I don’t know why I bothered with that query mark. Of course the web is the future of the novel. It’s the way forward for almost everything. Now we have to remind ourselves that the web is not rather more than ten years outdated, and that the revolution has only simply begun. Consider where the automobile was after just ten years of existence, or the aeroplane, or transferring pictures. And think of how far they’ve come since. We have now seen, to date, only a tiny fraction of what the web can and will do. However I’ve already seen more than enough to conclude that in my very own discipline of curiosity, literature, the writing is on the wall for the normal paper book.
I do not say this in a spirit of glee or provocation. In actual fact I would be much happier if it weren’t the case. I really like books. I love the way you may read them wherever — on the bus, the aircraft, over dinner, in bed, racked out on the couch. I like the best way you’ll be able to flick forward by them should you get bored, or flick back to examine on stuff you missed. I really like the way new ones smell totally different from outdated ones. Yet it is not onerous to see how most of these items — except the odor factor — might be replicated electronically, with some Alibris Coupons kind of I-Pod-like machine for downloaded text. Perhaps such a tool exists already and I do not yet know about it. In any case, those of us introduced up on paper books, those of us with a sentimental attachment to them, will not be around forever. Fairly soon we’ll need to yield the ground to a technology of people for whom it’s a minimum of as natural to learn things off a display screen as off a page. To them, the entire print thing, the whole concept of the exhausting copy, is prone to seem superfluous. Sooner or later our grandchildren will look back on the every day newspaper — that nice wasteful slab of pulped flora that turns obsolete a mere day after its creation — the way we glance back on such quaint historical objects as the penny-farthing, or the sheep-gut condom.
If the internet just isn’t the future of the printed phrase, and due to this fact of the novel, then my identify’s not Kirk Kinbote. In reality, I am going to go one step further: the novelist ought to need the web to be the future of the novel. In any case, what the novelist craves above anything is control. And publishing your personal stuff by yourself site gives you unqualified management over it. There may be, to start with, an absolute assure of publication. There will be no intermediaries. No one will alter a word of what you may have written. No grinning editor will propose “working with you” on the text. Debates regarding punctuation need not be entered into. No one will insert any redundant comma, or take away any essential one. Apostrophes will not be relocated from the place they belong to the place they don’t. You can control line-size, font, point-size. Any genuine writer is sure to be tantalized by these possibilities. After all, there’s the burning question of how you are going to generate profits out of the thing. This can be a serious question, and I am going to get again to it eventually. However other than that gargantuan caveat, internet publication looks in some ways like a novelist’s paradise.
But cling on. Is not there an essential sense in which the rise of internet publication would spell catastrophe for the novel? As a result of a published novel, in the traditional sense, is not only a novel that is been printed on paper, is it? It is a novel that is been vetted, that is passed muster. The publisher, the gatekeeper, has lovingly hand-chosen it from a chaotic bale of far lesser manuscripts. High quality management has been exerted. And without high quality management, all we might have can be an undifferentiated sludge of material, about ninety nine% of which is sure to be nugatory, proper? Is not that all the online is? An unsifted mass of largely valueless data, with no person in authority to information us via it?
It is a sound argument, in principle. Nevertheless it solely works in practice if the quality controllers know what they’re doing. And in my own nation, Australia, there is ample proof to recommend that they don’t. There is ample proof, in truth, to suggest that they are both asleep at the wheel or mind dead. Publishing on this country is rising extra fatuous by the day. A superb half of the books revealed listed below are autobiographies of cricket gamers, or superstar memoirs that will be uninteresting even when their authors might write, or reflections by former newsreaders on the distinction between Generation X and Generation Y, or barbecue cookbooks by half-assed TV personalities. (If they actually are half-assed, having lost an appendage or two in the course of some unnecessary however “inspiring” journey to the highest of some indomitable mountain, then a lot the better, as long as they’ve got an arm left to jot down the memoir.)
What issues about books nowadays is whose face is on the front cowl, not what’s written inside. In this sense at least, the web — that supposedly anarchic no-go zone of unfiltered data — is actually a somewhat extra rigorous enforcer of high quality management than our conventional publishers are. Your web web page can look as fancy as you want, but if it doesn’t deliver on content, individuals will hit the again button. By some strange law of publishing physics, folks will, beneath certain circumstances, pay for unreadable tripe; but by no means will they learn it for free.
As for the intellectual stuff, one of the most celebrated Australian novels of current times had a obtrusive error of grammar in its second sentence. I repeat: in its second sentence. Is it trivial to say this? Or does the truth that no editor picked up this howler reinforce the purpose that the editor as gatekeeper, as fastidious guarantor of high quality management, is nowadays a purely legendary figure. If a publishing home cannot even guarantee adherence to simple guidelines of grammar, its imprimatur is worthless. For all the help his editors gave him, this man’s novel might simply as nicely have been self-published on the web.
This is a pertinent anecdote for you. At a recent and excruciating social perform, I occurred to find myself seated subsequent to a fellow who was, and as far as I do know nonetheless is, employed by a globally respected publishing house as a senior editor of fiction. Finding him generally unimpressive, I generously raised the subject of fiction, so as to let him riff freely on a subject he presumably knew one thing about. I mentioned Catch-22. It swiftly emerged that he’d never heard of it. He thought I meant The Catcher in the Rye. After I subsequently referred to Thomas Wolfe he thought I was talking about Tom Wolfe.
Having gatekeepers of that caliber is, I’d vigorously contend, worse than having no gatekeepers at all. An fool like that is very prone to reject good books underneath the impression that they are dangerous, and — even worse — to publish unhealthy books below the impression that they are good. And in the event you publish shit and tell individuals it’s good, you’ll quickly devalue the currency. The asinine rise of the marketers — i.e. these geniuses who slap fancy covers on dud books and hype them obscenely beyond their actual price — would possibly effectively deliver short-time period profits, however only at the cost of ensuring long-time period catastrophe. The public will purchase one unreadable “masterpiece”, or possibly two, but after sustaining a few critical burns they will cease shopping for books altogether. After which the culture starts to rot. Publishers make less money, and the much less money they make, the less keen they’re going to be to publish something remotely risky. Pretty quickly they’ll be publishing nothing however cookbooks by one-legged ex-Rugby stars, with the odd new novel by some established dinosaur tossed on as a little bit of artistic garnish. A literary tradition run by individuals without brains may just conceivably survive. But one run by individuals without balls is doomed.
Something like this has already happened in Australia. That notional class of literati which is supposed to police our guide tradition, weeding out the bad books and publishing solely the nice ones — having first rid these of any and all grammatical howlers — has died out, if certainly it ever existed at all. No doubt this has something to do with the thinness of the country’s population base, combined with our lengthy tradition of settling for second-finest in mental affairs. In any case, the result is that the novel on this country is effectively lifeless as a form. Sure, novels still get printed here. But they’re like Wile E. Coyote working on a subtracted piece of ground, treading air and never but figuring out it. If something remotely original and thrilling ever gets revealed here once more, it will likely be fully by accident. Once more I have to point to the relative merits of cyberspace. It isn’t enough to say that the web, in such a local weather, is just nearly as good as the standard publishers. It’s higher, because there’s no material of which it is afraid. It excludes nothing. Which is, I repeat, better than excluding just about the whole lot on grounds that don’t have anything to do with quality.
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