Simon Groth on Why Pixels Complement Dead Trees [12.07.2011]

She adjusted her glasses and took a deep breath as silence descended on the room. Her eyes were red, but dry, her chest swelled and her jaw set: bring it on. When she spoke, her voice was cracking but not cracked. She talked about her love of the printed page, of the bound volume. She pointed to many examples of print culture declining in the news world—closure of news rooms, consolidation of mastheads, low revenues. She talked of print being under attack, and of its advocates being proudly out of step with the zeitgeist. She talked of being in the minority and of being right.

‘If you’re here to convince us to go digital, you can get the hell out.’

She didn’t say that directly to me, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t squirm.

The occasion was a gathering of small publishers and the speaker in question published and produced a small literary journal. As a writer with many contributions to small literary journals over the years, I felt strange and uncomfortable to be considered, even briefly, an antagonist to the little magazine. Really, I am heartened to hear that small publishers have no intention of walking away from their print editions, but I hope the speaker in question was kidding with all that digital stuff.

Though tempting, wholesale comparison with other industries are rarely of much use in divining the future of publishing. Even between forms of publishing, such comparisons are awkward and ill fitting.

Newspapers were always in the business of selling advertising. I assume, technically, they still are. They don’t compete for eyeballs with books or literary journals. Increasingly, they compete now with news aggregators, friend recommendations, RSS feeds, and user-generated content, all of it fuelled by the free exchange of information established in the world wide web’s DNA (and by the news’s own cut-and-paste advertising-funded approach to the web for the last fifteen years). Newspapers traditionally had to be both comprehensive and timely, two things the ubiquitous and space-generous world wide web does far more efficiently and often for free. That’s not to say newspapers have no place, but they have had to scramble to define what the printed edition brings to the table that a digital edition cannot. I’m still not sure they’ve solved that particular problem, especially when we see paywalls going up around the world.

And it’s not like the advent of digital is anything new for journal publishers. I loved publishers who insisted (in recent years on their web sites no less) that submissions were sent in hard copy only until they realised they actually wanted to publish the piece. Then the writer received a polite email requesting a Word document. Most new journals and a few older ones have now dispensed even with that, preferring email or web uploads for their submissions process. Today’s aspiring writers will never know the uniquely pitying smiles of post office workers recognising the signs of a serial submitter.

A couple of major obstacles facing literary journals are visibility and access. The low circulation and high cover price necessary to survive a print world keeps a lot of journals from reaching a wider audience. Print places limits on the volume of work that can reach the page, meaning many journals must reluctantly turn away good writing. But the limited space available in print editions can spill over onto pixelated pages. Publishers who embrace digital publishing have access to a larger canvas for work beyond what goes into print editions. Once this may have been considered inferior to print, but that attitude is changing. Making articles available online for free increases overall readership, reach and social influence for both writer and journal. Some journals already use a combination of social media and blogging to engage with audiences in a way that would be impossible had they remained purely on shelves. Thanks largely to this engagement, these are the titles I know best. I have a sense of the people who work for the journal, their interests, and of course the kind of writing they publish. Crucially, though, as a reader, these are the first journals I think of when thinking about Australian literary writing and considering subscriptions.

I guess it all feeds into what marketing types would call branding. Right, now that I’ve made the point, forget I used that word.

In this environment, the print edition, rather than being replaced, becomes a regular focus for a continuous stream of work: a snapshot of the best work a community of writers, editors, and readers has produced in any given time. Pixels complement dead trees wonderfully.

And that’s what really bothers me about the bespectacled journal publisher’s passionate defence of print and rejection of all things digital: that one is equivalent to the other. I thought we were beyond that. A print-published author—especially an emerging one—that fails to engage with an audience via whatever tools are available is one that wilfully dances with obscurity. I suspect the same can be said of small publishers, both of periodicals and books.

And I would have told her as much at the time, had it not been a ridiculously inappropriate forum to do so.

After all, I was outnumbered in there.

Simon Groth is a writer, editor and manager of if:book Australia, exploring digital futures for authors, readers, and publishers.

He writes fiction and non-fiction and blogs about stuff.

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