Christine
Böhler (Vienna)
The World of
Digital Literature
1. The WWW is a publishing and distribution medium and can be used for
these purposes by all users. Mini-media and middle-media are added to the range
of classic mass media. The mass media are losing their discursive power
2. A collectively produced universal text with a large community potential
and a high anonymity value is emerging.
3. The new space is settled and interpreted as various stakeholders engage
with it at different levels of power, using strategies that grow ever more
similar. These subcultures can be reached globally.
4. On the Net there is no verifiable identity.
5. As culture is considered a commodity by the information industry a
dynamic is introduced to the very notion of culture, leading to new issues in
various fields (e.g. authorship, copyright, the notion of the work, quality).
Literature is leaving its traditional locations, the Net is offering new ways
of articulation and representation. This is linked with economic, social and
aesthetic shifts. Judgements are increasingly formed via communication
(polling) in a move from expert opinion to majority opinion. Relations between
publishing houses, completion dates, bookshops, authors are changing. Voting
becomes the model according to which judgements are formed -
6. The IT industry is gaining a high profile in areas previously reserved
to the book market. At the same time, publishing houses are re-defining the
focus of their work.
7. Due to the strong tendencies towards individualism that come with
globalization, the individual has to assume more responsibility.
8. The Net calls for disparate, fragmented texts; these are circulated
world-wide, constantly refer to one another and can be found again and again in
innumerable combinations, often as polytexts.
9. More than ever, the aesthetically difficult forms of literature and art,
unsuited for marketing by the entertainment industry, need a lobby of their
own. The shift in cultural values places more emphasis on subject matters that
can be exploited globally than on local goods. Small-scale publishing is
replaced by do-it-yourself publishing. At the same time, liberalization leads
to spending cuts in subsidies to literature, thus shifting responsibility to
private sponsors.
1. The Net as a Participatory Medium
"The dream behind the Web
is of a common information space in which we communicate by sharing
information. Its universality is essential: the fact that a hypertext link can
point to anything, be it personal, local or global, be it draft or highly
polished."[1] By making
this demand on the WWW Berners-Lee laid the foundation for the Net as a
participatory medium. Every person who has a computer and Internet access is
given an opportunity to publish documents on the WWW. This is a far cry from
the expensive and cumbersome medium of book printing – everybody can be
his or her own publisher. The WWW is a huge publishing system consisting of
numberless micro-audiences. In principle, the Net is accessible world-wide and
"for everyone" but in fact it is primarily available to the higher
social strata in the industrialized nations and calls for the dominating
English language.
In her 1995
article "Cyberspace is Not Disneyland" Amy Bruckman described the Net
as "a finger-painting party. Everyone is making things, there's paint
everywhere, and most work only a parent would love. Here and there, works
emerge that most people would agree are achievements of note. The rich variety
of work reflects the diversity of participants. And everyone would agree, the
creative process and the ability for self expression matter more than the
product."[2] The WWW
created an almost boundless world of people writing and publishing what is
called 'personal narrative' in the United States. The personal narrative community forming the mini-medium is not interested in quality, sales
or profits. In a global network of media you can find contacts for any topic.
Websites can be developed easily and quickly using software such as Blogger.
The term Weblog, denoting innumerable diary projects, is derived from it.
Weblogs, which apart from their diary function also fulfil the task of
reporting about other weblogs and sites, and to discuss their contents with
friends, acquaintances and other users, form the middle-media level. This
is where stories are gathered, sites are presented, where things are assessed,
decried, and discussed. Metafilter (www.metafilter.com
) was one of the first weblogs that started to collect and recycle content
on a private basis. The sites of the newly emerged middle media level shows
how the Net advances the production of polytexts: texts recur, refer to one
another, are passed on, translated, quoted in newsgroups, analyzed and re-published
on the Net. Commercial middle-media sites use this communicative principle
by combining it with the number of user visits. Plastic calls it "recycling
the web", for The Vines it is "The Encyclopedia
of Everything, Built by Everyone". Polling models become ever more widespread
when quality needs to be assessed on the Net, and this is also true of literature
(www.t-online.de/literaturpreis/ or www.delreydigital.com).
2.
Hyperfiction and the
German-Language Literary World
Hyperfiction is
literary theory and practice, media critique and aesthetic model at the same
time. The digital narrative form claims post-modern literary theory and
practice, models of linguistics, literary reviews and literary utopias for
itself. The concept of hypertext, in conjunction with the computer, promised
that the narrative form would change radically: hypertext would replace the
novel. Big words repeating themselves: God is dead, the book is dead, the novel
is dead.
At the theoretical level, hyperfiction as a form of computer literature
of the eighties and early nineties dealt with its raison d'être within
the canon of literature. Works remain bound to the book as a medium, precisely
what hyperfiction was against, and the book, declared dead, stayed the measure
of all things. Caught between the limited technical possibilities of early
software and the definition of a new medium (computer, hypertext) via an old
one (book, writing), hyperfiction failed to stand its ground.
In the
German-speaking countries the reception of "computer literature" came
via the United States, and in particular via the hypertext concept. It embraced
the message of the death of the book along with the metaphor of the network.
Hypertext became deeply engrained as a synonym of digital literature. The
discourse has continued to determine the debate about literature and New Media
in the media, in science and aesthetics until today. A debate about the death
of the book, the limits of writing, the power of the author, the reader...
The literary
world considers these points identical with New Media and bides its time.
Many of the ideas,
demands and utopias linked with hypertext and hyperfiction seem to have been
incorporated in the WWW. Power distributed among users, co-determination in
fora such as www.plastic.com, anonymous
authorship, changing identities, plagiarism, publishing for all – these
have been taken over by Net Art and the IT industry. In an interview Mark
Amerika, the operator of Alt-X, describes
these developments as technological in nature: "Hypertext is a composition
and publication tool at the same time. As it was only available on disks, it
did not reach the general public, and nobody knew about it. It did not have
that third aspect: the character of a marketing tool. That was added with
HTTP."
3. Content
Business
_ Changes for
Publishers
Since Gutenberg's days the administration of content and the
determination of quality features had been a task assigned to the publishing
industry. Digital communication and publishing media have, however, brought
about a shift of paradigm in this context. Multi-media groups are mingling with
the business, an increasing number of authors seek to avoid them by using their
own structures. The print media publishers have their contacts with authors and
strong brands, but it remains to be seen if these are strong enough to survive
the change-over to the new medium.
To date, the new technologies had the strongest impact on encyclopaedia
publishers. The contents of encyclopaedias, short entries organized along
lexical lines are specially suited for use on the Net and with the help of New Media.
Ten years ago, the Encyclopædia Britannica cost roughly DEM 1,000.-,
today it can be bought on CD-ROM for DEM 169.-. Microsoft mingled with the
business, publishing the "Encarta Encyclopaedia" on CD-ROM in 1996.
From 1990 to 1997 the sales of printed Encyclopædia Britannica versions fell by
almost 90 per cent. The publishing house was sold, the new owner wanted to
market the lexicon online. Access to the Web Encyclopaedia could be subscribed
to at 5 US-dollars a month. However, it did not work out – since the
autumn of 1999 the Encyclopædia Britannica can be queried on the Net
free of charge.
Content as the most important commodity sold by publishers is subject to
change both in terms of definition and economic meaning. Contents hitherto
defined as culturally valuable are losing their significance in the information
society since they do not lend themselves well to exploitation in the New
Media. Short units of text with a specialized content are in demand, of the
kind which can produce new contexts when combined with other content. One and
the same text can figure in different languages, contexts and on several sites
on the Net. These polytexts have little in common with the classic model of the
book. The Internet as a "content industry" is threatening the classic
business segments of the publishing industry while at the same time offering
new opportunities. Literary publishers are in particular oriented on the model
of the book, a fact that is also reflected in their all but exclusive
commitment to the e-book.
The distribution of discursive power in the media has changed. Attention
is spread over a much wider range. There is a tendency towards outsourcing in
parallel with developments in the media, and frequently, the New Media are
involved here: there are no transport expenses, and proof-reading, clipping
services, public relations, distribution are spun off. Publishers' ideals such
as the lasting value of a work are replaced by the constraints of topicality
and production, a new generation of readers is emerging, people who have come
to know the screen as a means of reading and communicating on a par with the
book. The classic understanding of what it means to be a publisher has come
under discussion, the cycles of production and innovation become shorter.
Topicality turns into a criterion for quality. Works can be exploited for as
long as they are protected by copyright, and after that all that remains is
adaptations and stagings.
At the same time, politics increasingly expose publishers to the free play
of market forces, e.g. when abolishing reduced postage for periodicals.
_ The New
Publishers and their "Solutions"
The
"new" publishers on the Net present themselves as open fora
accessible to everyone. The literary world which has grown for centuries to
become a control mechanism regulated by quality and access is losing power. It
is only the Net that makes the uncontrolled world-wide mushrooming of texts and
documents possible, with all its advantages and disadvantages. It is certainly
advantageous that subcultures find it easier to organize themselves, that
small-scale publishers, fanzines, a wide variety of interest groups can be
found and reached world-wide.
Publishers define
themselves as information service providers, they have stopped publishing for
certain media formats as they focus on the needs of their respective target
group instead. They produce content to be processed for various media formats
as and when required. For this purpose data must be stored in a neutral form so
that they can be easily used and re-used in different media. The concept of
publishing independently of a medium aims at converting data to a uniform
digital format and storing them.
Publishing
independently of a medium does not so much point to creative solutions but rather
to the protracted and cumbersome change-over to new production structures. The
change-over will take a few more years. If you want to know the status of
creative force in many New Media publishing houses, all you have to do is look
at some of their websites. They usually consists of a static list of titles
with blurbs and authors' portraits, as well as dates of completion and related
events. At the level of form, hard-cover and soft-cover books are complemented
by new "book formats": in the case of the e-book, the digitised text
is processed as a "book" but not printed. The e-book introduces a new
price category in the book trade.
In the case of
print on demand, the text is published in the form of a book again: when a book
is ordered, it will be printed and delivered. This pays off in runs below 500
copies, otherwise offset printing is more profitable.
Another important
aspect can be found in the changes ensuing for the distribution and
organization of texts in the new contexts of the Net.
_ Changes in Copyright
As computer technology tends to encompass all media,
content is defined as the totality of digital data: images, sounds, text and
software, user data, e-mail addresses, archives, news groups. Standards
concerning production and business processes which had hitherto been accepted
are starting to change, as are cultural and societal conventions.
In February 2001 various communities cried out in
dismay: Google, a search engine operated by IBM, bought the Usenet
Archive. Usenet is a collection of news groups bringing together more
than 500 million messages, "more than a terabyte of human
conversation," as the PR text on the Google site said. The package, the
price of which was not disclosed, also contained software, various domains and
trademarks. The value of this collection of messages sent and opinions voiced
by individuals is derived from the fact that it can easily be searched when
turned into a data base. The totality of entries is more valuable than the sum
total of the parts. A work placed on the Net in the form of contributions of
individuals acquires economic value. Those who contributed did not get
anything.
Those who operate the server, manage mailing lists or
news groups have the best access to the data of a community. This kind of
multiple authorship shifts the copyright problem. No longer does one publisher
negotiate terms with one author, the owner of the technical equipment
negotiates with a large number of authors who may even remain anonymous.
This new kind of knowledge acquisition by publishing
groups acting globally can also be found in publications in the field of the
natural sciences. A few large companies are dominating the market. While
scientific treatises could be read in libraries and photocopied, the big
scientific publishers have now increasingly moved towards publishing such
content in electronic form only. As a consequence, libraries no longer
subscribe to a journal but pay for the number of readers who looked at an
article. "Looking" is the right word because printouts are
prohibited. This means that scientific knowledge can no longer circulate
freely: a limiting factor for researchers who do not have sufficient funds at
their disposal as well as those whose university or library does not have the required
technical equipment. The archives of knowledge are in jeopardy, too: the
reliability of digital storage media is unknown, CD-ROMS are expected to last
for 50 years but nobody has yet been able to verify that. So far, scientists
made their publications available to scientific journals free of charge and
assigned the copyrights to the publishers. The Public Library of Science calls for making
scientific articles available to the general public free of charge after a
protection period of six months during which publishers can generate a profit.
_ Changes for
Authors
Print on demand,
often praised as "the liberation of authors" because they have the
means of production at their disposal now, also creates completely new
requirements for authors. On the WWW they are sellers and buyers, authors and
reviewers at the same time. The innumerable opportunities of publishing, the
fact that publishing houses increasingly define themselves as pure service
providers require more management and PR skills from authors.
In contrast to
e-books, print on demand (POD) aims at publishing a text in the form of a book.
POD benefits from the electronic format because, unlike books, its storage
costs are negligible: 150 pages of text in PDF format require roughly 600 KB
storage space. There is no returns provision in POD because a commission to the
author becomes due once a text has been printed, and double sales must be ruled
out. For this reason book dealers must in any event pay POD books they ordered.
It remains to be seen whether book dealers will offer many of these low-number
editions. Thus, the customers will not have much of a chance of seeing the book
before buying. For this reason publishers acting in a global media environment
will need a well-structured network of contacts with known interests so they
can identify and grasp their opportunities on the market. Authors will become
interesting as both target groups and groups of publishers, new structures will
emerge, seeking, either free of charge or against a fee, to attract attention
for the books mainly produced by do-it-yourself publishing, offering PR,
proof-reading, graphic art and advertising services, from the creation of a
website to the presentation of the book.
Authors, barely liberated
from the dictatorship of the literary world, will not only enjoy new freedom
but will also have to accept new obligations. When authors become publishers,
they also have to assume new tasks. The instructions of the POD provider bod.de
called "This is how it works" fill no less than nine web pages.
Commercial and communicative skills are called for, in some cases, e.g. with Del
Rey Digital, copyrights must be given up before one can
participate in a forum.
Open-ended definitions of literature, interdisciplinary work in the
totality of the literary world, made possible by additional know-how on the
part of all those concerned (creative workers, operators, scientists), as well
as flexible approaches by those in charge of exploitation and the
representation of interests will be required for the literature of the coming
years.