Burning the Page

by Jason Merkoski

  But just a mere two years after the Oprah show aired, it’s no longer available anywhere on the internet or even the undernet. The show had a daily viewership in the millions, but it isn’t available anymore, with the exception of occasional bootleg clips here and there, like bits of papyrus buried in the Egyptian desert of the internet.

  Media has a surprisingly short shelf life. For example, only four of the films of Theda Bara survive. The others are all gone, lost. Theda Bara was the original Hollywood vamp, one of the most massively popular actresses in all of movie history. In 1917, her film Cleopatra had the biggest budget of any film up to that point, $500,000, and that was at the end of World War I! And yet, all that remains of the film and Theda’s risqué outfits is a smudgy, five-second clip that was rescued from the vaults of the film studio as it was burning down decades later.

  Theda Bara isn’t unique in this sense. Only ninety seconds of footage exists from one of the first animated movies, The Centaurs, made ten years before Disney came onto the scene. One of the first Westerns, Devil Dog Dawson, only survives as a thirty-eight-second fragment, found by accident in a mislabeled film can in Ohio. The first Technicolor film, On with the Show, a crowning success that raked in the modern equivalent of $2 billion in revenues, is now completely lost, although somehow, absurdly, a twenty-second color clip was found in a toy projector in the 1970s.

  History was harsh with Theda Bara and a lot of other silent film stars, but it’s just as harsh with books. If you look back to the ancient world, there were three major libraries. First and foremost was the library of Alexandria in Egypt with about half a million volumes, then the library of Pergamum in Greece with 200,000 books, and then finally the library of Harran in Turkey. These three libraries held most of the books of the ancient world, and scholars still gnash their teeth and tear out their hair thinking about all the conquerors in the intervening centuries who dumped these books into rivers or burned them for fuel.

  The story of books in the ancient world is a sad one. Anthony dismantled the library of Pergamum as a wedding present to Cleopatra. He emptied the shelves and sent all the books to Alexandria. But that library didn’t last long, because it was repeatedly decimated by fires and finally Islamic conquest. The only sizeable collection of books from the ancient world survived in Harran, a dusty outpost in Turkey where all the scholars fled from Egypt and Greece with their books. The books stayed hidden there until Arab scholars rediscovered and retranslated them, leading in part to the Renaissance of knowledge around Gutenberg’s time.

  The fate of these ancient libraries is instructive and offers models of what might happen with corporate mergers and ebooks. Is it too hard to imagine a future where Google and Apple merge and combine their vast ebook libraries—only to suffer the slings and arrows of corporate fortune and go bankrupt one day, the books disappearing as the servers get shut down and rust, as distant data centers become overgrown with ivy and vines? Perhaps Amazon survives for a while before it, in turn, is acquired by some future new-media company, its ebooks relegated to an archive, perhaps to survive, perhaps not.

  What would it be like to live in a future where all media is consolidated under one company? Not only would that company be able to set arbitrarily high prices on content, but it could also bury any content in its vaults, effectively censoring it. And what would it be like if that company failed, went bankrupt, or worse, lost its media archives? What if all the content was destroyed, perhaps through a massive server outage or an act of internal sabotage by a disgruntled employee or a digital ebook-eating virus?

  Such a loss is too catastrophic to consider. But it could happen. Technological obsolescence not only happens to hardware and software, but also to institutions. After all, there were only three major libraries in the ancient world—and only one of them survived long enough for its books to be retranslated and preserved. Likewise, there are only three major digital media retailers now—Apple, Amazon, and Google. Which of these three, if any, do you think will survive? Fast-forward a hundred years: what do you think it would be like if one company monopolized our media?

  http://jasonmerkoski.com/eb/19.html

  The Future of Writing

  The print revolution in Gutenberg’s time was truly revolutionary because it allowed knowledge to be distributed to masses of people. It was no longer necessary to hoard parchment, and books weren’t only available for the elite. Printing has undergone changes since then, but most of them have been evolutionary rather than revolutionary.

  For example, when mass-market paperbacks emerged in the mid-1930s, they weren’t revolutionary. Mass-market paperbacks were pioneered by the Penguin publishing house, which took the novel approach of producing books from cheap pulp, hence the term “pulp fiction.” In fact, the mass-market paperback books themselves could be recycled into pulp and reused as paper for the publisher’s next mass-market paperback. All the books you see in grocery-store checkout aisles and airports owe their existence to the mass-market paperback format. The idea was evolutionary because it allowed books to be sold for even cheaper prices and for incrementally more people to read them.

  Don’t get me wrong; we need evolutionary improvements.

  But revolutions are acts of genius. They take multiple evolutionary improvements and compress them into one new product. Gutenberg’s printing was revolutionary because it combined multiple evolutionary improvements (moveable type, the printing press, and oil-based inks). The iPhone was revolutionary in the same way (large touchscreen phone, apps, GPS, and unlimited data plans), and so were ebooks.

  As a culture, we can’t go back to the pre-iPhone days of the mere cell phone. And we can’t go back to the pre-ebook days of Borders, B. Dalton, and your local bookseller. In part, that’s because these stores are closed, bankrupted. The immediacy of digital ebook downloads and the convenience of a cloud-based library have replaced them. Moreover, ebooks are eternal.

  Classical scholars may hope one day to find a lost work of Aeschylus in the bindings of an Egyptian mummy or Shakespeare’s Love’s Labors Won in an old English priory. But ebooks democratize and extend the longevity of books. Your aunt’s self-published volume of cat poetry will survive the eons, and your grandpa’s autobiography will help your descendant in the twenty-fourth century to build a family tree. Our words aren’t dependent on penurious scribes or budget-minded librarians or choosy auditors at the Library of Congress. Our words are liberated—that is, if we choose to write them in the first place.

  Paradoxically, even though ebooks have ushered in a revolution in reading, the digital culture of our internet age is making writing more difficult.

  The flip side of digital reading is digital creation. I’ve written a lot here about how ebooks are changing the way we read, but how is digital technology changing how we write?

  We’re getting more used to the idea of ebooks, but many artists still prefer to sketch on paper instead of the digital medium, and many writers still prefer to carry journals with them in which to record their ideas and impressions.

  Digital journals still haven’t become mainsteam. However, some companies are providing an interesting bridge between print and digital for writing. For example, Moleskine and Evernote have recently partnered to create a hybrid system that lets you write or draw on a special kind of paper inside Moleskine notebooks. The paper lends itself to automatic digitization and cloud upload through Evernote, a company that aims to let you archive and revisit all your memos and ideas online. I think this is great because it can make content more searchable and reusable. Content from a journal can be copied and pasted into a term paper or business plan rather than having to be retyped. Innovations like this make us more efficient.

  I’d like to say that I’m an early adopter and I’m deliberately choosing to write 100 percent digitally from now on, on principle. But the reality is otherwise—I had to learn from my own misfortune to go fully digital.

  Sometime over the weekend in summer, on a rare vacation, I lost
my own journal. It might have been at a bakery or a farmers’ market. It might have been at a bar or a gallery, but I lost it. I no longer have my journal.

  It was a blue journal, the size of a regular notebook, with drawings and writing inside. It’s worthless to anyone but me. It has everything I wrote over the last two years. There are no passwords or bank account numbers in my journal. But there are illustrations I made and ideas I had about digital media.

  What is the lesson of losing my journal?

  I need to go fully digital.

  I learned that you can’t back up your journal to Dropbox or any other cloud backup service. And who knew? There’s no kiosk in a mall where you can back up or scan in regular, everyday objects so you can restore them if you lose them. There would be such a service in the ideal world, in the best of all possible worlds, but there isn’t here. Dropbox is great, but it won’t work for real-world artifacts, for things. Only bits.

  Because of the experience of losing my journal, I decided to go fully digital in my writing from now on. The experience of losing my journal has turned me into that guy in the corner of Starbucks who wears headphones and talks to his iPad, dictating his thoughts in a public place and making a fool of himself. It has exiled me to the shady corners of coffee shops and bus stations, away from the happy patrons who I might otherwise annoy with my dictational monologue. Losing my journal has made me mutter to myself like an old, drunken crazy man.

  There’s a benefit to this, of course. I can now back up whatever I write. If I have a kid one day, I’ll give her all my blank journals and let her draw in them. Or maybe I’ll give my kid a secondhand iPad, so her scrawls last a thouand digital years. The digital mode of creation immortalizes us; the analog mode humbles us.

  I’m not the first writer in history to lose a journal. Some writers have lost more. Malcolm Lowry, author of Under the Volcano, retired to the coast of British Columbia to write his second novel. He spent seven years writing in a cabin he built out of driftwood, but when he was about to mail his manuscript to his publisher, his house burned down and he lost everything. He had to spend another seven years rewriting and reconstructing the book, which was finally published as Ultramarine but which even the author himself admitted was a bit of a flop. Something about the loss affected his writing, and the book was never as good as the original. Reconstructions rarely are.

  There’s something about the surety of the Save button. When I save a document—like this one, as I type it on my computer—I know it’s instantly copied to the cloud. I’m safe, my writings are backed up, and I rest easy. Until, at least, the cloud topples over one day, and what was once in the much-vaunted cloud is reduced to digital dust. I imagine a collosal implosion, like that in the season finale of Lost where Locke destroys the Dharma Initiative’s Swan station. In the buildup to the countdown on Lost, you see computers toppling over, steel walls imploding, all the girders creaking and straining, the countdown clock itself imploding, knives flying, metal struts rending and shrieking, and you hear the high-pitched whine of metal, the catastrophonic sounds of electromagnets bending the walls, and a woman’s voice announcing systems failure, before Locke admits, “I was wrong.” Easily the best three minutes in TV history.

  But the digital cloud won’t topple for a while.

  Maybe it will in fifty years or so, once we can no longer afford to power the many clouds. Facebook has its cloud, and so do Amazon, Apple, and Twitter. Basically, it’s new gold-rush country, but instead of gold, people are mining clouds. Old stalwart companies like Adobe and even Walmart need to have their own clouds. There are even companies selling devices to small businesses so they can manage their own clouds.

  It’s faddish, and it may all fail one day.

  Maybe then people will return to a simpler mode of life. Return to writing with pen and ink and, yes, the peril of permanently losing what you’ve written.

  Both print and digital are ephemeral. Our works can be destroyed in an instant with either. But at least digital versions give you backups.

  All these backups do introduce one casualty, however. With digital writing, there will be fewer manuscripts for sale. There used to be a healthy after-market among collectors to buy not only the first editions of a given novel, but also the author’s own manuscript. With digital manuscripts, this kind of collecting is pointless. Since value is typically related to scarcity, there’s no value to a unique good if it can be duplicated an infinite number of times.

  Though I’m bullish on digital writing, I do want to note that in the process of writing this chapter, my word-processing software crashed. Twice. I almost lost everything I wrote. Even after recovering what I could, a lot had to be rewritten from memory. So take this paean to the benefits of digital writing with a grain of digital salt!

  That caveat aside, now that so much is digitally composed, authorship is flourishing.

  Writing digitally instead of on old-fashioned typewriters lends itself to faster publication. Ebooks can be self-published in just hours. Retailers like Barnes & Noble and Amazon and Smashwords, who have their own self-publishing portals, have created ways of disconnecting authors from publishers. Authors who are savvy enough to use the newer self-publishing tools are flourishing.

  It’s been said of the American Revolution, in Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, that it was a revolution of the people, for the people, and by the people. But let me tell you something about the ebook revolution: this is a revolution of the publishers, for the readers, by the retailers.

  Strangely enough, the roles of authors are mostly unchanged in this revolution. They’re still going to write on their computers or typewriters. Yes, some manuscripts are still typed out on old typewriters, although composing books digitally lends them a felicitous fluidity that enables them to be published faster. They’re more immediate now than ever before.

  In fact, digital authorship is alive and well! So many wonderfully obscure and unknown books are published on Kindle’s self-publishing platform, ranging from “lost books” of the Odyssey to bizarre theories of the universe. The rise of self-publishing and ebooks is giving little-known authors a megaphone. And sometimes the authors are heard. A few of them start out as self-published and then resell their books to big publishers, where they actually can be more successful.

  Such authors may have gotten their start with self-publishing, but they become truly successful only when courted afterward by a traditional publisher, who helps the author craft the raw content into a polished product that readers really want. Traditional publishers also provide such initially self-published authors with a bigger and better marketing platform, a broader reach, and frankly, legitimacy.

  I joke sometimes that self-publishing is mainly about cat poetry, but the universe of self-published content is truly vast. If only it were possible to surf through all these words easily, if only I could have a buffet of this content all at once—and truly, I do love to read, because to me reading is like being a starving omnivore at an all-you-can-eat buffet!

  There’s no better time than now to be a reader.

  And it’s a truly democratic time now for being an author, in that anyone who can use Microsoft Word or blog-authoring tools can quickly publish a book—but with democracy comes altogether too many options. In some ways, this is a case where the paradox of choice reigns supreme. Two or three hundred years ago, your choice of authors might’ve been limited to Daniel Defoe or Jonathan Swift, but now there are too many authors, too many choices. Almost too many choices, in fact.

  There are so many choices now that we may be afraid to make a choice. This is known as the paradox of choice. It’s easier to choose between chocolate and vanilla than to choose between fifty-seven flavors at your local Baskin-Robbins. You’ll stare at all the flavors, numbed and likely to leave in despair, overwhelmed by all the choices.

  In addition to swamping readers with a surfeit of great books, the ebook revolution will place demands on authors. Especially authors who choose to use
larger publishers.

  Publishers will eventually require their authors to log in to websites that show statistics about their books. For a given chapter that the author wrote, the sites will show statistics about what percent of people read that chapter, which pages were highlighted the most, which pages were shared most on social networks, and spelling mistakes or anachronisms that readers pointed out.

  The author will need to use this data in making revisions for a second or third edition of the book. Or perhaps this data will be available to the author as he or she plans a new book—to see what content engaged readers most and what sections were too difficult for the target audience to read. Editors may not even be part of the process. Authorship may be a direct relationship between readers and authors, mediated by these web pages of statistics culled from the thousands of readers and their reactions to the content.

  In the years ahead, authors will have to become amateur statisticians.

  Likewise, these stats will open up worlds of possibility for the writing process itself. It will mean that the process of writing an ebook is no longer static.

  When traditional brands launch a new ad campaign, they usually create multiple versions of the ad for what’s called “A/B” testing. Version A of the ad gets shown to one group of people online in a test market, and version B gets shown to another group. After a few days, the results are tallied, and whichever ad is more effective is picked to go national. The same process will happen with ebooks. An author will be able to publish version A of an ebook with a plotline that differs slightly from version B. Once results are in from readers, the author can pick the more effective ebook.