ON THE ROAD TO VIRTUAL

Will that be Paper or Pixels?

In the winter of 2003, I became aware of a significant shift in the way editors responded to agents pitching book projects at them: they invited them to submit the documents by email as file attachments.

As long as anyone in our industry could remember, printed manuscripts had been mailed or hand-delivered to publishers. But to the savvy young people who entered publishing’s ranks at the end of the 20th century - Publishers Weekly described them as “the first generation to harvest the benefits of a robust digital culture” - it made no sense to print and transport all those reams of paper when the means for instant delivery was literally at their fingertips. Online submission was the only logical procedure.

Even older hands, who, only a few years earlier had been terrified of computers, are now completely comfortable with them. Email has all but replaced the telephone as their communications mode of choice. They are constantly visiting amazon.com to check out competitive books or the BookScan website to evaluate the performance of their own or competitors’ books. Text-editing software has reached a level of sophistication that enables them to “blue pencil” drafts on their monitor screens and transmit revision instructions to authors without ever having to resort to a sheet of paper or travel to the post office.

Increasingly, agents pitching projects over the telephone can hear the editor’s fingernails clicking on a computer keyboard as they converse. The editor is googling the author, checking out his or her photo, web site, amazon.com ranking, reviews and publication history, forming impressions (and perhaps even reaching conclusions) before reading a word of the author’s text.

Although this shift occurred without fanfare, it was an important marker on the road from a tangible publishing model to a virtual one. So delighted was the publishing community with the convenience of these innovations that the larger significance - a fundamental change in the publishing culture - was largely overlooked. For many of us who had puzzled over Marshall McLuhan’s famous dictum, “The medium is the message,” the clouds parted and the meaning shimmered through: printed and electronic communications are not merely different media; they are fundamentally different experiences.

Many such indicators confirm that the shift to a new publishing paradigm has progressed much further than some publishing professionals, preoccupied as they are with content - with words - think. This article attempts to fix our location today on the trajectory of the book from one medium to another.

Dog and Pony Shows

If form follows function - if the experience of reading on screen is different from that of reading on paper - it follows that the nature of the book itself will be transformed by the way it is transmitted from author to reader. In fact, that is just what is happening.

Before we examine how, it might help to look at the reading experience itself.
A generation that defines books as material objects is giving way to one that regards them as quanta of digitized information. This new culture thrives on the vivid colors of television and videos, the frenetic interactivity of email and messaging, the emotional stimulation of video games and of channel- and web-surfing, and the instant gratification of cell phones and googling. Hyper-exposed to audial and visual media, the new breed of publishing animal seems to exhibit diminished confidence in the power of words alone to stimulate the imagination. For many jittery young people, printed texts on a stack of paper are, as one editor said, “kind of boring.” “If all it is, is a book, merely words” he elaborated, “it’s hard to get excited. I ask myself, ‘What else is it besides a book? Is it a video game? A movie? A web site?’ It’s got to be more than a book to turn me on.”

In order to reinforce the impact of “mere” words, authors and agents are being forced to package their projects more vividly and interactively, loading them with every imaginable bell and whistle to get attention and stimulate jaded editorial imagination.