This isn’t about what is or isn’t journalism; it’s about the larger genre of nonfiction, so called because IT’S. NOT. FICTION. Daisey not only undermined what has been an important assessment of a major tech company’s practices, he sullied the creative nonfictioneers everywhere who work hard to stay within the bounds of truth.

Creative nonfiction is hard to pull off. Assuming you aren’t Mr. Daisey or James Frey, you’re challenged (I almost wrote “stuck”) with creating a smooth, compelling narrative from the messy details of real life.

I have workshopped with fiction writers who became impatient with CNF’s demands and suggested, repeatedly, that the work either be recast as fiction or that fictitious details be added to “improve” it. But a great piece of nonfiction cannot simply be labeled fiction and done with; quite often what is powerful about the piece is that it really happened. And making stuff up is lying pure and simple.

What grieves me most about this incident is that Daisey didn’t need to do it. He had many options for putting the truth on stage. He could have stayed within the boundaries of his own investigation, leaving out the wholesale lies and downsizing the exaggerations to their truthful contours. He could have reached out to an investigative reporter or researcher for assistance. But he chose the lazy path.

At noon today I’m going to listen to This American Life’s retraction (titled, very humbly and directly, Retraction). I could listen to it right now on one of my many devices. But I feel somehow that radio honors the occasion.

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People are beginning to notice that big publishers are not really all that interested in authors or readers; they are interested in consolidating control of distribution channels so that the only participants in culture are creators who work for little or nothing and consumers who can only play if they can pay.

Barbara elegantly collapses into one sentence the last several years of the ebook wars and, even more importantly, identifies all stakeholders in the reading ecology: not just publishers and libraries, but authors and readers.

The Growing Crisis

Over the last year or so, there has been spluttering (sometimes from me) at individual publishers such as HarperCollins (they of “26 checkout” fame), distributor-packagers such as Overdrive, and of course, the idiot library administrators who sign contracts they obviously haven’t read, or they would never have entered into those agreements, right? (That spluttering definitely didn’t come from me, being one of those administrators.)

But Barbara is pointing out that while the problem has many moving parts, the entire reading ecology is at risk; we are, in her terms, in an “apocalypse.” It is really nothing less than an outright assault on fair use; the publishing-industrial complex won’t be happy until readers are paying, not just by the title, but by the page-turn.

Barbara and I have an interesting convergence: we are both librarians-authors-readers (except she can write entire books, while my attention span ends at the essay). By author, I mean (full disclosure: HUSTLE AHEAD!) non-industry writing, such as the forthcoming The Cassoulet Saved Our Marriage (Roost Books, Fall, 2012; edited by Lisa Catherine Harper and Caroline Grant), in which you will find my revised and republished essay, “Still Life on the Half-Shell” (first published in Gastronomica) about oysters, the locavore movement, and how I came to terms with life in Tallahassee. My essay includes exquisitely clear instructions on eating oysters Southern-style (complete with a photograph), making Cassoulet an obvious “must buy” for all library collections.

But my point isn’t about whether I am expecting to make a living from essays such as “Half-Shell.” My day job is my income; I can’t even remember if I am getting a small one-time payment, though I had such good editorial input from Lisa and Caroline that the revision process was its own mini-post-grad workshop, and I have a food essay floating out there that is significantly better for the lessons learned for “Half-Shell.”

My point is that it’s important, both ethically and strategically, for advocates of the right to read to understand that creators should have the option and the right to make a living from their creations, and that our advocacy, right now, at this moment in history, is crucial to ensure that right.

It’s also the reader’s right to support creators, which they can do either directly (buy my book!) or indirectly (fund libraries, and they will buy my book). Some of us in society will “buy” books, by way of funding libraries, that we never read ourselves or that we choose to purchase on our own, but we understand that the town pump benefits everyone — a take on the world that is less popular in certain circles, but only underscores our value to society.

Tied to the Tracks

What happened?

In the past, the writer-publisher-library-reader model had a modicum of equanimity. It is now obvious that the nature of the technology — the printed book — largely regulated that equanimity.  All of us in the reading ecology — librarians, authors, repackagers, readers — are tied to the tracks by the Brobdingnagian power wielded by the highly consolidated publisher-industrial complex that is then magnified a thousand-fold by the conveniently elastic, virtual nature of digital publishing.

As Steve Lawson observes, publishers can get away with limiting access, so they limit it. As Kate Sheehan points out in a comment on her own post, publishers can cut us out of the conversation, so they cut us out. Though it has been proven time and again that library reading boosts individual book sales, that’s not good enough for for the publisher-industrial complex.  They smell an opportunity, and their greed is overwhelming any vestige of decency or sense of social fairness.

Deep down, the publishing-industrial complex will not be satisfied until they can do away with those pesky librarians, they who broker reading as a public good, champion the right to read, and advocate for equitable access. Penguin invoked the term “friction,” in reference to the ease of checking out books; but I see the real “friction” as the Bonus Army of librarians, authors, and readers who are speaking truth to power. How convenient it would be if we were starved out of the reading ecology.

We’re also back to my ancient observation about Google: “don’t be evil” does not translate into “do be good.”

What is to be done?

I’m not a fan of…

• Dwelling at length on the supposed sins of any one publisher or redistributor; this isn’t just HarperCollins, Penguin, the other publishers who won’t even deal with Overdrive, or Overdrive. It’s bigger than that. (Note: I lay aside the Elsevier boycott, which works for other reasons, in a different situation and a different reading ecology.)
• Singling out individual libraries over their Overdrive contracts.
• Assuming Dilbertesquian cluelessness on the part of librarians struggling to provide ebooks to readers.
• Arguing that Information Wants To Be Free and therefore creators should work for free and make a living some other way. That’s not only naive, it leaves just one profiteer in the equation: publishers. (Again, this relates to the for-profit book industry. Scholarly publishing also relies on slave labor to line publishers’ purses — which is the point of the Elsevier boycott — but it’s a different ecology. There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch, but sometimes it’s hard to point to the money on the table.)
• Assuming “they” will solve the problem. Much as I appreciate ALA going to meet with big publishers, one of those publishers, Penguin, subsequently thumbed its beak at the reading ecology, withdrawing from Overdrive with a timing that can only be labeled impertinent.
• Indulging in magical thinking; the clock isn’t rolling backwards, and ebooks are here to stay.

I do think we need to…

• Recognize this crisis as a reading-ecology problem and a fight for the right to read, not just a public-library problem. It doesn’t matter that this has primarily been about Overdrive, whose customer base is overwhelmingly public libraries (though Overdrive has higher-ed customers, including Yale, Pitt, and my tiny library).  We’re all part of the reading ecology.
• Inform and engage our stakeholders, such as the Free Library of Philadelphia is doing., and as Peter Brantley did through Publishers Weekly, though I was a little uncomfortable with his portrayal of public libraries. They aren’t all urban catchbasins, and strategically, we need the large middle-class voting base to understand their stake in this crisis.
• Study the structure of our reading ecology and have economists and other strategists propose workable solutions. I know there has been talk about “buying” Overdrive, but even if it were for sale, would acquiring the repackager/redistributor solve anything? We need some serious theory at work for us. This is made even more challenging because library “science” is an iffy discipline at best.

I wish I had more ideas, but I solicit yours.

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I think one reason “biblioblogosphere” caught on is that it was immediately challenged. I am not a linguist (though I do like the occasional tongue taco–and what a glorious city that I live in, that tongue tacos can be had at a whim). But I suspect once upon a time (now I am going to be very ahistorical, so no need to correct me) a caveperson sitting around a fire said, “Heyyyy… let’s call this: FIRE,” and several other cavepeople nibbling on bones left over from their Humongasaurus roast said “Yo, whatev” and began using the term, while three other cavepeople immediately said “That’s a terrible term!” and offered their own suggestions, like furor and fur and floober, which they then used at every opportunity (although only two of which eventually caught on, though for other use), and then the “Yo, whatev” crowd had cavepeople who became indignantly protective of their choice and said, “No, really, it’s a good term,” and that cast more light on a term that otherwise could have floated away as yet more flotsam and jetsam on the stream of self-published writing.

N.b. I have observed that on occasion, some genders are more reluctant than other genders to let other genders create new terms. But I will not dwell on that.

(Incidentally, that 2004 post referenced “weblog,” a term since shortened to “blog,” perhaps because “weblog” was hard to pronounce? When did it die, or do I care?)

I didn’t get serious or weepy about being challenged (at times, in lengthy and indignant tomes), or even about the long-term viability of “my” word… though it made me laugh at the nature of people. I didn’t have a lot invested in seeing my neologism push its delicate tendril through the soil and establish mighty trunk and roots. (Aside from this strange offshoot, which I just discovered.)

At the time, I had spent several years as senior editor on a weekly newsletter, and I was steeped in words in a way that (oddly enough) is not true in higher ed, unless you think the following are real words: promulgate, synergy, utilize… which I do not.  I had a quotidian attention to words that fertilized my brain at both conscious and unconscious levels.

That attention emerged again last week, at least briefly, when after an hour of mission-statement exercises with our cross-campus Vision Task Force (more fun than it sounds, especially since we served lunch) I stepped back and announced, to a collective gasp, that our verbs were flabby. I then rushed in to assure everyone that we had done very very good work and so forth.

There was some energetic thinking done that day, and we are on the road to a real mission statement, but — and I mean this very seriously — my leadership includes the awareness that I am “good with words,” and that something good can almost always be forged into something much better. Part of writing (and this comes from the MFA workshop experience, as well) is to understand that I am obligated to be merciless with my writing. When I am absolutely sure an essay is ready to be submitted for publication, I then send it to several more people for comments, and give it two more serious revisions–and if I have the slightest sense that it isn’t my best work, back into the hopper I push it.

At any rate (this blog post is beginning to remind me of W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn–the ultimate “So, anyhoo” read — perhaps the consequence of rushing through my “Monday” post early Thursday morning), I was very, very pleased to see that two doctoral candidates were awarded funding (from the Big O no less!) for research titled “The Biblioblogosphere: A Comparison of Communication and Preservation Perceptions and Practices between Blogging LIS Scholar-Practitioners and LIS Scholar-Researchers.” (Plus one of them is at McGill, which makes this international research.)

So “biblioblogosphere” will someday be discoverable as part of a monograph title.  I feel very motherly and proud.

Not only that, but as I write this post, I realize I am creating a set of nesting Russian dolls, because surely this post will become part of their research! Mirrors within mirrors! (This assumes they think I’m a Blogging LIS Scholar-Practitioner. I don’t know what their standard is, but surely crafting neologisms is worth at least one point.)

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Yes, I Eventually Do Explain The Parrots

Here is a very interesting question others have posed: are libraries that license ebooks through Overdrive violating state patron-privacy laws because Amazon retains user data?

(For context, Sarah Houghton-Jan, who last spring proposed an eBook User’s Bill of Rights, recently taped a video recording her thoughts about the Overdrive-Amazon deal enabling Overdrive books to be checked out on Kindle devices and apps. To save time and  skip over the f-bombs, fast-forward to the 4-minute section, where Sarah talks about the complicated privacy issues.)

Full disclosure: I am a happy Overdrive customer. I do not, unlike Sarah, feel “screwed” by Overdrive. As a customer, I knew (most of) what I was getting into with Overdrive’s Kindle deal with Amazon. I knew in advance that Amazon keeps a fair amount of information about its Kindle book customers. I’m not surprised that they keep this data regardless of how the money goes in the pot – through a direct customer purchase, or an indirect library-purchase transaction.

At the start of the deal, the Overdrive-Amazon deal benefited people who already own Kindles, and presumably librarians don’t nanny the world. But that conversation changes with the first person (or library) who purchases a Kindle in order to check out “free” (to them) library books.

My “what next” thoughts: my take is that this is a prime time for libraries to work with eBook vendors, publishing and library associations, and standards groups to nail in some basic rights for readers AND authors AND publishers. It’s also a good time to review the mishmosh of issues and organizations related to accessibility and eBooks. And finally—and this is a librarian task—we should all look at state patron privacy laws and ask if they provide enough protection and the right protection.

I am setting aside other complaints. There’s a moment during the Kindle eBook check-in where Amazon nudges me to buy a book. Perhaps that should bug me. But I don’t see this as The Man. As a writer, I wouldn’t be offended if after checking out one of the books I’m published in, you then chose to buy it. And that’s because I want people to buy my books (whether through the agency of a library or strictly on their own).  I would be even happier if they actually read them.

Is this a bad thing? As a librarian, I partner with our small university bookstore, which is invited and encouraged to sell books at our readings—the same books available for checkout.  I rejoiced at recent readings when our bookstore manager sold a few copies of a professor’s book—two of them to our library, to fill requests. Isn’t this how it should work?

I see Overdrive as a company brokering a useful but transitional technology for placing current reading in the hands of mobile-technology users, leveraging known processes and practices. Overdrive is quaint—designed around the way fair-use works with print books–but it works for now. When things change, weeding will be a breeze!

However, if Overdrive’s current approach is transitional, eBooks are with us for good. (Am I allowed to again note that I was heckled in the late 1990s when I said the paper-based book would be an anachronism in my lifetime? Oh, and I do want stuff from Overdrive, but that’s another post.)

All of us in the reading ecology need to step back and do some serious rethinking. Some of us already are.  Take a look at Gluejar, where Eric Hellman and other thought leaders are proposing a digitization model for existing books that honors everyone in the process — readers, authors, publishers, and yes, libraries. (Eric’s blog, Go to Hellman, is required reading for all stakeholders in the reading ecology.) But while we’re rethinking, we also need to provide services.

We also need to leave the door open for conversations with data-lovers. The traditional librarian narrative wants me to be outraged, simply outraged that Amazon has all that user data, but in reality, I’m jealous. I’d like to have rich user data. I’d like to understand user behavior better. Frankly, I’m jealous not only as a librarian, but as a writer. Who among us of the writerly tendencies would not like to know more about our readers?  We need to at least acknowledge that this data has tremendous appeal.

I’ve held on to this post because I couldn’t figure out how to conclude it, so I’ll wrap it up with this non sequitur: hey, the wild parrots flew all the way from Telegraph Hill to visit us in the Inner Sunset! I have pics AND a video.

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Torture irons on the ship SUCCESS (LOC)

Last weekend on Twitter I saw a post:  “Tell me your favorite books on failing and failure, especially as it relates to innovation and leadership.”  I responded with this comment: “another blog post I don’t have time 2 write: how failure is overrated, & often confused w iterative design.”

I got up a little earlier than usual this on Monday (thanks to a cat who was licking my face) and decided to see if I could succeed (as in, not fail) at a 20-minute post on this topic. Cindi Trainor does a good job of capturing some of my thoughts, but I wanted to paraphrase/amplify, if only in the spirit of chiming in. I’ll use my writing experience to add crunchy bits of flavor and texture.

I know the conversations about failure are intended to get us comfortable with owning up to the idea that we don’t always succeed, and that if you don’t break a few eggs, you’ll never make an omelette (or something). That’s terrific. But let’s be clear that succeeding is personally and professionally more rewarding than failing. The delta is the difference between how I feel when I get a rejection letter and how I feel when I get that magic email or phone call that an essay has been accepted for publication.

Furthermore, claiming you’re comfortable with failure is dangerous if what you’re really doing is being uncomfortable with iterative design and group input. Don’t give up too early in the design process, and for God’s sake, set your vanity aside and let others help you. A good idea may need tuning; it will nearly always need iteration, particularly after it’s been tested in anything like a functioning environment.  If you love your idea, if you think it’s valid, you owe it more than one try.

(I cannot tell you how many times, late in the survey design process, I have to insist that yes we DO need to test the survey one more time–and I’m talking about surveys I’ve designed, not others. You don’t get a do-over once you launch a survey, just like you get one chance to submit an essay to a literary journal. That last 10% of effort separates good from great.)

Invention usually comes from individuals (a point Roy Tennant has made more than once), but it takes a village to bring ideas to life. One phenom I’ve observed in work organizations here and there is discomfort with feedback, coupled with the mistaken idea that input on a design immediately voids the value of the original creator’s effort. My guess is this stems from how we approach higher education these days, which is to emphasize individual achievement–a very artificial model.

I have heard workers say, “Well, I can’t take credit for this idea, because others helped me.”  I acknowledge all the people who help me with my own writing, but in the wee small hours of the morning, it’s me and my keyboard, revising my essay. It’s still your idea, even if someone told you it would be better off purple, not green.

I’ve also observed workers losing interest in an idea once they received feedback on it. Absolutely we want to acknowledge people who participated in making an idea come to life. But it doesn’t negate the value of the original idea.

My first semester in the MFA program, back in 2004, I observed one very smart, skilled writer dropping out of the program within weeks of starting. My take then (never voiced, just pondered) was that this  person could not cope with the very radical level of feedback provided in the workshop environment. This writer liked the idea of “succeeding,” writer-style — to see a work improved enough to be ultimately published — but was not able to handle what success actually required.

My suspicions were further solidified several years later, when I was running a writers’ workshop in Florida and two new members were introduced who unsettled the group for several months through their discomfort with feedback. Needless to say, neither would-be writer had much success getting anything published. But their unhappiness with anything less than glowing confirmation of their writing skills translated into disruptive behavior that threatened the very core of the group. Fortunately, this kind of person is at heart a quitter, and quit they did, before we had to take the final steps to “evict” them.

Are you declaring failure too early  because you’re pain-averse? Almost never have I observed a writing workshop where feedback was intended to kill a writing idea, but the best feedback is necessarily painful–excruciating, I-hate-myself, I-suck, I-am-not-a-writer, pound-the-steering-wheel-all-the-way-home painful.

A writer submitting a manuscript to her peers believes deep down that this will be the time when the other writers say, “This work is perfect.” A writer needs to think that this response is possible; it’s what forces you to give your all to a manuscript for hundreds or thousands of hours upon end only to share it with other people whose role it is to tell you what works, but also, what doesn’t work. A writer may spend thousands of hours on a manuscript only to be told by trusted peers that it needs overhauling top to bottom, or hundreds of pages need to be tossed, or that second-person-omniscence really isn’t working, or magical realism doesn’t belong in a recipe collection. But a writer who wants to succeed will subject herself to the process willingly, fully aware that pain lies ahead.

By the way, if you think most good ideas, or literary works, are extracted in the space of a long afternoon, think again.  Most writers have to curl their hands and breathe shallowly when people say, “Oh yeah, I keep meaning to take a day and write a short story,” and only fantasies about this person’s comeuppance help us survive these moments. (Anne Lamott said it better in Bird by Bird, which should be required management reading; note that her subtitle is Some Instructions on Writing and Life). A long afternoon is about how much time it takes to produce five paragraphs, four and a half of which will soon end up on the cutting-room floor, with or without your workshop’s help (since the purpose of a workshop is to gradually build the governor in your brain that does their work for you), so that the remainder can be revised ten times over.  The same is true of the execution of nearly any good idea.

Finally, the failure may not be in the idea, but how it is introduced and managed. A good idea needs curation: coordination, timing, communication, care and feeding, iteration. Someone tweeted Lombardi’s truism that winning isn’t everything, it’ s the only thing. I don’t buy that, because I’ve learned a lot from good ideas that I couldn’t bring to life (and also because it’s heartless). But you can’t win/succeed/not-fail if you aren’t willing to accept that the response to your great idea may be that it can’t be executed the very minute you think it up and without any modification or coordination. In an organization with the resources to execute ten good ideas, the eleventh idea either has to bump something else off the table, or it will have to wait.

Patience, grasshopper. “Not now” is not the same as “no.”  Sometimes a great idea needs to wait its turn; sometimes it is simply precocious, and in a year will be timely. Other times, a great idea has lost its prime moment and needs to be left behind on the altar of things that could have happened in an alternate universe. You’re all the better for having had a great idea; there will be many more.

Yes, winning is part of it, but learning how to win is even bigger. I didn’t complete this post on Monday; I had to get to work, and it wasn’t done. It was better to let it marinate a day while I forged on to other things. It’s still not much as far as writing goes–it’s a hasty blog post, not an essay in the New Yorker, and my expectations for it are low.  The essay I worked on for an hour and a half early this morning, on the other hand, will take many more hours to reach its first draft, and I will willingly break my heart ten times over, shredding the essay to pieces, reconstituting it, spending sunny days staring at a screen, to see it succeed.

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Her idea of a preservation plan for literary journals, named Bristlecone, has some positive aspects, but I think misses the mark on so many levels. [1] The basic goal of preserving a last copy of these literary journals is a lofty one, although perhaps impractical on a basic level. [2] As pointed out in her posting these literary journals are not collected widely even by academic libraries. Knowing which copies to withdraw and which to save won’t solve the problem if libraries don’t subscribe to the journals in the first place.

One of the interesting blind spots in LibraryLand is that we are near the last stop for the production chain for the materials we collect and share. Most of us don’t have real insights into the communities and cultures that produce these materials. In simplest terms, we don’t dogfood digital humanities.

In [1] above, Mary suggests that a last-copy plan for literary journals is “impractical.” She also suggests it is “lofty,” which to me implies idealistic but unachievable.

Yet I designed Bristlecone around small-range achievability.  I specifically do not say I am thinking of resolving every preservation problem we will face in the next century or millenium. I target a literature I know, and a community I participate in.  I carefully till a narrow row.

In [2], Mary assumes that Bristlecone lives and dies by the engagement of academic libraries. It would be great if libraries got on board this simple idea. But there are many other places journals are held other than libraries, and as Mary herself hints, the stewardship isn’t any better in LibraryLand than elsewhere.

Furthermore, if the LOCKSS threshold is only six issues wide, then we are well-covered. We already know the journals we’re talking about (sadly, libraries have nothing to do with this curation). We know the preservation depth level. In the digital world, we can easily measure and address any shortfalls in collection strength (even easier with digital collections shared by LOCKSS, where 1 collection can quickly become 6 or 12 or 48). For paper copies, we need to find holdings — whether in “libraries” or not (and I use those quotation marks quite meaningfully).

In the end of her post, Mary makes reference to “Those of us with our hearts in the digital humanities.” Though I fully champion my colleagues who promote literature, I would suggest to Mary that the people with the greatest stakes in “digital humanities” are those who create and consume them. It is to us I recommend we look for the survival of literature.

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Scuppernongs and Muscadines

Originally uploaded by freerangelibrarian

I spoke at a writing association recently where I noted that it takes me several years to finish an essay. I saw dismay on the faces of aspiring memoirists (since like many new writers they wanted to be told that their focus should be on finding agents and polishing their book-jacket blurbs, not slogging through years of actual writing).

I should have added (even if it would not have helped), but there is always that first harvest, which is the sweetest.

I spent this summer working with a marvelous group of creative nonfiction writers (in addition to my usual monthly workshop group, folks who are all kinds of wonderful).

In June, I debated seriously whether I wanted to do this at all. My projected work schedule had suddenly gone from busy to whatever modifier means busy-to-the-max. But with some nudging from Sandy and Writer Friend Lisa, I took the plunge.

There were weeks when I would put in very long work days, some including travel, many including weekends, and after scrabbling through whatever necessary household stuff needed to be done, tiredly carve out several hours for the writing project — working on my own writing, providing feedback on theirs.

It was hard work, iterative work, mentally backbreaking work that involved both brains — the creative, freeflowing, dreamlike, seeds-on-the-wind brain, and the structure-and-research-and-iterative revision brain that is the tractor bumping up and down the fields day after day.

I dearly wanted to have more time to get this project right — not just clock hours where I was technically awake and capable of sitting at a desk or cafe table and typing on a keyboard, but quality mental time, when my brain was fresh enough to function either in that special dreamlike overdrive or in that John-Deere-tough iterative-revision/research mode. My sense of never quite having enough time to get it right hung over me like a summer thunderhead.

And I even wanted to have a little more time for things that were not work, chores, or writing — to be a lily of the field.

Yet part of me was standing aside, watching myself (an unstoppable habit for most writers, and a good one). I saw myself dragging my tired ass into my writing garden, sometimes under the light of the moon, sometimes in the pre-dawn darkness, to till, plan, weed, water, and finally, harvest the fruits of my labor. (Well, young fruit that will be plowed back under eight or ten more times before it is ready to be harvested–the analogy had to break somewhere, given the slow, iterative process of writing.)

I don’t know what it’s like to have children, but I do know what it’s like to have something you love be both a burden and a joy. That’s how this writing project was to me. I had made a commitment to it, I wanted to do it, it was hard to do, and I was often frustrated both at my exhaustion and my level of effort, but I wasn’t going to give it up for anything, and now, as I look over the fields we planted this summer, shorn and golden from our harvests, I can’t imagine my life without this project. I am that much better for it, and I hope my writing friends feel the same way.

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Best American Nonrequired Reading 2009

Saturday, September 12, 7 p.m. at the Babylon Salon in San Francisco, I will be reading from my essay “The Outlaw Bride,” which will appear in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2009 (due out in October).

I’m thrilled about this on many fronts: giving a reading, getting published in a book that not just my dearest friends will buy, being in San Francisco (home! ET phone home!), having easy access to friends and good food, and gosh, doing something on Sutter Street for once other than parking in the Sutter-Stockton garage.

The first version of this essay about marriage and love and all that good stuff was shared in a workshop at the University of San Francisco, and it was selected as USF’s nonfiction submission for the AWP awards that year.  Didn’t even make honorable mention.  A couple years later, I reworked the beginning with the help of my brilliant writing friend Lisa, submitted it to Ninth Letter, and it was published. Three cheers for brilliant friends (and for patience, and writing time, and Panera’s). And for my lovely and supportive bride!

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Bristlecone Pine

For a couple of years I have had an idea completely unrelated to my current field of endeavor. The idea — tentatively named Bristlecone, for the oldest surviving pine trees — is, quite simply, a preservation plan for literary journals.

The problem, in a nutshell

No matter how passionately committed the publishing agency for any one literary journal, or how many copies are currently housed worldwide on actual library shelves or on servers, when time and interests shift, if there is no intentional plan to ensure a minimum number of copies are maintained (and there are formulas for determining the minimum), these creations will disappear as if they never existed in the first place.

As a librarian and writer, I believe that Bristlecone, or something like it, is necessary. I very much have a dog in this fight — several dogs, for that matter. I have shopped my ideas around and received a variety of responses, many positive, many that helped me further refine the ideas.

However, Bristlecone is so far afield from my current areas of professional engagement that I don’t have a way to take a next step. So I release this into the wild, not because I am letting go of this idea but to allow it to incubate more openly, perhaps with more cross-pollination between the two communities.

Defining the terms

Before I get much farther into this discussion, let me define some terms, since this idea crosses two communities with separate knowledge sets. Toward building a common cross-domain knowledge, I have considerably simplified and condensed these ideas.

• Preservation is “concerned with maintaining or restoring access to artifacts, documents and records through the study, diagnosis, treatment and prevention of decay and damage.”  Preservation is intentional, and is focused on ensuring that paper or digital artifacts are available long after we’re all dead.
• Literary journals (or magazines) are that small subset of periodicals that primarily or exclusively publish “short stories and longer fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, essays, literary criticism, book reviews, author interviews, art and photography.”  The Journal of Advanced Microbiological Entomological Research is not a literary journal. Atlantic Magazine isn’t a lit journal, either.  Most lit journals are published by universities or nonprofit organizations, sometimes by writing programs. These small, relatively inexpensive journals, while almost never carried by public libraries and only irregularly housed by university libraries, are the crucibles for many emerging writers, who both publish and read these journals (as do agents, I have been advised). These journals are crucial to our literary ecology.
• The phrase “open access” will come into play. Wikipedia defines open access as “the publication of material in such a way that it is available to all potential users without financial or other barriers.”
• Other terms and phrases such as “trigger event” and “last copy” have special meaning in this discussion, and will be defined as we go along.

Why Bristlecone? Why Now?

I believe the future of publishing is digital. I also believe that the decisions we are making — right now, today, not a decade or twenty years from now — as literary communities move into e-publishing and libraries contract and consolidate paper-based print collections, will decide the future of our cultural heritage —and we need to get this right, since we can’t fly into the future to correct our mistakes.

Why literary journals?

Because I know literary journals, care about them, understand their culture, appreciate their contributions to world literature, and worry their needs will be overlooked in the Big Shift.

Literary journals excel at publishing great literature, but their publishing arms tend to be naive about issues such as preservation. Meanwhile, libraries focusing on serials-related issues are generally not well-attuned to the characteristics and longterm needs of literary journals.   This is understandable — librarians acquire, provide access to, and manage humongous bodies of heterogeneous information, and literary journals are a mere pinky-fingernail on the corpus of serial publishing.

But because — straddling two worlds — I do see the problem, I feel it incumbent to at least share one approach to addressing it.

Where we are today

Many small print literary journals have been operating on a slender cost-recovery basis, in which the traditional scarcity-based publication model uses journal subscriptions to cover the cost of fulfillment (printing, postage, and other resources required to produce and distribute paper-based artifacts) as well as editorial, marketing, and other costs.

In response to a variety of factors — many cost-related — literary journals have been moving online. Unlike their sister publications in the newspaper and popular-magazine industries, online publishing allows literary journals an alternative to the rapidly rising costs of traditional fulfillment without creating revenue problems. (I began this proposal before the recession began, and this is all more true than before.)

Journals such as Tin House and Ninth Letter are using websites, presences on social networking sites such as Facebook, and email lists to market their traditional subscriptions. Others, such as White Crane, place some digital content online to entice their potential audiences. A few journals have adopted a hybrid publishing model—q.v. the recent announcement of the Missouri Review to offer all of its content as e-prints and podcasts—while some are either born digital, such as Brevity, or have moved entirely online.

Some literary journal publishers have adopted subscription-based online models, attempting to duplicate the revenue model that supported traditional print fulfillment; more appear to be adopting open access models that make the content freely available, and then use other methods, such as conferences or the sale of related print publications, to generate enough revenue to cover digital production costs — strategies that were often necessary for the increasingly costly paper-based fulfillment model.

So there are creative responses that allow literary journals to survive and even thrive, even in the face of economic crisis and format changes. But few if any publishers or libraries have intentionally and consciously addressed the long-term preservation issues of literary journals.

Solving the Last Copy Problem

One of the most basic principles of long-term preservation of cultural records is the idea of replication. Think of the impact war and natural disaster can have on the art world by the destruction of lone-copy, sui generis creations. Now apply this to the bibliographic world. Having one last copy of a book or journal, whether it is paper or digital, is perilously close to having none. (Consider the lone server, with its dubious backup, as little better than one copy.)

One solution to this last-copy problem, common to print and digital, is to ensure there are enough copies available to survive trigger events such as natural disasters (or even the closure of institutions, as we may see happening if our economic crisis deepens).

In the academic world, last-copy agreements for print materials—which are common if not ubiquitous for some materials—help university libraries determine what to discard and what to save, whether shelved in a local collection or, as is increasingly the case for low-use items, high-volume centralized mass storage facilities.

LOCKSS for digital preservation

Some libraries have turned to replication for ensuring the long-term preservation of their digital assets. Some of these libraries–including Metaarchive, a cooperative LOCKSS network in the South, or the Alabama Digital Preservation network—rely on software called LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe).

LOCKSS is free, open-source software that crawls data, replicates it, and stores the data on inexpensive servers called LOCKSS boxes. (One rule of thumb is that you need at least six LOCKSS servers.  I have heard that number go up to 13, depending on who is doing the estimation and what format they are discussing.) LOCKSS software also provides tools for checking the data for integrity, monitoring it, assessing the content stored on the LOCKSS boxes, and other key preservation tasks.

Because LOCKSS is free and open source, it can be used by any organization without additional cost. But many libraries using LOCKSS also pay a modest annual fee to the LOCKSS nonprofit organization to both ensure LOCKSS has continued development and to benefit from sharing ideas and resources with other LOCKSS libraries.

Today’s writing, tomorrow’s formats

One problem LOCKSS also addresses that is unique to digital content is that of format migration.

The sheer openness of the traditional book or journal is easy to overlook. You don’t need special software to read older versions; the first books ever created are as easy to access as the books now rolling off printing presses (assuming you can read Sumerian). Even a child holding its first book usually figures out within seconds how to open it.

But in our new digital era—and remember, the general public has been using computers for less than two decades, and has been online for barely over one decade—we have already rotated through many versions of software. Files created decades ago in early word processing programs require some effort to find software that can open them—assuming you have a floppy drive to run the software and open the files.

There are two prongs to ensuring accessibility to future content formats. The first is format migration—the ability of tools such as LOCKSS to translate files from older formats so they are readable. But another, more complicated principle is to encourage publishers to produce content in easily-translated formats in the first place. The assessment phase of the Bristlecone proposal would identify the formats used to produce online journals; the education and advocacy phase would advise on best practices.

Respect for publishing models

A small complicating factor has to do with open versus closed data. As noted earlier, some journals have subscription models for online journals that effectively make the data “closed” — only available to subscribers. However, LOCKSS offers the ability to create both “bright” and “dark” archives—that is, publicly-available or available only to those with the proper credentials.

The open model is inherently more secure in the very long run; the more eyes are on data, the better its health (or as software developers say, “With many eyes, all bugs are shallow”).  Also, as noted earlier, the subscription model However, the purpose of this project is not to reengineer publishers’ individual models, but first and foremost to preserve the written word.

Paper or digital preservation? Yes.

The emphasis in this discussion is on digital preservation. But in the longer outline I point out that a last-copy network for print-based publication would also be valuable, and not difficult to implement. We are at the very beginning of the Big Shift, and in any event, we will always have some paper publishing (just as, while waiting for a flight to Tallahassee one night, I met our local farrier — and he’s doing quite fine, thank you).  Not all paper copies will become digital, and some will exist in dual forms for a while to come.

Note, however, that in a mixed-format LOCKSS preservation network, digital content has one distinct advantage over paper: it is possible to bring to life a new digital “copy” simply by adding another LOCKSS box, whereas trigger events can reduce and eventually eliminate actual paper copies. This suggests an ancillary role for the Bristlecone project to partner with digitization projects to ensure that in the future we at least have digital facsimiles of print-based literary journals.

A Vaccine for Cultural Memory Loss

Bristlecone essentially proposes a public health campaign, and like so many of these, so much depends on so little. Wash your hands. Sneeze into your arm. Preserve our literary journals with LOCKSS and last-copy plans.

It is hard to imagine there are not at least a dozen organizations—not necessarily in higher education, though that is a good place to start, given how many universities publish literary journals—that would agree to a cooperative project to ensure the long-term preservation of literary journals, which in the grand scheme of things represent such a small speck of publishable output.

It would take such modest effort to ensure that our literary journals reach into the future long after we are gone—that these homes for so much good writing will be read and studied and enjoyed (or for some students, endured) well into the future.

But it would also take equally modest negligence to seal the fate of the work produced by the sweat of our collective brows. To paraphrase a statement by the Metaarchive preservation project, the assumption that cultural heritage institutions have taken steps to preserve literary journals is the greatest threat to their long-term survival. We don’t have to do very much—but we must not choose not to act.

Where I go from here I’m not sure. As I’ve said before, this comes from my avocational life, where I write, and does not directly apply to my professional work. But I’d be humbly grateful for any feedback you could provide.

The next post will be the two scenarios I use at the beginning of my idea paper.

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“People need to get over the idea that ebooks are ‘just’ books,” Tim wrote. “Just because you can read it, doesn’t mean it’s the same thing. Books are socially and legally situated. You can’t change the delivery and legal structure, and expect everything else to remain the same.”

E-books are disruptive in ways we can barely comprehend, and all the self-congratulatory nattering at conferences about trends and digital humanities and big-ass repositories doesn’t change that a bit. It’s easy to laugh off early efforts at e-books, but is there anyone who really thinks the future of publishing—if not five years, then ten or fifteen—is not primarily digital?

And none of the current big players —Amazon, Google, not even Pogue’s beloved Apple—are in it for the passion of connecting books and readers. No matter how much they posture otherwise, the bottom line for them is profit, pure and simple.

As an author and librarian, I am greatly ambivalent. The writer in me sees opportunities I don’t have in the paper world. I am considering publishing a chapbook of essays via the Kindle and seeing if Kindle-readers—a community who by definition read heavily—will buy what is essentially unpublishable in the paper-based publishing economy.

But the librarian in me is worried, both on behalf of libraries—the bulwark of free speech in an open society—and on behalf of readers everywhere. And the writer with her eye on the future of writing — not for the next year or two, but the next century or two — is bothered as well. I worry that post-paper reading will become an event as closely and expensively metered as parking in downtown San Francisco. It’s doubtful that writers, journalists, and the rest of us in the writing trenches will benefit.

And if you agree that publishing is moving to a digital mode, you are also tacitly agreeing that the traditional role of libraries will soon be made obsolete. The delivery of reading to the next generation will be managed by digital mammoths who will control what and how we read to a fare-thee-well.

Since Pogue’s article was published, the Times added an “Editor’s Note” that comforts me not a whit:

EDITOR’S NOTE | 8:41 p.m. The Times published an article explaining that the Orwell books were unauthorized editions that Amazon removed from its Kindle store. However, Amazon said it would not automatically remove purchased copies of Kindle books if a similar situation arose in the future.

But these books weren’t removed “automatically.” They were removed by humans, who were following orders — just as some human, somewhere, chose to alter Amazon’s search results to hide GLBT titles. Each time, a well-publicized kerfuffle reversed Amazon’s decision, but the point is that the decision was made at all.

What we are learning is that the same technology that makes a book conveniently available on your Kindle in a manner of minutes can easily change that content or entirely remove it. Barbara Fister commented on my Facebook page, “I’m waiting for a little libel tourism to lead to books edited before your very eyes. How efficient!” Sadly, I don’t think we have to wait very long. Like the e-gov-documents that magically morphed and vanished during the Bush administration, the unseen silent workforce at Amazon will obediently carry out the mandate of the company.

Perhaps—to shift from Orwell to Bradbury—the ending of Fahrenheit 451 is prescient in other ways. Once the digital world has taken over — perhaps with legislative support, the way that track-building and trains yielded to automobiles and highways through the influence of energy lobbies — there will be outliers hiding in forests who are the voices of freedom and reading, while the rest of the world follows the dictates of the blinking screen.

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