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…