rules for anchorites
Proxima Thule has a strong thread going at her live journal. It begins to scratch the block of the role of print publishing as an infrastructure for authorship. And beyond that it begins to lift the curtain on the hidden skills, values and attributes behind the physical book.
“Funny thing is, if this future came to pass and the market were nothing but self-published autonomous authors either writing without editorial or paying out of pocket for it, if we were flooded with good product mixed with bad like gold in a stream, it would be about five seconds before someone came along and said: hey, what if I started a company where we took on all the risk, hired an editorial staff and a marketing staff to make the product better and get it noticed, and paid the author some money up front and a percentage of the profits in exchange for taking on the risk and the initial cost? So writers could, you know, just write?
And writers would line up at their door.” Proxima Thule
ut portfolio
Students at the Kilgarlin Center have composed a book conservation portfolio.
“Archives and Preservation at The University of Texas School of Information is ranked number one in the country. As a part of their advanced training, students are given the opportunity to conserve books out of one of the several special collections libraries on campus. This exhibit showcases the conservation work performed for Tarlton Library 2008-2009.”
A highly structured program such as the Conservation track at Kilgarlin can also engender its own Nemesis. This would be the multi track or Amtrak program of endless workshops and webinars. The logic being that methodic education is inverse to specialization. And there is some practicality to ongoing kaleidoscope training for practitioners who must deal with daily chaos and endless novelty.
post e-book era
Let’s imagine that the publishing focus is currently on sale of print products. They could be wary of e-books as they observe reverses in other industries that have focused on electronic equivalents for previously mechanical features or products. Automotive costs of electronic hardware and software are now nearly as much as purely mechanical components and the downside of brake or acceleration failure is endless. Touch screen voting, electronic finance, and electronic music delivery have all had adverse effects on their parent industries. Is it any wonder that print publishers may have seconds thoughts over electronic delivery? Print publishers may actually be the visionaries.
Such a perspective may be another of the missing topics in debate over publishers’ regard for the e-book market. Why assume that the e-book is viable? Or, if it is, that it is consequential? There are many attributes of screen reading but they don’t necessarily convey to e-books. There is also the challenge, exclusive among electronic communications to the e-book, of outright attempted mimicry of attributes of the print book. Publishers know a bit about this.