Post- Digital Print - Monoskop

might look like after 100 years, by 1993. The journalist Nym Crinkle
wrote:
“Every person of fairly good education and of restless mind writes
a book. As a rule, it is a superficial book, but it swells the bulk and
it indicated the cerebral unrest that is trying to express itself. We
have arrived at a condition in which more books are printed than
the world can read.”
Furthermore, by 1993 “there will not be so many books printed,
but there will be more said. That seems to me to be inevitable.” 123
Unfortunately, it seems that we have instead reverted to a situation
comparable to 1893, when there was almost no need to limit or filter
the production of content.
Clay Shirky, writing on the social and economic effects of Internet,
spoke of blogs in terms that may just as well apply to vanity press:
“The Gutenberg revolution is over… It’s going from a world of ‘filter,
then publish’ … to ‘publish, then filter.’” 124 And this applies even
more to POD ‘vanity publishing’. The original publishing paradigm,
with editors carefully selecting, editing and proofing content before it
could be printed, is being superseded by what Shirky defines as “mass
amateurization”. This in turn is having a significant impact on the
more commercial POD efforts, since the self-gratification of seeing a
book with one’s own name on the cover is an attractive prospect for
many potential customers. Meanwhile, the mass media are publicising
this development as a social phenomenon, presenting it as some new
promised land for would-be writers. This is quite similar to the mirage
of what the Internet was supposed to mean for musicians: anyone can
publish their work, and who knows, if it turns out to be outstanding
(the classic American Dream rhetoric),
then you too can become a
literary star. 125
On the other hand, experimental
books can now be published
without having to spend large
sums of money. A nice example
is My Life in Tweets by James
Bridle – a collection of all the author’s
posts on Twitter during two
years, as a sort of intimate travelogue.
Here the printed book is
an innovative hybrid of something A copy of James Bridle’s My Life in Tweets, 2009
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