Harvard University Press Blog

The Essence of the Literary Experience?

Earlier this month, The New York Review of Books Blog featured a piece from Tim Parks called “E-books Can’t Burn,” which has since been much tweeted, facebooked, and otherwise shared. It’s a solid, considered defense of the e-book, one that rehearses all of the practical advantages of digital reading (portability, one-handed reading, resizable type, etc), and kindly but firmly dismisses the materiality that people are reluctant to leave behind (the feel of paper, the scribbling of marginalia, the books on our shelves). In his repudiation of the notion that there’s much lost with the transition to e-books, Parks writes directly against those “literary men and women” who are most loathe to see such change.

He notes that e-books are one more stage in the evolution of the material experience of reading:

Weren’t there perhaps specific pleasures when reading on parchment scroll that we know nothing of and have lived happily without? Certainly there were those who lamented the loss of calligraphy when the printing press made type impersonal. There were some who believed that serious readers would always prefer serious books to be copied by hand.

More than just a defense, though, Parks actually argues for the superiority of the experience of literary reading done digitally:

The e-book, by eliminating all variations in the appearance and weight of the material object we hold in our hand and by discouraging anything but our focus on where we are in the sequence of words (the page once read disappears, the page to come has yet to appear) would seem to bring us closer than the paper book to the essence of the literary experience. Certainly it offers a more austere, direct engagement with the words appearing before us and disappearing behind us than the traditional paper book offers, giving no fetishistic gratification as we cover our walls with famous names. It is as if one had been freed from everything extraneous and distracting surrounding the text to focus on the pleasure of the words themselves. In this sense the passage from paper to e-book is not unlike the moment when we passed from illustrated children’s books to the adult version of the page that is only text. This is a medium for grown-ups.

Fetish-free direct engagement with the essence of the literary experience certainly sounds like a great thing. But this nearly-utopian vision overlooks quite a bit of the actual experience of e-reading. The very advantages provided by the e-book surely undercut its ability to fuse us directly with the text: We can read e-books with one hand while the other clutches a strap on a crowded, racing train; We can read e-books on our phones, with calls and text messages breaking in at their whimsy; We can read them on our tablets, where the internet just dares us to call it extraneous; We can read them on our Kindles, with advertisements and crowd-sourced annotations.

We’ll leave aside all the very real concerns about what happens to the quality of the literary experience when we’re all trained to expect books for $9.99 or less, and won’t do much beyond chuckle at the suggestion that our engagement with gadgets (gadgets!) could ever not carry fetishistic gratification. Because we’re not e-book haters, honestly. Some of our best friends are e-books.

But, despite his nods to reading as an evolving experience, what Parks has written feels a bit too much like a declaration of the end of (book) history. It’s a celebration of an apparently friction-free medium whose mediation we can’t yet actually claim to understand. The study of the history of the physical book should make this clear. It’s a discipline that didn’t even exist until recently (the scholar Peter D. McDonald suggests that 1982 perhaps marks its birth, noting the publication that year of Robert Darnton’s classic “What Is the History of Books?”). This field, which has seen so much incredible work in these three decades, surely teaches us that there is much to learn from studying the experience of reading, even if it took us centuries to take note. And the work of scholars such as Matthew Kirschenbaum, who’s studying software’s impact on writing, should suggest that its impact on reading is similarly ripe for examination.

To be sure, this isn’t meant as another attack on e-books, nor a defense of print. But to suggest that we’ve come closer to “the essence of the literary experience” seems to take for granted that such a thing exists, when scholarship suggests that it doesn’t. Mediation is a wonderfully messy thing, even when it comes on sleek screens.

Electronic Publishing, Then and Now

Ebooks aren’t just from the future anymore. Though ereaders and formats will continue to evolve, they’re clearly here to stay. That much we can say for sure, and have clearly known for some time. As we rapidly catch up with our future, though, it’s interesting to think about who knew what, when.

For example, here’s pioneering American composer and polymath John Cage on electronic publishing in 1965:

We can't be satisfied with distribution now because it won't be very good. For instance, my book (Silence), published in the United States, is very difficult to get outside the United States, and that won't be solved, because all of the publishing problems of books, and objects, and things in quantity are still those of the previous culture. Yet with the number of people who work now -- the number of composers, the number of authors, and so on -- has vastly increased over the 19th century; but the number of publishers has not increased. The result is that you have traffic problems, so you have the kind of problems that all large cities encounter with automobile traffic. And I hear, where I go now, that in the future we may expect that private traffic in large cities will be forbidden. It may then equally be forbidden to produce a book that would require people to distribute it, but it will not be forbidden, certainly, to send information by electronic media throughout the world. (Via the blog of the John Cage Trust.)

And here’s 60 Minutes commentator Andy Rooney on electronic publishing in 2011 (CBS isn't too embed friendly, so take a look on YouTube):

 

A little funny, no? That bit of John Cage above probably seemed straight from The Jetsons back in 1965, and Andy Rooney last night had perhaps a touch of The Flintstones. On the one hand, there’s nothing too surprising here. John Cage was always way ahead of his time, and Andy Rooney is often an easy target.

On the other hand, though, these comments juxtaposed do tell us a bit about this transition to digital. You can look at the ereaders all around you and then read John Cage’s thoughts on electronic distribution and start to think that things were always going to happen exactly this way. But somewhere in those Andy Rooney minutes is the recognition that there’s a lot left to shake out about business models in electronic publishing, and about what ebook dominance could ultimately mean for authors, publishers, and readers. We’re past the point where it makes much sense to scoff at electronic publishing, but accepting that fact doesn’t mean we know where we’re headed. And, sadly, John Cage isn’t around to tell us.

Reading in the Year of the Device

Unless the professional soothsayers, the book industry navel-gazers, and the technological evangelists have all been proven wrong (impossible!), lots and lots of you are ringing in 2011 with the brand new ereaders that you received as gifts last month. A Kindle? A nook? An iPad? A smartphone? One of each? Lucky!

Whatever you got, if you’re planning to use it for ebooks, we have you covered. Not every Harvard University Press title is available as an ebook, but quite a lot of them are, with more and more added nearly every day. Below is just a very short list of HUP titles that are currently available as ebooks from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and the Google eBookstore (which, by the way, lets you finally buy ebooks directly from some of your favorite independent booksellers – check here for a list of participating indies).

This (again, very short) list contains recent releases, backlist treasures, perennial course adoption titles, and some of this blogger’s personal favorites. A word of warning, though: some of the ebook vendor sites aren’t yet so good at handling searches (Google is maybe being ironic?), so try including both the author and the title in your search terms if you have trouble finding any of these ebooks.

In no particular order:

Stealing Lincoln's Body, Thomas J. Craughwell

Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor, Sudhir Venkatesh

Leadership Without Easy Answers, Ronald Heifetz

China's Trapped Transition: The Limits of Developmental Autocracy, Minxin Pei

Tinkering toward Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform, David Tyack

To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise, Bethany Moreton

The Case against Perfection: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering, Michael J. Sandel

Inside Deaf Culture, Carol A. Padden and Tom Humphries

Why People Die By Suicide, Thomas Joiner

Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation, Jonathan Lear

Learning a New Land: Immigrant Students in American Society, Carola Suárez-Orozco, Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco, and Irina Todorova

The Alex Studies: Cognitive and Communicative Abilities of Grey Parrots, Irene Maxine Pepperberg

White Teacher, Vivian Gussin Paley

A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of '08 and the Descent into Depression, Richard A. Posner

Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora, Stephanie E. Smallwood

Dry Manhattan: Prohibition in New York City, Michael A. Lerner

Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman, Marjorie Shostak

Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America, Lawrence Levine

A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States, Stephen Mihm

The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena, Thomas Borstelmann

The New Gay Teenager, Ritch C. Savin-Williams

Biophilia, E. O. Wilson 

We Who Are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity, Tommie Shelby

The Faithful: A History of Catholics in America, James M. O'Toole

Worst-Case Scenarios, Cass R. Sunstein

Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy, John Rawls

That should be good to get you started.  Happy New Device!

Ebook Sales - What's in a Number?

The New York Times made a mini-headline of its own this week, when it announced that it would begin to track and report ebook best sellers in 2011. This, says the Times, will also entail a redesign of the section of its Sunday Book Review that currently includes 14 other lists.

The variety of lists currently available gives a nice, sweeping picture of what’s selling (which is different than what’s being read), but it’s important to consider all of the factors involved. Distribution, for one, plays an enormous role in these statistics. A book by an independent press is not going to be available in anywhere near as many outlets as one published by Random House, and if it isn’t available, it can’t sell. The movie business has a way of accounting for this sort of disparity, with the reporting of per-screen or per-theatre revenues, so that one can compare the success of a film on hundreds of screens to that of a film that’s playing on thousands. This could just be my ignorance, but I don’t believe the book business has a similar metric.

The best seller lists also provide a sort of sociological window into American purchasing patterns. The hardcover fiction list, for example, presents us with the 15 best sellers in cloth. But what it means, really, is that these are the 15 books most popular right now with a cross-section of the population that either has the disposable income to drop $25-$30 on whatever they want to read this week, or has a relationship to literature that compels them to get it while it’s hot, regardless of the expense. Bless their hearts, in either case.

The paperback numbers are even more flush with insight, mostly because of the way that the trade fiction and mass-market fiction lists are presented side by side. Ever walk into a bookstore and see two versions of a single paperback book, right next to each other? One has a bigger trim size, but a slimmer profile, and nicer paper, and sells for $13-$16. The other has a smaller trim, meant for spinner racks, but is much thicker, on rougher stock, and probably priced around $6.99. The former is the trade, the latter the mass-market. If you bought both, and set them on your shelf for even just a year, you’d see that one’s meant to last, and one’s basically disposable. They represent different attitudes towards the value of books as objects, each perfectly valid. They also represent different supply channels – mass-market fiction is available at grocery stores and gas stations; trade paperbacks usually are not.

The paperback fiction lists in the NYT Sunday Book Review let us see how different books appeal differently to these different markets. On the list dated November 14th, 2010, for instance, Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is #1 on the trade fiction list, but Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol is #1 on the mass-market list. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, along with Larsson’s The Girl Who Played With Fire, make the only two titles that appear in the top 20 for both trade fiction and mass-market fiction. What’s not clear from the list, though, is that only a very small selection of books is ever actually available in both formats. Number three on this trade fiction list, for instance, is Howard Jacobson’s Man Book prize-winning The Finkler Question, which is not available as a mass-market paperback.  Publishers decide which books to make available in which formats, and these lists both highlight and inform their decisions.  

Freedom to Hide: eReaders and the Bashful Academic?

A book on a train can be a powerful shibboleth. I see What You’re Reading, I know Who You Are. Right? Well, maybe not so definitively, but if you’re persnickety about books and the same about people, the books in the hands of the people provide a useful if cynical filter. Maybe on your commute you see somebody reading one of your favorites and it spurs you to strike up a chat. Or maybe you’re thinking of saying hello, then a book you’d never touch is brandished and you decide not to bother. We can wish that they didn’t, or even pretend that they don’t, but the books that we read say things about us, and, as the hilariously blunt Better Book Titles often points out, we might not always love what they’re saying.

This, of course, is old news. Books-as-signifiers came up again and again in those oh-so-recent yet clearly bygone early days of the Kindle, when every style section and book review back page bemoaned the eReader’s crippling attack on judgmental voyeurism. No longer could you so easily size people up by their reading material – no telling what they were working through on that maddeningly vacant device. The flip side of this loss for the watchers was the new privacy for readers, and it was assumed that traditionally stigmatized material would thrive in the new format. Those predictions proved accurate, of course – erotica and romance titles are thriving as eBooks.

Lately, though, I’ve been thinking about eReaders as possibly enabling the enjoyment of genres beyond those typically degraded. Or, rather, I’ve had occasion to consider the possibility of a broader spectrum of books about which one might be bashful. The spark initially, like that of much book chatter this fall, was Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom. It’s not lowbrow in any of the ways for which eReaders are said to provide cover. It is, in fact, the most celebrated piece of literary fiction in years. The annoyance for me is that it’s gone so far past celebration. There was the media fuss this summer over President Obama trying to buy the book ahead of release at a Martha’s Vineyard shop. The coverage of Franzen’s détente with Oprah. His private chat at the White House late last month. The kerfuffle over his European publisher printing and distributing the wrong version of the book, with Franzen himself making headlines and startling the supply chain by publicly announcing that all copies would be replaced. Cripes, the man’s eyeglasses were abducted and held for ransom. Seriously, they were.  

It’s more than a book, is the thing. It’s a spectacle. And, yeah, I should probably read Freedom, but I'd rather not be part of the spectacle for the month or two of commutes it’d take me to slog through. So, Freedom is the very first thing to make me sort of want an eReader maybe a little. Quick download, and then I could work my way through it on the train for as long as it took, and nobody would be the wiser. I’m almost ashamed to say that the very thought was liberating.

Now, believe me, I’m prepared to just chalk this urge up to my own grandiose, paranoid secrecy. But I can't help noting that the only time I’ve been tempted by the idea of an eReader has been to facilitate my reading of the type of book that even the general literati are usually proud to tote.

And now I’m wondering if maybe publishing as an industry has underestimated the variety of stigmatized literature for which eReaders could be a boon.  More specifically, could university presses be due a shot in the arm from ashamed fans of political philosophy, shy classicists, sheepish social scientists, reticent history buffs, and self-conscious literary theorists? Could eBooks do for nerdy nonfiction what they’ve done for Harlequin and the like? Are there closet academics who’ll find freedom (or Freedom) in the anonymity of eReaders?

I figured I should do some research, so I asked a friend if she’d ever had occasion to regret reading something scholarly in public. She scoffed at first, but then told me a story about having once ended up seated next to a favorite artist on a long flight, and wishing her nose was buried in something a bit more catchy than Hans Kelsen’s Pure Theory of Law.

That poll scientific enough for you?  The results are clear: very soon university press eBook sales will skyrocket, and smarties of the world will find privacy through eReaders. You heard it here first.

But, oh, wait. Privacy? On an eReader? Whoops...

"Why (These) Books?" Relaunching The Image of the Black in Western Art

Last week, Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute hosted a two day conference called “Why Books?” All day Friday the Radcliffe Gymnasium was packed with eager listeners as historians, librarians, computer scientists, and other scholars (but, regrettably, no publishers) held forth on the past, present, and future of the book.

There was a lot of great information shared on Friday (much of which you can access via the twitter hashtag #whybooks), but the most compelling element of this conference was the series of Thursday afternoon site visits to local libraries, archives, and publishing houses. A handful of HUP staffers were invited to participate, and we also offered two sessions here. The first, hosted by Art Director Tim Jones, was called “Why (Design) Books?” Afterward, Susan Donnelly, Director of Sales and Marketing, hosted “Why (Sell and Market) Books?”

After brief overviews covering their respective beats, Tim and Susan each chose to focus on our involvement with The Image of the Black in Western Art. It’s a series with a story. It starts in 1960, when John and Dominique de Menil, art patrons and philanthropists, began an ambitious research project to collect and document how people of African descent have been portrayed across the media of Western art. The results of the research were collected in a beautiful series of books that was produced by the Menil Foundation and distributed by Harvard University Press in the 1970s. As it happened, the series stalled out before completion.

The collected art was eventually transferred to Harvard under the auspices of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research. Together with the Du Bois Institute, we at Harvard University Press have undertaken the massive project of relaunching the series, reproducing the original volumes with full color throughout, finally completing the originally planned books, and even adding a new volume on the twentieth century. All told, the project will consist of five volumes over the course of ten books, the first four of which we’ve published this month.  We'll release the remaining books over the next several years, with the final installment scheduled for publication in the Spring of 2015.

So, as prompted by the Radcliffe conference – why these books? Why are we reintroducing this series, and why in this form? Why undertake such an enormous project?

The most straightforward answer came from Tim Jones: simply put, the bound, physical book is the perfect format for the information in this project. This is a lavishly illustrated series, containing over 3,000 images of art housed in over 500 museums and collections around the world. Currently, the fees charged for digital rights, as opposed to print, are just prohibitive. Meaning that there is no way we could afford to offer these images in any digital format for a price that would get these books distributed anywhere near as widely as the project deserves. We couldn’t do an ebook, we couldn’t do a comprehensive website, we couldn’t do a dvd.

Susan Donnelly, in her presentation, offered another answer: books are what the audience for this project wants. Having begun her career as a travelling sales representative, she’s long been aware of the affinity for this series, something buyers would never let her forget. “When is the series going to be completed? When will the missing volumes be available? Will you reprint the earlier books?” Our distributor, too, has fielded these questions for years. And we’ve regularly seen used copies of the original books trading online for hundreds of dollars. These books are loved.

Aside from the straightforward and the emotional reasons, though, the real answer to the question of “why these books” is that we’re probably the only ones who could do it, which I say dutifully, not boastfully. Our designers and editors spent a long time figuring out how to update the series while still satisfying the original fans. How do you design a series of books meant to last beyond the lifetime of all involved and never appear aesthetically pegged to the early 2000s? It took a lot of work. We wanted a classic design, with bigger images than were in the original books, and we wanted them in color, so we couldn’t use the original files. We worked with the Du Bois Institute to track down every piece of art so that they could all be reproduced anew. One of our designers spent six months laying out the first four books, and in that time did almost nothing else, simply because that’s the level of attention that the project required.

Ten books, each hundreds of pages long, each full color throughout, with hundreds of illustrations, printed and bound in Northern Italy, all to the highest production specifications, for $95 per book. That’s a high price point, we know, but trust us – this isn’t a project for the bottom line, and probably no traditional publisher would risk doing it at that price. This is a project that could only be done by a university press because it’s likely that only a university press would let the scholarly and artistic value of the series overshadow the financial realities. We’re producing these books in collaboration with the Du Bois Institute because they represent an incredibly important trove of scholarship, and disseminating work like that is our charge.

And that’s what it comes down to. The scholarship is important, books are the right format, and we can afford to do the work that it takes. And, finally, they’re absolutely stunning. In 2015 when we can lay these ten books out and finally absorb the scope of this project, I’m sure that all involved will look on this as the most beautiful project they’ve had a part in.

That’s “why books.”

For more on the series, and to see samples of the art, visit www.imageoftheblack.com

Standing By The Book

Susan Wallace Boehmer, our Editor-in-Chief, recently took part in a forum on scholarly publishing organized by Bookbuilders of Boston. The text below comes from her talk, which she informally called “What’s Changing and What’s Not as HUP Goes Digital.”

----

What I like about books are not the usual things people mention as they wring their hands about the world going digital. It’s not the smell of ink on paper, the tactile turning of pages, the lending and giving of your favorite books to friends and family, the practicality of books for beach reading (no worries about sand, water, batteries). It’s not the usefulness of books as coasters for a cup of hot coffee, or the social cachet that comes from having a well-stocked library in your home.

Don’t get me wrong: I like the physicality of books quite a lot—as an avid book owner. But as an editor, and more important a reader, what I like about scholarly books is something else.

More than anything, I like their length. I prefer ideas and opinions and narratives that are just too complicated, too nuanced, to fit into a New Yorker article, or a Wikipedia entry, or a series of public lectures. But at the same time, I like the boundedness of books—the sense you get at the end of 300 or 400 pages that you really have a good firm grip on the subject. This is of course an illusion—there are dozens of other books out there that grab the subject in quite a different way. But the feeling that you’ve mastered something—however fleeting—is what keeps me going back to books. What you feel at the end of a good book is kind of like a runner’s high—though I guess we should call it a reader’s high.

Another thing I like about scholarly books is their table of contents. When I was a developmental editor, I’d sometimes tell authors that I wanted them to write three things for me. The first one was an ad: 250 words that would persuade readers that of all the books in all the bookstores in all the world, this is the one you must read next—buy it! Of course the true purpose of this writing exercise was to get authors to focus their own minds on what their book was all about.

The second thing I asked authors to write was a novel. Needless to say, I didn’t really want them to write a novel, but this was my way of telling authors that every book, nonfiction as well as fiction, must tell a good story—and they should never let an irrelevant truth get in the way of that.

The third thing I asked my authors to write was a poem. And this is what the table of contents is: it’s a little piece of verse that signifies and anticipates all kinds of mysterious, enlightening things to come. A table of contents, like a poem, has to be aware of meter and form, metaphor and echo, alliteration and allusion. It has to be lyrical. It has to sing.

The table of contents leads to another thing I like about nonfiction books, which is their division into chapters. Chapters are not like essays. Essays—in a magazine, let’s say—relate to one another sort of the way out-of-town first cousins relate at a family reunion. They have polite conversations, and maybe you’ll notice a little family resemblance, but mostly they come together briefly and then they go away to live their separate lives. Chapters in a book relate to one another the way siblings do: every one of them is looking around at every other one, all the time, sizing them up and figuring out when to play together and when to get out of the way. A book with chapters is a tight-knit little family: there’s tension in every relationship, but they’re still all in it together.

Multiple Multimedia Medium Wars

A comely young woman sits poolside, comfortably reading her new Kindle in the sun. To her right, some schlemiel in a t-shirt struggles with the awful glare on his iPad. She tells him her Kindle cost less than her sunglasses. Outclassed and inept, he flops his iPad limply. Foiled. Rats. 

That’s not how I spent my weekend. It’s Amazon’s new television commercial for the latest Kindle model. The ad has come in for a little teasing, but to me it’s the format, more than the content, that calls for a taking of stock. Where are we? How did we get here? Let’s look back. Let’s reduce. 

In the beginning there were books. Then television killed them. Then the internet killed television AND newspapers. Then the iPad killed everything. Or saved everything. And now the Kindle fights back! In the name of books. Or e-books. On television. An e-reader using television, which killed books, to show how much better it is for e-books than a tablet computer. But mostly just in the sun. 

This seems messy. And a little funny. But, really, maybe not so new. We’ve already seen a lot of these format fights, like last year’s Green Apple web series on the Book vs. the Kindle. 

But the media creep isn’t just for battles. By now you should be familiar with book trailers, which borrow from the movies to advertise books on the internet. Most of the book trailers out there yet are for novels, but just last week we shared a trailer made by the Harvard AIDS Initiative for Saturday Is for Funerals, a book we proudly published last spring. 

Today, though, we’re happy to share what’s surely a first for Harvard University Press. We’re not even sure what to call it. It’s not fan fiction, because it’s not fiction and Vic of Jane Austen’s World is so much more than a fan. Take a look: 

That's our Annotated Edition of Pride and Prejudice!  So, what to call this?  Third party plug? Outsider ad? We’ll think on it.  For now, though, just call us chuffed.   

    

More on digital publishing

We leave you this week with an interesting Boston Globe article from Alex Beam on "the brave new book." "The brave new book" is, of course, the e-book. Sony has just released a new reader that uses "e-ink" technology to mimic the look of a printed page. Is this the future of reading, or is this contraption destined for the junk heap like most of its predecessors? Beam's got his own take:

As it happens, the e-book is the solution to a problem that doesn't exist. Check out my Personalized Literacy Unit, a 2003 release from Bantam Dell labs. It's an $8 paperback called "Persuader" by Lee Child, and it weighs the same as my stripped down cellphone and less than my Palm Pilot ... I've used my PLU on an airplane, in the car, and in a few other places where you wouldn't take electronic equipment.

This, of course, is tongue-in-cheek. But the question remains--is the book already a so-called "perfect technology?" As Beam points out, it's light, portable, and it works. It won't short out when you spill your drink on it, and it won't shatter when you drop it off a four-foot table.

But does this matter? What's going to happen? Will physical books soon become a thing of the past? Find out what the experts think at BookExpoCast, which has archived speeches from this year's BookExpo, including "Embracing New Media and Web 2.0" and John Updike's much-talked-about commentary on the state of publishing today, where he referred to a digitized future as "a grisly scenario."