory school reading as well as by others, whilst with regard to content they feature authors that are already read in traditional form. Thus librarians are not afraid of sawing off the branch they are sitting on. But readers still manage to stray among the traditional books shelves as well. It is believed that e-books and e-readers will only supplement and not replace the traditional book.

“E-books will only really take off when people get used to them,” observes our colleague (editor and PEN member) Andrej Blatnik. “They’re not there yet, but they will be. Partly because of the price, partly because of the e-readers themselves and partly because of the content. Mobile phones have also become indispensable, even when we want geographical information we now look at Google Earth rather than an atlas.” The world is changing so fast that printed dictionaries and lexicons become dated as soon as they are published. We look for information on the internet. E-books appear hand-in-hand with modern consumerism and free choice. The creative editor of one of Slovene magazines says that e-books are here, they are a fact, they are knocking on our door and entering our everyday existence. She wonders when the Slovene publishing business model will be such as to allow the sale and purchase of copyrights that will facilitate the normal functioning and survival of publishers and authors.

An editor with a student publisher swears by the “swish and the movement of air created by book pages”. Moreover, an e-reader doesn’t fit in a rucksack, he says. An arts programme editor at Slovene Television maintains that a computer screen with its “virtual reality” does not offer added value. A younger, already established writer, finds an e-reader a handy tool for when you are on holiday or when studying. When he is able to load any book, he will buy one himself and read in bed without having to turn from one side to another with a book in his hand. A well-known web designer and strategist sees very erotic possibilities in e-readers. He is interested in both writing and reading and is awaiting the first “vook” (a video book), as well as being very enthusiastic about the possibility of having the 30,000 works from the Gutenberg project on his iPad. A researcher and teacher in the field of new media said that e-books will sell better and better and that new literary hybrids are on the way.

Literary content is thus becoming ever more accessible, but in connection with this we come across the issue of copyrights – but that is another story altogether. And where exactly in all this is the diffusion in the cultural market?

Ivo Frbežar, Slovene PEN centre