Day: May 10, 2012

Go read This | Binaries Aren’t Going to Work « Wordisms

~ Eoin Purcell ~ Leave a comment

It’s a day of good posts on publishing and books and how they are going to work:

I often get annoyed at people ruing that the Internet has destroyed book culture, because this tends to clump blogs, online magazine and journals, and independent or DIY presses alongside content farms, auto-aggregated “reviews” and recommendations, and corporations intent on selling your data to other corporations. But that’s not to say that there isn’t a threat from the Internet, it’s just that the threat to book culture is not from digital, per se. It’s from corporate entities really, really interested in finding ways of exploiting book culture, sucking it dry and leaving its bloated corpse behind when it’s finished.

via Binaries Aren’t Going to Work « Wordisms.

Go Read This | Serious Nonfiction in the Digital Age

~ Eoin Purcell ~ Leave a comment

Great piece. And one that warrants a solid response, which I will think on before I write anything else:

So when digital evangelists prognosticate about the future of publishing, as they love to do, and about what “needs” to go away, serious nonfiction is now one of the first things I think about. Maybe it’s because I’m getting older and want to read more of it and notice twentysomethings have little perceived patience for weighty tomes. Maybe it’s because I’d rather have pragmatic conversations about what categories are best suited to digital — genre fiction obviously, certain commercial strains of literary fiction, basically any book that needs to have a completed manuscript done before it’s shopped around, or can be finished very quickly post-proposal — and which ones won’t be. Maybe it’s because the very institutions that support serious nonfiction are themselves in more financial trouble than they used to be.

via Serious Nonfiction in the Digital Age.