The exercise is extremely instructive in that it organizes the chaos that is the industry right now. I will continue to work on other scenarios that could possibly occur as my research evolves.
[Image at left of Jeff Bezos taken from Time Magazine, 6/22/09] I also found 3 extremely enlightening articles from Time Magazine today. They are, Are Libraries the Next Napster? , Books Gone Wild: The Digital Age Reshapes Literature, and Is Amazon Taking Over the Book Business?. Each of the articles was extremely thought provoking in terms of their vision for the industry. Particularly the article concerning Amazon, in which the authors Lev Grossman and Andrea Sachs discussed the business practices of Jeff Bezos, President of Amazon books, and the future of the publishing industry. Grossman and Sachs imagine the future of the industry as "a world where publishing has two centers rather than one: a conventional literary center, governed by mainstream publishing — with its big names and fancy prizes and high-end art direction — and a new one where books rise to fame and prominence YouTube-style, in the rough and tumble of the great Web 2.0 mosh pit." I thought that the two-center model could potentially be extremely accurate in portraying the future of publishing. I would really like to explore the possibilities of an industry that takes on this two center framework.
I wonder what the main differences between literature from each framework would be. Could the stuff created online ever be the literature we once knew? A published (published in the mainstream sense of the word) book--especially a published work of fiction--is rarely edited. Even if an updated version of the book is available, people will opt to keep their old book instead and new buyers may buy used to save a buck. All this makes a work of literature something finite. Even as the new edition of Huckleberry Finn enters into the world edited-- http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/07/books/07huck.html
ReplyDelete--I know my copy hasn't been changed and bookshelves across the country still have the unedited--maybe "true"--version resting upon them. The original Huck Finn is the part I am inclined to see as art, but what if Mark Twain himself had edited the work? Would I give the changes credence because he is the author whose name is attached to the original work? Online things get trickier. People are editing their own and others works in video posts and blogs constantly: changing old into new, adding and subtracting. What bit of those would be the art? Are none of them art? Is the original bit art while the things that appropriate it are just rehash? Are they all part of one work of art?