Paper or E-Publishing?
Cat in the Stack
Cathy Davidson's HASTAC blog on the interface of anything.
Cathy N. Davidson: Don't be so quick to dismiss paper books [This op ed piece in the Durham Herald Sun expands on some points I made last week in a blog posting on the Gutenberg-e project, a wonderful project of born digital history electronic books (these are not books that were reprinted electronically but books actually conceived as digital productions). It's a great project. I love it. But I was concerned at the time about unrealistic hype about what the Gutenberg-e would accomplish vis a vis the so-called "crisis in scholarly publishing" and, almost a decade later, it is turning out Gutenberg-e was an experiment, not a solution. Here's the editorial, and the url in the Herald Sun:
http://www.heraldsun.com/opinion/columnists/guests/68-929261.cfm
Cathy N. Davidson: Don't be so quick to dismiss paper books
Mar 1, 2008In 1999, Columbia University Press and the American Historical Association announced an ambitious project. Dubbed Gutenberg-e, this project would allow historians to circumvent conventional publishing (the kind that comes on paper, between book covers) and "simply" publish their books on line. There would be no paper version at all. Only an electronic one. Similar to a blog, except for serious scholarship, all digital all the time.
Some of the finest minds back in 1999 insisted that this revolutionary electronic publishing venture would allow scholars to produce books far more cheaply, faster, and more easily than ever before. They even predicted that Gutenberg-e would "solve" the crisis faced by scholarly publishing, where serious research sells to such a specialized audience that it ends up losing money for its university press publishers. Gutenberg-e would solve all that. Some predicted Gutenberg-e would supplant conventional publishing. Some said it was the best thing to happen to book publishing since, well, Gutenberg.
Those predictions have proven to fall wildly short of the mark. A few million dollars and countless hours of time spent by scholars, editors, electronic designers, programmers, librarians, publishers, and others have yielded 36 e-books. The quality is high; but the hype has turned out to be so wrong-headed as to provide a cautionary tale about the hype of new technologies. Many of the same commentators who insisted Gutenberg-e would revolutionize how books are published now say that "unsurprisingly," the e-history books ended up costing far more than conventional books and took longer and were incomparably more difficult to produce. The surprise is that, a decade ago, brilliant people thought that it could be otherwise.
If I could predict the biggest lesson that future historians will take from this electronic publishing experiment it is that even the very best historians made the common mistake of assuming a new technology would solve problems it cannot possibly solve. As a historian of technology, I recognize the trap. We seem to fall into it over and over again, when any new technology comes along.
Technology is almost never a quick fix. It invariably introduces as many problems as it solves. For example, I blog on various aspects of new media on the www.hastac.org website. It's fast for me and easy. I type. I upload. But it is easy for me because a cadre of technology people invisibly support the website, the network, the server, the computational facilities, and all the rest, the whole constellation of supports of which my little blog is simply the "free and easy" tip of the iceberg. Someone is paying all those costs that make it possible for me to communicate to my readers in a fast and efficient way.
Since I was an administrator at Duke for eight years, I know that all that hidden technology that supports my electronic publishing venture is expensive and it is labor-intensive. It's rather like the U-Pick Strawberries in a farmer's field. If you really believe that all you need to do in order to have fresh, organic, right-out-of-the-garden fruit is pick it, you have never been a farmer. Someone else ploughed that field, cultivated, watched for pests, irrigated, and did what was required so you could pluck the best. Technology is like that. It takes a lot of labor to create and support the revolutionary, new labor-saving device.
For me, the biggest problem with born-digital electronic publishing is that it relies on whatever technology exists at the time you publish. Platforms change; websites go defunct. Lots gets left behind. I can't predict if my blog will be viewable by readers two years from now, let alone a dozen years or two hundred years.
When I write a book, I want it to last, which is why I choose to publish my books on paper, not just on a url. Paper remains the best technology when you're writing for posterity. The history paperbacks I bought for $9.95 a decade ago sit on my bookshelf now, pretty much as they did when I first read them. They require no upkeep, batteries, uploads, downloads, rebooting, or software updates, nothing, really, except an occasional dusting or pleasant rereading.
Cathy N. Davidson is the Ruth F. DeVarney Professor of English and John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Duke University.
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More food for thought, "The Future of Reading" by Steven Levy in Newsweek, Nov 17, 2007 (although this is more about reading on an electronic device such as Kindle rather than actual born-digital publishing.) Still, some interesting insights here:
http://www.newsweek.com/id/70983/output/print