"The
dream behind the Web is of a common information space in
which we communicate by sharing information. Its
universality is essential: the fact that a hypertext link
can point to anything, be it personal, local or global, be
it draft or highly
polished."
[
1]
By making this demand on the WWW Berners-Lee laid the
foundation for the Net as a participatory medium. Every
person who has a computer and Internet access is given an
opportunity to publish documents on the WWW. This is a far
cry from the expensive and cumbersome medium of book
printing – everybody can be his or her own publisher.
The WWW is a huge publishing system consisting of numberless
micro-audiences. In principle, the Net is accessible
world-wide and "for everyone" but in fact it is primarily
available to the higher social strata in the industrialized
nations and calls for the dominating English
language.
In her 1995 article
"Cyberspace is Not Disneyland" Amy Bruckman described the
Net as "a finger-painting party. Everyone is making things,
there's paint everywhere, and most work only a parent would
love. Here and there, works emerge that most people would
agree are achievements of note. The rich variety of work
reflects the diversity of participants. And everyone would
agree, the creative process and the ability for self
expression matter more than the
product."[2]
The WWW created an almost boundless world of people writing
and publishing what is called 'personal narrative' in the
United States. The personal narrative community forming the
mini-medium is not interested in quality, sales or profits.
In a global network of media you can find contacts for any
topic. Websites can be developed easily and quickly using
software such as Blogger. The term Weblog, denoting
innumerable diary projects, is derived from it.
Weblogs, which apart from
their diary function also fulfil the task of reporting about
other weblogs and sites, and to discuss their contents with
friends, acquaintances and other users, form the
middle-media level. This is where stories are gathered,
sites are presented, where things are assessed, decried, and
discussed. Metafilter (www.metafilter.com ) was one of the
first weblogs that started to collect and recycle content on
a private basis. The sites of the newly emerged middle media
level shows how the Net advances the production of
polytexts: texts recur, refer to one another, are passed on,
translated, quoted in newsgroups, analyzed and re-published
on the Net. Commercial middle-media sites use this
communicative principle by combining it with the number of
user visits. Plastic calls it "recycling the web", for The
Vines it is "The Encyclopedia of Everything, Built by
Everyone". Polling models become ever more widespread when
quality needs to be assessed on the Net, and this is also
true of literature (www.t-online.de/literaturpreis/
or www.delreydigital.com).
Hyperfiction and the
German-Language Literary World
Hyperfiction is literary
theory and practice, media critique and aesthetic model at
the same time. The digital narrative form claims post-modern
literary theory and practice, models of linguistics,
literary reviews and literary utopias for itself. The
concept of hypertext, in conjunction with the computer,
promised that the narrative form would change radically:
hypertext would replace the novel. Big words repeating
themselves: God is dead, the book is dead, the novel is
dead.
At the theoretical level,
hyperfiction as a form of computer literature of the
eighties and early nineties dealt with its raison
d'être within the canon of literature. Works remain
bound to the book as a medium, precisely what hyperfiction
was against, and the book, declared dead, stayed the measure
of all things. Caught between the limited technical
possibilities of early software and the definition of a new
medium (computer, hypertext) via an old one (book, writing),
hyperfiction failed to stand its ground.
In the German-speaking
countries the reception of "computer literature" came via
the United States, and in particular via the hypertext
concept. It embraced the message of the death of the book
along with the metaphor of the network. Hypertext became
deeply engrained as a synonym of digital literature. The
discourse has continued to determine the debate about
literature and New Media in the media, in science and
aesthetics until today. A debate about the death of the
book, the limits of writing, the power of the author, the
reader...
The literary world considers
these points identical with New Media and bides its
time.
Many of the ideas, demands
and utopias linked with hypertext and hyperfiction seem to
have been incorporated in the WWW. Power distributed among
users, co-determination in fora such as www.plastic.com,
anonymous authorship, changing identities, plagiarism,
publishing for all – these have been taken over by Net
Art and the IT industry. In an interview Mark Amerika, the
operator of Alt-X, describes these developments as
technological in nature: "Hypertext is a composition and
publication tool at the same time. As it was only available
on disks, it did not reach the general public, and nobody
knew about it. It did not have that third aspect: the
character of a marketing tool. That was added with
HTTP."
Content
Business
Changes for
Publishers
Since Gutenberg's days the administration of content and
the determination of quality features had been a task
assigned to the publishing industry. Digital communication
and publishing media have, however, brought about a shift of
paradigm in this context. Multi-media groups are mingling
with the business, an increasing number of authors seek to
avoid them by using their own structures. The print media
publishers have their contacts with authors and strong
brands, but it remains to be seen if these are strong enough
to survive the change-over to the new medium.
To date, the new
technologies had the strongest impact on encyclopaedia
publishers. The contents of encyclopaedias, short entries
organized along lexical lines are specially suited for use
on the Net and with the help of New Media. Ten years ago,
the Encyclopædia Britannica cost roughly DEM 1,000.-,
today it can be bought on CD-ROM for DEM 169.-. Microsoft
mingled with the business, publishing the "Encarta
Encyclopaedia" on CD-ROM in 1996. From 1990 to 1997 the
sales of printed Encyclopædia Britannica versions fell
by almost 90 per cent. The publishing house was sold, the
new owner wanted to market the lexicon online. Access to the
Web Encyclopaedia could be subscribed to at 5 US-dollars a
month. However, it did not work out – since the autumn
of 1999 the Encyclopædia Britannica can be queried on
the Net free of charge.
Content as the most
important commodity sold by publishers is subject to change
both in terms of definition and economic meaning. Contents
hitherto defined as culturally valuable are losing their
significance in the information society since they do not
lend themselves well to exploitation in the New Media. Short
units of text with a specialized content are in demand, of
the kind which can produce new contexts when combined with
other content. One and the same text can figure in different
languages, contexts and on several sites on the Net. These
polytexts have little in common with the classic model of
the book. The Internet as a "content industry" is
threatening the classic business segments of the publishing
industry while at the same time offering new opportunities.
Literary publishers are in particular oriented on the model
of the book, a fact that is also reflected in their all but
exclusive commitment to the e-book.
The distribution of
discursive power in the media has changed. Attention is
spread over a much wider range. There is a tendency towards
outsourcing in parallel with developments in the media, and
frequently, the New Media are involved here: there are no
transport expenses, and proof-reading, clipping services,
public relations, distribution are spun off. Publishers'
ideals such as the lasting value of a work are replaced by
the constraints of topicality and production, a new
generation of readers is emerging, people who have come to
know the screen as a means of reading and communicating on a
par with the book. The classic understanding of what it
means to be a publisher has come under discussion, the
cycles of production and innovation become shorter.
Topicality turns into a criterion for quality. Works can be
exploited for as long as they are protected by copyright,
and after that all that remains is adaptations and
stagings.
At the same time, politics
increasingly expose publishers to the free play of market
forces, e.g. when abolishing reduced postage for
periodicals.
The New Publishers and
their "Solutions"
The "new" publishers on the Net present themselves as
open fora accessible to everyone. The literary world which
has grown for centuries to become a control mechanism
regulated by quality and access is losing power. It is only
the Net that makes the uncontrolled world-wide mushrooming
of texts and documents possible, with all its advantages and
disadvantages. It is certainly advantageous that subcultures
find it easier to organize themselves, that small-scale
publishers, fanzines, a wide variety of interest groups can
be found and reached world-wide.
Publishers define themselves
as information service providers, they have stopped
publishing for certain media formats as they focus on the
needs of their respective target group instead. They produce
content to be processed for various media formats as and
when required. For this purpose data must be stored in a
neutral form so that they can be easily used and re-used in
different media. The concept of publishing independently of
a medium aims at converting data to a uniform digital format
and storing them.
Publishing independently of
a medium does not so much point to creative solutions but
rather to the protracted and cumbersome change-over to new
production structures. The change-over will take a few more
years. If you want to know the status of creative force in
many New Media publishing houses, all you have to do is look
at some of their websites. They usually consists of a static
list of titles with blurbs and authors' portraits, as well
as dates of completion and related events. At the level of
form, hard-cover and soft-cover books are complemented by
new "book formats": in the case of the e-book, the digitised
text is processed as a "book" but not printed. The e-book
introduces a new price category in the book
trade.
In the case of print on
demand, the text is published in the form of a book again:
when a book is ordered, it will be printed and delivered.
This pays off in runs below 500 copies, otherwise offset
printing is more profitable.
Another important aspect can
be found in the changes ensuing for the distribution and
organization of texts in the new contexts of the
Net.
Changes in Copyright
As computer technology tends
to encompass all media, content is defined as the totality
of digital data: images, sounds, text and software, user
data, e-mail addresses, archives, news groups. Standards
concerning production and business processes which had
hitherto been accepted are starting to change, as are
cultural and societal conventions.
In February 2001 various
communities cried out in dismay: Google, a search engine
operated by IBM, bought the Usenet Archive. Usenet is a
collection of news groups bringing together more than 500
million messages, "more than a terabyte of human
conversation," as the PR text on the Google site said. The
package, the price of which was not disclosed, also
contained software, various domains and trademarks. The
value of this collection of messages sent and opinions
voiced by individuals is derived from the fact that it can
easily be searched when turned into a data base. The
totality of entries is more valuable than the sum total of
the parts. A work placed on the Net in the form of
contributions of individuals acquires economic value. Those
who contributed did not get anything.
Those who operate the
server, manage mailing lists or news groups have the best
access to the data of a community. This kind of multiple
authorship shifts the copyright problem. No longer does one
publisher negotiate terms with one author, the owner of the
technical equipment negotiates with a large number of
authors who may even remain anonymous.
This new kind of knowledge
acquisition by publishing groups acting globally can also be
found in publications in the field of the natural sciences.
A few large companies are dominating the market. While
scientific treatises could be read in libraries and
photocopied, the big scientific publishers have now
increasingly moved towards publishing such content in
electronic form only. As a consequence, libraries no longer
subscribe to a journal but pay for the number of readers who
looked at an article. "Looking" is the right word because
printouts are prohibited. This means that scientific
knowledge can no longer circulate freely: a limiting factor
for researchers who do not have sufficient funds at their
disposal as well as those whose university or library does
not have the required technical equipment. The archives of
knowledge are in jeopardy, too: the reliability of digital
storage media is unknown, CD-ROMS are expected to last for
50 years but nobody has yet been able to verify that. So
far, scientists made their publications available to
scientific journals free of charge and assigned the
copyrights to the publishers. The Public Library of Science
calls for making scientific articles available to the
general public free of charge after a protection period of
six months during which publishers can generate a
profit.
Changes for Authors
Print on demand, often praised as "the liberation of
authors" because they have the means of production at their
disposal now, also creates completely new requirements for
authors. On the WWW they are sellers and buyers, authors and
reviewers at the same time. The innumerable opportunities of
publishing, the fact that publishing houses increasingly
define themselves as pure service providers require more
management and PR skills from authors.
In contrast to e-books,
print on demand (POD) aims at publishing a text in the form
of a book. POD benefits from the electronic format because,
unlike books, its storage costs are negligible: 150 pages of
text in PDF format require roughly 600 KB storage space.
There is no returns provision in POD because a commission to
the author becomes due once a text has been printed, and
double sales must be ruled out. For this reason book dealers
must in any event pay POD books they ordered. It remains to
be seen whether book dealers will offer many of these
low-number editions. Thus, the customers will not have much
of a chance of seeing the book before buying. For this
reason publishers acting in a global media environment will
need a well-structured network of contacts with known
interests so they can identify and grasp their opportunities
on the market. Authors will become interesting as both
target groups and groups of publishers, new structures will
emerge, seeking, either free of charge or against a fee, to
attract attention for the books mainly produced by
do-it-yourself publishing, offering PR, proof-reading,
graphic art and advertising services, from the creation of a
website to the presentation of the book.
Authors, barely liberated
from the dictatorship of the literary world, will not only
enjoy new freedom but will also have to accept new
obligations. When authors become publishers, they also have
to assume new tasks. The instructions of the POD provider
bod.de called "This is how it works" fill no less than nine
web pages. Commercial and communicative skills are called
for, in some cases, e.g. with Del Rey Digital, copyrights
must be given up before one can participate in a forum.
Open-ended definitions of
literature, interdisciplinary work in the totality of the
literary world, made possible by additional know-how on the
part of all those concerned (creative workers, operators,
scientists), as well as flexible approaches by those in
charge of exploitation and the representation of interests
will be required for the literature of the coming
years.
[1]
Berners-Lee, Tim: The World Wide Web: A very short personal
history. <www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/ShortHistory.html
>
[2]
Bruckman; Amy: Cyberspace is Not Disneyland: The Role of the
Artist in a Networked World. 1995 <www.cc.gatech.edu/~asb/papers/getty/disneyland.html>
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