Technology has invaded the world of publishing. This past summer, two major publishing houses - Random House and Time Warner - announced plans to venture into e-publishing. The GSJ's Mary Jo Curtis recently asked Adjunct Professor of English Robert Coover (below), a pioneer in online literature, where these changes are taking us.
No, but they will displace books and other print products as the dominant expressive and communicative medium. People will read much more online or on printout than on published print paper. Books will continue to be read and, indeed, to be necessary, but they will mostly be purchased via the Internet and often as a consequence of reading other material on the Web.
A half-million people downloaded Stephen King's first e-novella, "Riding the Bullet," and he seems to be off to a good start with his second e-publishing venture, "The Plant." Can lesser-known authors - or new writers - also meet with online success? Are there better opportunities for success online than in the traditional publishing world?
Not yet, but they are developing. King's pioneer efforts have successfully shaken up the publishing industry and publishers are scrambling now to find the best way to adjust to the changes. No less popular author could have done that of course.
Brown University has been a leader in confronting these issues [in venues such as] our important symposium on literature and the new technology in May 1999. We are also helping to organize a major conference that grew out of our own symposium, this one on new publishing models and what they mean to the future of literature, to be held in New York in the spring.
Do you think e-publishing will change the novel as we know it?
It will certainly change literature as we know it, adding many new forms, and embracing all the other digital arts as well. Novels belong to the book and will continue to be published and read there, though I anticipate alternative online versions that will be hypermedia enhanced.
Can technology provide a format for readers that will ever be as comfortable as curling up in bed with a good print book?
E-books and soft books are essays in that direction. One nice thing about them is that they are backlit, so you can read in bed with the lights out, a benefit to your sleeping partner. And they have hypertextual and hypermedia features that make it possible to stay in your chair or in bed or at the beach without getting up and going somewhere to consult dictionaries, encyclopedias, or history books.
That said, those of us who are book lovers will never find anything to replace them; whether there will be such peculiar creatures as book lovers in the generations to come, however, is another question.