It is a cruel twist of technology that librarians have become one of the most computerized professions. Whether transporting their bibliographic files across platforms or navigating all the varieties of text processing and information retrieval the technical expertise expected of them seems totally disjointed from the personalities that this profession should attract. Like Amazon, librarians rarely touch books. What librarians want to do, and are rewarded for, is party: events and fund raisers. The only people in the stacks anymore are kids playing and making out. Similarly, authors are now plunging the depths of HTML to properly format their works. Books have become video graphic experiences. I fully expect hypertext markup language to be taught in Humanities. Professors make use of services to check for plagiarism, grammar and composition.
Except
perhaps for Prince, who cut all his own tracks, most people work with others.
Authors have constantly railed against publishers and editors. Now we can
publish whatever we want. That is not good either. There is a lot written about
Shakespeare, he was Catholic, he was Protestant, he was royalist, he was
radical, he was someone else. Shakespeare was a producer. He had a piece of the
Globe Theater. Every day he was there watching the take and the concessions and
most importantly, the audience. When something worked, Shakespeare pumped it
up, when it didn’t, he dropped or changed it. Somehow, we have to rebuild that
relationship.
I miss the
proofreader and editor if only to have someone to share the blame. I’m sure even now there are errors and awkwardness
in the manuscript I have created on Kindle. The primary function of publishers
was gatekeeper. We have moved the slush
pile onto the web. Richard Brautigan in The
Abortion imagined a library where we can check in our masterworks. Now it exists. The wonderful thing about blogging is that
since so few people read it, I can say whatever I want. It was also wonderful to get the first book
out the door.
I was
preparing to plumb the depths of Font, illustration, and HTML when I simply
gave up. The current body of literature manages front cover, table of contents,
footnotes, endnotes, indexes, bibliographies and so on without hyperlinks. That is not such bad company to keep. I finally just dragged the word document
through Mobi, the packaging software Amazon gave authors, and sent it off to Amazon’s
Kindle direct self-publishing. I suppose
it is a little embarrassing for a programmer’s book to be more awkward to use,
but my experience has taught me that any attempt at cleverness will look silly
in the next release. I hoped that in the
future Amazon would give us a means for editing our books on their site and
then we can get rid of the superfluous code and format our books with all the
features we intend.
How will
people find the good books? I suppose fewer people will read my book than read
my blog. Some beats none. Perhaps authors could petition designated
editors for inclusion on recommended reading lists. This reminds me of the old days of penny dreadfuls,
comic books, Mad Magazine and dime store romance.
Since I
wrote this, I wrote the blog entry Blogspot Sucks. By some miracle, perhaps
someone took pity, or I found the correct incantation, I now have ads on my
blog, as you can see. I now have two books out. Kindle has gotten easier. They
have an editor to set up the table of contents. Index still doesn’t work. I was
sort of able to smuggle in footnotes. It’s very frustrating that I can’t
download my books from Amazon to work on them. I would also like to revise my
covers rather than start from scratch. Don’t harvest the corners. Good enough,
I guess.
The real
money is YouTube, or movies. Good
literature makes lousy movies. Perhaps because they have too much respect for
the material. Fitzgerald’s real money was as a script doctor. Hemingway
couldn’t type. So, his material was easier to adapt.
Audio books
next.