This paper will consider the transmission of medieval literature from its manuscript origins to its digital reproduction. As a lens, I will explore the publishing history of Chrétien de Troyes’ seminal Le Conte du Graal (The Story of the Grail), composed in c. 1180 and the original basis for all subsequent narratives depicting the Holy Grail, from Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur to Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. In essence, I shall argue that medieval texts are richest and most enjoyable when they are contextualised within their intended mode of transmission – a dynamic manuscript culture, which digital formats enable us to enter with greater dexterity than print has so far allowed.
My methodology will involve a consideration of the various ways in which this important text has been published across the centuries, concentrating on the publishers’ response(s) to changing literary tastes amongst target markets. I will provide key examples from manuscript, early print, print and digital to illustrate how new formats allow publishers to re-spin existing material for new audiences (whether scholarly or otherwise). Of crucial importance will be the publishers’ employment of paratexts such as illustration, blurbs, cover design (where appropriate), editing and compilation. A greater understanding of these will not only facilitate an exploration of this text’s rebranding and recasting, but also the correlation of the various treatments of this text to those of narratives from the broader medieval literary genre.
My paper will conclude by considering the existing provision of digital editions of this text, focusing on the fact that, despite there being a Kindle edition of the narrative, digitised manuscript editions have not yet been developed – a curiosity given the pervasive digitisations of other medieval literary manuscripts (such as of Beowulf). I will consider the reasons for this, and offer suggestions as to how primary manuscript materials can most fruitfully be employed in modern publishing projects involving not only this text, but also medieval literature more broadly.
Dr Leah Tether, Senior Lecturer in Digital Humanities, University of Bristol, UK.
How is the printed novel affected by digital culture? Two tendencies may be pointed out. Several contemporary novels tend to resist digital culture by celebrating the traditional aesthetics and culture of the book. However, the same texts are often deeply grounded in digital culture at the level of production, narrative content, promotion, distribution and reception.
My paper investigates this ambiguity in contemporary literature, focusing especially on the changing position of the reader in relation to the author or text. Claire Squires and Padmini Murray have noted how readers in the digital age tend to become prosumers as well as co-promoters of literary texts, creatively participating in the text, influencing the author as well as helping to promote the work through online communities, social media and blogs. Henry Jenkins has similarly pointed to a broad participatory turn in contemporary culture. The traditional power relation between reader/consumer and the author/publisher seems to be changing.
I examine how this situation is expressed in and around selected novels by e.g. J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst, Mark Danielewski and Steven Hall. These works celebrate traditional book culture while also encouraging participation online, suggesting a situation where old ideas of reading and established modes of interacting with books are projected into new practices of reader interaction, in online forums, on social media etc. I investigate this connection and point out two different tendencies. Readers are presented as powerful, potentially influencing the literary work, hence reflecting a general idea of new media as carrying the potential of enabling more dialogue and more readerly influence. However, readers’ participation may also be staged, controlled by the authors and publishers and used as a mode of promoting the work. Thus I investigate how the role of the reader is negotiated in and around the printed novel, between participation and promotion.
Sara Tanderup, PhD Student, Comparative History, School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University, Denmark.
Ebooks are often posited as futuring objects, that is as vehicles for a re-imagination of the future of the book, both from aesthetical, technical and societal perspectives. At the same time, it is clear that many ebook formats, readers and software platforms also seems to remediate the traditional design of paper books and mime or even cherish in evocations of traditional book design. While this may make perfectly good business sense from an author and publisher perspective, as it doesn’t require a complete transformation of the production process, nor a rewriting of the book, it makes little sense in the discourse of e-books as the future of reading. This is especially attenuated by the fact that most authors and readers, as well as other stakeholders in the business of the book, still seems to prefer the 'good old' paper book (Woody et al, 2010). It is the suggestion here that these cultural imaginations can be understood as non-synchronicity (Jordheim, 2014); either looking to the past through the use of nostalgia, retro, appraisals of tradition (Baker, 2013), or the future, through futuristic or even amnesiac calls for the total transformation of the new (Campbell, 1992).
This paper will examine the use of past and future in three cases of e-books and ebook distribution in Denmark: an national e-reading service from the Danish libraries, an e-book from a small experimental micro publisher, and a hybrid digital educational book. While the chosen cases span across genres, formats and relations to the circuit of the book business (Darnton, 1982; Murray and Squires, 2013), they are selected because they explicitly challenge the traditional paper book, and thus claims a bid for how we ought to conceptualise the e-book, although in different ways. By comparing the use of typography, interaction and elements in the interface and covers, and by studying marketing material as well as other mediating elements, the aim is to understand how discourses of future and past are set in play under current technological and business conditions.
Toke Riis Ebbesen, Assistant Professor, Design Studies, Department of Design and Communication, University of Southern Denmark.
According to recent alarming reports, the reading skills among young readers in Sweden have shown to be in a steady pace of decline for the latest five years. This has helped to raise a political awareness about the importance of reading among all the institutions involved in producing and distributing children’s literature in Sweden. In this context, the digital formats on the market are sometimes discussed as a possible means to reach the non-readers by new and different means to the traditional paper book, while the critics tend to see all digitized media as threats to the development of children’s reading skills.
The debaters often express an ambivalence that specifically addresses the aspect of gaming, assumed as children’s preferred use of digital tools. Some of the concerns are, for instance, that reading on a tablet will send the wrong message about what reading is or create distracted readers. Other concerns are that the professional skills of the publishing houses will be compromised in the process of leaving too much of the production conditions to companies outside of the business, such as technical engineers or internet operators. As with most issues where children are the target audience, these discussions tend to become more invested with moral dilemmas than when only adults are concerned.
Alongside this discussion, there is a debate on the Swedish book market about the possible futures for the e-book market. Statistics show that e-sales are still diminutive and publishers hesitate to invest large sums of money in products that may never become successful on the market. In this paper, some of the discernible attitudes towards e-formats for children’s books will be discussed in the effort to map out the different concerns and possibilities connected with e-books from the viewpoint of the debate on children’s reading skills.
Sara Kärrholm is associate professor in Literature and Publishing studies at Lund University, Sweden, where she teaches a course on ”Digital publishing”, among other things. Working in literary studies with an interdisciplinary approach, her research interest is popular literature, specifically crime fiction, and children’s literature. She is the co-author of a Swedish handbook on crime literature (2012) and has coedited a volume on children’s literature and values (2012). In 2014 she was the coeditor of an anthology on Hype: Bestsellers and Literary Culture.
Although there is the perception that developing economies are slow to adopt new technologies, anecdotal evidence suggests that eBooks are gaining acceptance among young readers in Ghana. Based on qualitative research, using focus group discussions, this paper examines the status and use of printed books along side eBooks among school children in Ghana.
This paper discusses children’s perceptions about printed and electronic books; their preferences based on the categories of the books they read, their aesthetic qualities, ease of access to these books and the possibility of adopting eBooks as a tool of learning in Basic schools in Ghana. This is part of a broader research that examines digital children’s book publishing in Ghana within the context of Rogers’ diffusion of innovation theory.
Lucy Ry-Kottoh is a PhD researcher at the University of Stirling, Scotland and a lecturer on the Publishing Studies programme at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Kumasi, Ghana.
How do we understand publishing activity in a transforming cultural ecology or context? What is the nature of the relationship between literature and other cultural mediums, like games design and the visual arts? Exploring these questions are important, to offer insights for publishers who wish to adapt in new and refreshing ways to the intricacies of the relationships for readers, between media: paper and pixels, and other cultural mediums: literature, film, art, games, etc., that for readers are perhaps not so distinct.
Kist (2009) and Breede (2008) wrote of the need for publishers to adapt to the new information market, and that technological innovation was key for future growth for publishers, technology being inextricably linked as it is to publishing activity. The digital disruption and disintermediation to publishing activity, with the contemporary version of Darnton’s publishing communications circuit have been shown by Ray Murray and Squires (2013), and Bhaskar (2013) describes a new theory of publishing, helpfully developing the forum for a paper such as this. Situated within this literature, this paper aims to build on previous work around the relationship between publishing and visual culture (Preston 2013), towards addressing the conference theme of “aesthetic experiments” around an emergence of new forms of reading.
Events I attended as a participant observer and audience member are the focus of this paper; three talks which were a part of Dundee Literary Festival; a Twine Jam workshop/hack day organised by Electric Bookshop, and a two-day workshop, ‘Read, Write, Execute’ at Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop. Common among these events was an aim to explore and uncover new understandings of the practices of production related to publishing activity around literature and visual art, and how they relate to the opportunities brought by digital mediating means.
The paper aims to extract some of the underlying relationships for cultural producers and intermediaries at the outskirts of mainstream “publishing industry”, between literature and other cultural mediums in this current post-digital context, giving rise to interesting insights and implications for the ‘potential’ future of publishing activity.
Louisa Preston, PhD Candidate, Publishing Studies, University of Stirling and University of St Andrews, Scotland.
Traditionally we have seen the interaction and choice allowed by interfaces as a empowerment to the reader who can navigate more freely and perhaps participate in the production of texts. However, we now see the popularity of new digital cultural platforms such as e-readers, tablets, smart phones that can be described as tracking and controlling reading in ways that can be described as controlled consumption (Striphas, 2011). What we know from social media, that our consumption becomes production is also true in e-readers where our reading behaviour is tracked and datafied in order for profiling, marketing and other kinds of capitalisation. In this way we see the structure of a new cultural industry run by mainly IT companies taking over from the old culture industry of publishers or at least adding a meta-interface to their products and in this way adding a software-hardware interface that changes production infrastructures, relations between authors, producers and readers, economy and marketing. The Amazon Kindle is an example of this in the way that it combines the Kindle hardware, the Kindle software and the Kindle shop in an intricate circuit that frames both production and consumption.
This paper will discuss how this challenges literary culture and with reference to concrete works how artists and authors answer to the challenge. One example is Ubermorgen’s The Project Formerly Known as Kindle Forkbomb that aims to explode the Kindle system by automatically generating e-books from dramatized YouTube comments, another example is Silvio Lorusso and Sebastian Schmieg’s Networked Optimization which is a series of popular self-help books with only the popular high-lights from Kindle readers printed and thus readable. The final example is our own platform, Ink After Print, which will serve to argue for a different literary interface reflecting its own material dimensions of media, interface and text towards a dialectic, critical rather than intuitive, invisible and ‘smart’ interface.
Søren Pold and Christian Ulrik Andersen are Associate Professors at Information Science, School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University, Denmark.
In January 2014 the top ten bestselling books on Amazon's Kindle in Germany were all self-published. This indicates a radical change in the book business: authors are turning their backs on publishers and other cultural gatekeepers and finding new paths to their readers. At the same time well-known publishing companies are acquiring self-publishing platforms, as Pearson did in the summer of 2012 when it bought Author Solutions for 74 million pounds. In late August 2015, Scandinavia’s largest publishing house, Bonnierförlagen (Bonnier Publishing), launched Type and Tell, a platform for aspiring self-published authors. If self-publishing is seen as a threat to traditional publishing, such investments could seem paradoxical. However, they are motivated by self-preservation; publishing companies strive to find new business models in reaction to such major changes within the publishing business.
My paper explores the breakthrough of modern self-publishing, a phenomenon that has gained new momentum due to the digital shift in publishing. First my paper delineates the particular characteristics of today’s self-publishing market, and how they have developed in recent years. For example, who is the self-published author, what does he or she publish? Which channels does he or she use, and what do the business models look like? Here, I will examine digital, commercial as well as non-commercial self-publishing platforms. Finally, I will consider how libraries are meeting new demands of self-publishing. The vast quantities of self-published titles put the acquisitions departments of libraries, particularly copyright libraries, under tremendous strain, necessitating new acquisitions procedures and selection criteria. I will analyze the responses to these demands by the Swedish Royal Library.
The perspective is Scandinavian, with the UK and the US for comparison.
Alexandra Borg, Postdoc. Department of Literature, Uppsala University, Sweden.
