As a lawyer who’s worked for a number of years at the Copyright Agency, I am genuinely in favour of copyright and believe that writers and others who create works are served well by it.
Twitter isn’t a map – it’s a territory.
Overland in conversation with industry insiders Jo Case, John Weldon and Malcolm Neil.
We have reached a point where reading and writing are now inseparable from the consumer technology and software that produce them. Those who don’t use computers at their place of employ will almost certainly own a mobile phone – and increasingly, it will be a smart phone, of the kind that have made fortunes for companies and CEOs.
The publishing industry has never been a convincing example of sound business logic. Even before a page is printed, vast amounts of time and sums of money are spent without any guarantee that anyone will like – much less buy – the eventual product.
For decades, the model was accepted as a happy marriage between art and commerce. But something happened in the 1960s that began a transformation of the book publishing business: the industry was bought up bit-by-bit by conglomerate media corporations and the economic imperatives of the global free market encroached on the trade, imposing alien business norms.
I’m not alone in my thinking here. A writer friend, Kate Rizzetti updated her Facebook status on 21 August 2012: ‘iPad’s are crap for blogging. Crap I say. So – exactly what is the point of them?’
‘Interactivity’ has long acted as a buzzword. It is representative of the relationship we have with the market in general and the media specifically.
Of publishing in the digital space, a writer buddy says: ‘Sometimes, it’s like having your heart cut out and chopped up before your eyes while the world watches.’
Digital reading is not being developed in a uniform way. Battle lines have been drawn between different publishers, with readers left in the dark about the directions of these technologies. This tech battle is much more uncertain than that between VHS and Beta. How it will end is anyone’s guess.
Someone once told me that the direction that languages follow – left to right, right to left, top to bottom – is decided by the tools that influenced their development. I remember the anecdote more than the teller, but, basically, Hebrew is right to left because right-handed people hold the chisel in their left hand and hammer in their right.
Continue reading 'If William Blake were going to make a poetry ebook' 3
Can a piece of writing suffer from too much feedback? Writing, it has often been said, is a conversation, so critiques are essential to the process. This is both the lore and the law of writing. But whose notes should we take note of?
Continue reading 'The literary equivalent of your underwear drawer' 4
If technology was going to thwart anything, I’d expect it to be a literary journal. Fittingly enough the current issue of Island is ‘Digitalism’, dedicated to the ‘digital’. It has a collection of essays tackling self-publishing, literary participation and the Australian book publishing industry. Southerly has, as always, two tables of contents: one for print articles and one for their online articles, ‘The long paddock’.
As a child of the ’80s my interests coincided with the high points of the decade’s nerdiness: Dungeons & Dragons, Choose Your Own Adventures and text adventure games. In text adventure games, most famously Zork, the player would interact with the game by typing out commands like ‘north’ (or just ‘n’) to go north, ‘examine’ objects, ‘look’ to view their environment, ‘give’ and sometimes ‘kill’.
A couple of years ago I acquired a guidebook to Lombardy and Piedmont published in 1914 in which I was especially delighted to discover a map of my native Milan drawn in the distinctive and attractive style of the Touring Club Italiano publications. Looking for familiar places, I came across the road in which my father spent all of his working life and found that a river ran through it.