It does seem the literary fiction, almost more than any other area of publishing, could really benefit from the digital long tail.

For that matter, some of the most challenging lit fic could benefit from a digital format with hyperlinks. James Joyce, I’m looking at you. Look what people do to study Finnegan’s Wake. They’ve taken Roland McHugh’s page-by-page companion book, Annotations to Finnegans Wake, and put it all online. Pretty smartly, too, but I’m not about to read 700 pages (plus 700 of notes) online.

Also, reading in foreign languages would be fab with in-text notes and selected translations available. Some of that can be done on paper, but what about pronunciation? I’d have loved an on-demand pronunciation guide when I read The Canterbury Tales in Middle English.

I hope the Sony Reader/Penn State U study will be able to assess this kind of usage, though I’m not aware that there’s a major publisher involved in the study, so I assume they’re looking primarily at static documents.

Literary fiction is a long-tail taste, whether or not that term is used explicitly.

Such a good observation. It does seem the literary fiction, almost more than any other area of publishing, could really benefit from the digital long tail.

I spent part of the weekend with my daughter’s BF, who is a tech-geek of major proportions (iPod Touch, fancy QWERTY-keyboard phone, the works). Know which gadget he whipped out the most? His Kindle! He went on and on about it, and I started to realize the power of this device to reconnect young people with reading. I also realized that what he is reading is dictated by what is available for his Kindle — he won’t even think about reading anything but e-ink. In a very short time, I can already see that his reading taste is being shaped by the choices of certain publishers about whether or not to make a book available in electronic format.

Any publisher who spurns this market is going to be sorry, in both the short and long terms.

When I took a class on short stories and ended up the only genre person in the room. Sadly, the roasting was not as funny as the ones on Comedy Central.

Yeah, it’s not any funner going through a whole creative writing program that way. (Also got sneered at for being a novelist in a playwriting class.) Fortunately, I ended up writing my senior paper for a Latin professor who was fascinated with my creative process. She didn’t want a story, she wanted a how-to.

Of course, when I read it, I wonder if “literary” publishing will ever change, especially when I’m reminded of the attitudes I encountered one weekend at the Iowa Writing Festival when I took a class on short stories and ended up the only genre person in the room. Sadly, the roasting was not as funny as the ones on Comedy Central. Oh well…

I'm reminded of Bujold's theory on how the intertubes facilitated an end-run around print publishing's bottlenecks. E-publishers “have an economical way of getting the word out to the excluded people in this process, the actual book readers, of their books' existences -’ totally jumping over the unfortunate book-blocking nature of the distribution system.” Bujold's argument is that the distribution gatekeepers (which include brick and mortar bookstores) have lost control of the gates, leaving readers more in control.

But here's what I see as a problem: all the major NY companies rely on literary agents to person the slush barricades. While there are no doubt some literary agents who will fight to get “literary fiction”* considered by a publisher, the sad fact is that they all work on commission, and it is their best interest to represent popular blockbusters and negotiate huge advances. And who can blame them? It's not a cost-effective use of their time to represent an unknown author who's not going to be offered an advance and whose books may not sell more than 1,000 copies.

So for “literary fiction” publishers to emulate the success of e-publishing they would have to do as Baen, Samhain, Ellora's Cave, Loose ID, and Liquid Silver Books do, and look at unagented material.

It could work! It wasn't a literary agent who got Annie Proulx's career on a fast track after decades of obscurity – it was her editor.

On the other hand, it might not work! Because most people (and I include myself, a Proulx fan) don't want to read novels that are “Huckleberry Finn without the laughter and The Grapes of Wrath without the hope” (aka Postcards, the novel that made Proulx the first female recipient of the PEN/Faulkner award).

Mike Cane has an entertaining rant on this subject.

* I don't agree that “literary fiction” should be defined as something that excludes specfic, mystery, or romance, but that's another issue.

Most of the “Great” Literature that I like was past contemporary pop culture works that have simply proved their reading value over time.

Also via Chris Anderson, David Heinemeier Hansson brilliantly explains the problem with this approach. His conclusions apply precisely to the publishing world.