cross-posted from http://reauthoringproject.wordpress.com

Funny, the conversations you can find yourself sucked into while casually perusing a distant friend’s Facebook site. And so it was for me earlier this week, as I innocently replied to a posted article about the future of books; or more specifically, about the future of books as seen in these early days of Apple’s much-hyped iPad.

It was a thoughtful (if somewhat disjointed) article, the basic premise being that writers who start writing ‘for’ the iPad or Kindle or any other device as if it were merely a snazzier conveyer of a traditional form were doomed. The future winners of the Darwinian scrum now consuming the publishing world, the article concluded, were those who would think about how to tell their stories in a way that took maximum advantage of how new technologies engaged with their audiences. Making the story part-read, part-game, for example; or offering clues in the text that lead to embedded story enhancers on the web.

I’m all for such things as long as story remains paramount, which was the article’s primary point, and it was in this spirit I that offered a ‘huzzah’ on my friend’s FB page for bringing this tidbit to light. Alas, I was quite immediately flamed by another of her FB friends, who said essentially that he wondered what I was smoking. Surely, the flamer said, books were books and e-books or any other ‘e’ interpretation of text was something other than a book, and therefore not to be spoken of in the same hallowed tones as we must, so the flamer said, surely speak of ‘proper’ books.

As the flamer and I traded broadsides, a spot of Googling revealed him to be a rather accomplished and reasonably well-known author himself. The broadsides gradually morphed into a kind of detente as our (rather long) exchange moved to the diminishing opportunities for professional authors, and particularly authors who focus on non-fiction, which requires great expenditures of time, research, and travel, and therefore money (as in, literary advances) to produce. The flamer, whose work generally falls into this category, noted sadly that he’d seen his advances go from livable to laughable to non-existent: this despite prizes, press, and decent readership.

We concluded our exchange with a virtual handshake of sorts since I, too, know several writers with roughly the same literary profile and trajectory. I didn’t tell my nemesis-turned-(sort-of)-comrade-in-arms that some of these writers, rather than howling about a changing publishing world, had made conscious choices to do things differently. I didn’t say that some of them were beginning to reap dividends from doing so. I left that exchange wondering if I’d ever see the flamer’s name on a book again. I hope I do; he clearly does great work.

I feel fortunate to have retained a fair amount of flexibility in my thinking about writing and its changing forms and audiences. But it’s all too obvious that there are many writers out there who cannot see past ‘the book’, or even a very specific idea of what makes for a worthwhile book. Exhibit A: at one point, amidst an exchange about self-publishing, the flamer wrote that surely if one’s book doesn’t crack the Amazon top million, it isn’t worth much creatively. A dubious assertion indeed in a publishing world dominated by the likes of Dan Brown and JK Rowling.

The author of the article that started this whole saga, who proudly admitted to being only 21, said with great enthusiasm that if George Orwell had had an iPad and other tech gizmos to enhance his writing arsenal, he would “have blown our minds.” Maybe: would 1984 have been any more potent had Orwell decided, say, to embed a tiny webcam in the e-book version and have readers surreptitiously eavesdrop on each other? Discuss!

But at the least, one likes to think he’d have understood that just as sheepskin gave way to papyrus, and painstakingly-rendered monkish script gave way to Gutenberg, the form, function and use of ‘the book’ is changing again. But people still want stories, and they always will. Every writer should find solace and light in that idea.