digital publishing

Joseph's Tabbi's talk introducing "Post Digital: Dialogues and Debates from the Electronic Book Review," new two-volume collection of essays edited by Joseph Tabbi documenting highlights of 20 years of essays one of the longest-running open-access research journals focused on literature and culture after the digital turn.

Ciberia Project has emerged around the creation of Ciberia, a digital archive dedicated to digital literature in Spanish, with the purpose of making its contents more widely shared and fostering community building around digital literature. This project in-tends to function as a platform for a community interested and/or specialized in new creative forms of literary publishing, using the Ciberia database as the confluence point and origin of collective interaction, creation and reflection on digital literature and its ramifications in the field of literary publishing. This paper provides a descrip-tion of the digital library Ciberia, and its spin-off, the web platform Ciberia Project, offering a detailed account of their structure and potentialities.

(Abstract article)

As publishers of children’s e-books – the first publishing house of exclusively digital books for children in Brazil – we are part of an editorial market consolidated for centuries and, at the same time, we participate in the production of digital contents, which puts our hybrid production in a point of union between past and future. (…) The experience we are building with this publishing house of children’s e-books in the present political, social and cultural context in Brazil unites transdisciplinary pedagogical and editorial knowledge, using them as instruments that allow the maintenance of what historically is understood as children’s literature: a space for varied languages and many authorships.

(Source: Abstract ICDMT 2016)

Digital literature is enjoying profitable and exciting times, made possible by emerging trends in digital publishing, as well as a growing enthusiasm on behalf of readers, publishers and authors for all forms of digital literary productions. These new players, who often come from traditional publishing, are discovering with great interest the literary and creative potential offered by touchscreen mobile devices. They are also exploring emerging new ways of writing and conceiving literary objects designed to be read on tablets, defined as “digital books”.

While homothetic books for e-readers such as .pdf and .epub files only imitate the characteristics of paper books, digital books conceived as “augmented” or “enhanced” combine text, sounds, and fixed or animated images in order to create a heterogenous work meant to be read, watched, handled, listened to and experimented with.

The contents of such digital books and the forms they can take – augmented fictions, digital artists’ books and exhibition catalogues, etc. – take the reader into account, aim at meeting his/her expectations (Jauss) and come from mainstream considerations, clearly stepping away from the digital literature avant-gardes. The “book object” (Claire Belisle) raises some interesting questions when it is considered alongside the digital. Works created by authors and artists that tackle these issues also try to explore the tensions between printed books, visual book-objects and digital literature.

But should be presume that these works which often are experimental, yet destined to a commercial use, belong to the field of digitial literature as it has previously been defined (ELO, Katherine Hayles, Landow & Bolter, Aarseth)? How should such textual and multimedia productions, conceived especially for digital environments, be defined, if not as digital literature? Is some new field in digital literature materialising?

This paper seeks to examine these tensions as well as to explore how (and when) content designed for digital environments becomes a book. We shall consider the visual stakes of the forms displayed on screen, “down to the last pixel”. We shall also reflect on the characteristics of digital, hypertextual and multimedia reading, looking specifically at a collection of “augmented texts” for tablets and e-readers offered by traditional publishers and collectives: Juliette Mézenc’s Poreuse (Publie.net), Conduit d’aération (Hyperfiction.org collective), Célia Houdart and André Balinger’s Fréquence (P.O.L.), Jules Verne’s Voyage au centre de la terre (l’Apprimerie), the digital catalogue Hopper, d’une fenêtre à l’autre (Réunion des musées nationaux), Thierry Fournier and J. Emil Sennewald’s Flatland catalogue (Pandore Édition), the editions Art, Book, Magazine, together bookstore, library and digital book reader specialized in contemporary art.

(ELO 2015 conference catalog)

Many publishers—pure players or “traditional” publishers—are now exploring the field of digital literatures by producing enhanced e-books aimed at young readers. Whether they are ePub3 e-books or apps for mobile devices, more and more of these digital works are created for commercial purposes and try to settle in the cultural industry market by adapting to the evolution of digital reading. This new generation of publishers is only now discovering the poetic potential of hypertext narratives and the endless possibilities that derive from the hybridisation of text, image, sound and video. Yet they find themselves facing many obstacles throughout the design process. Psychologically, digital reading is often associated with disorientation, cognitive overload and discontinued ways of reading (as opposed to the immersive reading experience known with printed novels) (Gervais 1999 ; Baccino 2011). Economically, few examples of profitable models exist. Technically, many constraints emerge, on the one hand from the open and standardised ePub format, on the other from the ideology imposed by the software and hardware industry. Bearing these elements in mind, publishers remain reluctant to offer hyperfictions to their readers and prefer investing in “traditional” models inherited from the print (i.e. models that still rely on pages, tables of content and linear reading) as well as fun, educational games, all of which tend to standardise new reading experiences. The first part of this paper will present the results of an empirical study carried out with a dozen of digital publishers of children’s literature (Tréhondart 2013). The study tries to define how publishers conceive hypertext and their expectations and fears towards interactivity: the fear of losing the reader, the belief that animations might be preposterous, etc. It also aims at defining the socio-technical and socio-economic aspects that hold back the development of “commercial” digital literature.
The second part of this presentation will present the creative research project The Tower of Jezik , a hyperfiction for young readers initiated during the 2014 Erasmus program in Digital Literatures held in Madrid. Originally designed for web browsers, this project is being remediated in ePub 3 by one of the author of the article, as part of the Textualités Augmentées research and creation workshop at Paris 8 University. Through the semio-pragmatic (Jeanneret, Souchier 2005) and semio-rhetoric (Saemmer 2013) approaches of the work (design models, hypertext rhetorics, features of reading) and the presentation of its script, we will try to suggest a hyperfiction model that steps away from the standardised models used in the digital publishing industry, while simultaneously exploring the semiotic, cultural and ideological constraints imposed by the ePub 3 format.

(source: ELO 2015 conference catalog)

Contemporary “format disruptions” (Savikas) lead to a new experience and practice of scholarly publishing: it is global, virtual, and instantaneous. How does this apply to electronic literature? Elit works exist in a field of publication, characterized by circulation, commentary, and archiving. They are subject to complex corporate toolchains, software updates, social media, etc. The work is no longer just the work but the entirety of this field. Publication is no longer a single event or a single thing. Think of this in terms of Luhmann’s systems theory: the differentiating distinction between artistic production and critical discourse is shifted; the difference made by artwork - its “poetics” - is now systematically linked to critical discourse.

Our essay is a call for editors and publishers of works on / about elit to become active participants in the process of creating the entire work and in creating the field around works of elit. Traditionally editors were invisible, working in the background. By contrast, the contemporary publishing situation - as well as the specifics of publishing on elit - enables publishers and editors to address the global with local realities of writers, the virtual with the material concerns of the text, and the instantaneous with the measured need for critical reading. We look at two case studies. The first is a discourse analysis of existing publications on elit. Scholarly publishing is already in a tight reflexive relation with elit works (e.g. the ELD). We recognize these contributions, but we also examine how in many cases the unevenness of the existing field of critical discourse re-distributes and re-names these works as dealing with “new media” or “electronic culture,” or similar topics. Our second case study is Po.Ex, a collection of essays on intermedia and cybertext by authors from Portugal, currently being co-edited with Rui Torres, and due to be published in 2013 by the Computing Literature series - releasing print and ebooks - developed at West Virginia University, in collaboration with the University of Paris 8. The three primary contributions of the book are: 1) a historical model of elit within a continuum of avant-garde writing stretching back to the Middle Ages; 2) a hermeneutic model for finding meaning in electronic literature through intermediality; and 3) a semiotic model for the computer as the cybernetic extension of human creativity and as an enabling medium for merging writers with readers as mutual authors (as wreaders). While these essays demonstrably shaped the field of elit, especially in Europe, their influence is limited because new generations of artists, critics, and students of elit do not have access to the works. Our case studies shows that scholarly publishing as a critical practice can address such limitations. Our overall claim is that publishing can organize and create the field of discourse for elit. We conclude with proposals and questions for future directions of critical publishing on elit.

(Source: Authors' abstract ELO 2013: http://conference.eliterature.org/critical-writing/editing-electronic-literature-global-publishing-system)