ACTA BIBLIOTHECÆ REGIÆ STOCKHOLMIENSIS LXII Skrifter
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ACTA BIBLIOTHECÆ REGIÆ STOCKHOLMIENSIS LXII Skrifter utgivna av Avdelningen för litteratursociologi vid Litteraturvetenskapliga institutionen i Uppsala Publications from the Section for Sociology of Literature at the Department of Literature, Uppsala University 42 Johan Svedjedal The Literary Web Literature and Publishing in the Age of Digital Production A Study in the Sociology of Literature Kungl. Biblioteket Stockholm 2000 Tryckt med bidrag från Stiftelsen framtidens kultur Sättning och formgivning: författaren © Johan Svedjedal Risbergs tryckeri 2000 ISBN 91–7000–192–8 ISSN 0065–1060 (Acta Bibliothecæ Regiæ Stockholmiensis) ISSN 0349–1145 (Skrifter utgivna av Avdelningen för litteratursociologi vid Litteraturvetenskapliga institutionen i Uppsala) Contents Acknowledgements 7 Introduction 9 1. The Book Dethroned 17 Books and the Media Revolutions 17 The Gutenberg Capacity 26 Railroads 34 Electricity 38 Radio 42 The Internet – Change Revisited 45 2. With No Direction Home 49 Dimensions of Textuality 49 From Texts to Hyperworks 51 Suspense and Curiosity – the Double Helix of Narrative 63 Temporal Structures in ”The Speckled Band” 78 Temporal Structures and Multisequentiality 83 Hyperreading and Zap Reading 88 3. Busy Being Born or Busy Dying? 93 Beyond the Book 93 Books and Other Media 96 Authors and Publishers 100 Literary Responsivity and the Unspoken Rules of Publishing 111 Functions in Publishing 114 Functions in Other Professions in the Book Trade 120 Beyond the Book Chain: a New Model of Functions in the Book Trade 125 4. Something Old, Something New 133 Quality Control 133 Publishing on the Internet 135 Print On Demand – Cheaper Printing or Publishing Somebody You Love? 141 Marketing Publishing – Traditional Publishers and the Internet 149 Internet Bookshops 152 Networking the Net – Links and Conferences 162 5. Almqvist on the Internet 175 Work in Progress 175 C. J. L. Almqvist’s Collected Works 176 The Digitization of a Book Project 178 From Editor to Reader 188 Other Swedish Critical Editions on the Internet 190 Copyright and Freedom of Information – the Net Book Disagreement 192 Conclusion 197 Internet Domains 203 Bibliography 205 List of Tables 215 Index 217 Acknowledgements The research for this book was jointly funded by the project Nya vägar för boken (New Ways for the Book Project) and the research project IT, berättandet och det litterära systemet (IT, Narrative Fiction, and the Literary System), funded by Axel och Margaret Ax:son Johnsons stiftelse för allmännyttiga ändamål (The Axel and Margaret Ax:son Johnson Foundation for Public Benefit) and run by Avdelningen för litteratursociologi (The Section for the Sociol- ogy of Literature) at Uppsala University, with the present author as project leader. Nya vägar för boken is the Swedish contribution to the larger European project New Book Economy – Building the Infor- mation Society. NBE-BIS was initiated by the European Council and is partially funded by the EU program ADAPT. The Swedish part of the project is also funded in part by Stiftelsen framtidens kultur (The Future Culture Foundation). I would like to express my gratitude to the Swedish project coordinator Peter Almerud for his many valuable comments on the manuscript of this book. I am also grateful for the pertinent comments of Erik Peurell, my former doctoral student and present colleague, who took time from his own busy research schedule to read my manuscript. Since early 1999, the research project “IT, berättandet och det litterära systemet” has been a most stimulating academic milieu for research on the impact of computerization on literature and the community of books. I would like to thank the other participants in the project, Anna Gunder, Svante Lovén, and Erik Peurell, for sharing their insights on everything from hypertext theory to the habits of cyborgs. If the future of literary studies in the digital world is anything like the academic spirit of this project I, for one, cannot wait for it to unfold. 8 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Earlier versions of several parts of the book appeared in the Swedish periodical Human IT. Mats Dahlström, one of the editors, gave invaluable comments on the articles before publication. Parts of Chapter 2 appeared as “A Note on the Concept of ‘Hypertext’ ” (1999/3), Chapters 3 and 4 together as “Busy Being Born or Busy Dying?” (1999/2), and a prototype version of Chapter 5 as “Almqvist on the Internet” (1998/3). I would also like to thank my excellent editor Rosemary Nordström, who has painstakingly checked and improved the text before publication, and Gunilla Jonsson of Kungl. Biblioteket (The Royal Library), who accepted the manuscript for inclusion in the library’s series of monographs. My wife, Katharina Leibring, gave unfailing intellectual support by reading and criticizing earlier versions of the manuscript. And as ever, Katharina and our daughters Anna and Karin deserve my gratitude for two other things of equal importance – for some- times giving me space and time to write, and sometimes keeping me away from writing. Uppsala, December 8, 1999 Johan Svedjedal Introduction iterature may very well be said to be a world wide web of influences and interdependencies, an intertextual universe L of echoes, allusions and similarities – a flow where time present and time past are both perhaps present in time future, and time future contained in time past. The book trade forms another kind of web, a network where corporate ownership, personal loyal- ties and past history bind people and institutions in complex sys- tems of respect, reliance or revenge. These are the global intellec- tual networks of the world of paper and ink – the literary webs of the book world. The “literary web” discussed in this book, however, is some- thing else. With this concept, I allude to the new forms of writing, publishing, distribution and reading emerging on the Internet. The rapid digitization of the literary world is spurring many changes for fiction and poetry in the form of the written word – enhanced printing technology, new kinds of online publishing ventures, in- novative methods for selling books, different forms of literary discussions, new ways of structuring literary works in the form of digital hypertexts, hypermedia, interactive stories, what have you. These changes are transforming professional profiles, as well as the book world as a whole. If the old book world was something of a monosequential literary process, with discrete units linked together one after another (chapter following chapter in a book, bookseller following publisher and author in the book chain), this new book world is much more of a multisequential web, a place where each reader chooses his unique way through hypertexts and where traditional boundaries between traditional professions are blurred or simply break down.* This is the literary web referred to * I have chosen to use the term “multisequential” throughout this book, since each discrete unit of the text (“scripton;” see below) is generally intended to be read sequentially, but the sequence of textual units (“scriptons”) is ever- 10 INTRODUCTION in the title of this book: a vast assembly of fragments, literary works, sites and institutions, linked together electronically in a globally accessible digital network. This “literary web” calls for new skills such as programming and linking. However, traditional professional skills are still needed (editing, quality control, assess- ment, and so on), even if combined in new ways, in new environ- ments, and sometimes, new professions.* Needless to say, this digitization of the book world is part of a larger historical process. As Manuel Castells has pointed out, this process should be understood as a restructuring of capitalism into informational capitalism, a network society permeated with mod- ern information technology working globally and in real time – that in fact, “globalization” is mainly the consequences of advanc- es in information and communications technology. This restruc- turing of capitalism may be said to have begun around 1970. As Castells shows in a survey of the highly industrialized G7 coun- tries, the period of 1920–1970 entailed the rise of the post-agrarian society (with rising employment in industry), while 1970–1990 saw the emergence of a post-industrial, post-fordist society (with dwin- dling employment in industry) where routine operations were au- tomated and jobs taken over by machines. Communications tech- nology and media are crucial factors in this new kind of society where, as Castells points out, the rapid change is “at least as major a historical event as was the eighteenth-century Industrial Revolu- tion, inducing a pattern of discontinuity in the material basis of economy, society, and culture.”† Predictably, the Western World is leading this industrial change. The result is reinforcement of tradi- tional global power structures and further Americanization of economies and minds. In sociological variables, the winning sides changing. By “monosequential,” I mean a fixed temporal order of these units. For a further discussion of these concepts, cf Chapter 3. * Cf Ian M. Johnson, “The Need for New Qualifications for New Products and Services in the Electronic Environment,” Laboratory of Future Communication: New Book Economy. Conference Proceedings. International Conference, Berlin, 26–27 Octo- ber 1998 (Berlin: International Book Agency, 1999), 70–79. † Manuel Castells, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, 1, The Rise of the Network Society, repr. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), Chapter 4, esp. pp. 208–16 and 242 (first ed. 1996). Quotation from p. 30. INTRODUCTION 11 are the expected ones – men still dominate over women, the edu- cated over the uneducated, white over non-white, the Western World over the Third World. Such is the larger sociocultural framework of the present digitization of literature. Worldwide, the number of computers connected to the Inter- net rose from some two million in 1993 to over 16 million in 1996.* This rapid growth is an unparalleled media change. In the Age of the Internet, publishing and literature seem destined to be changed by new forms of technology.