Sure.
Hi, everyone.
I want to say thank you to Annie Guthrie
and if we thought maybe I would start talking just a little bit
about myself, since--
and hopefully folks caught Dan and Ander's form pieces today.
I think they were really terrific.
And I was very excited by them.
But just to give you a little context as to where
I'm coming from, I've worked for Small Press Distribution, which
I think--
I imagine most of you have perhaps heard of SPD--
in Berkeley for about 13 years.
So we're a book distributor.
We have about 400 small literary publishers.
We'll warehouse.
We sell the books.
We pick, pack and ship the books.
We market the books.
They go to a lot of book shows and trade shows.
And I've been on a lot of panels,
usually talking to publishers, sometimes
some other distributors, people who are in the book industry.
And I'd be very happy to talk along those lines
and obviously in that world, the transition from page--
paper books, to other kinds of ways that writing might get out
of the world is a pretty constant topic
of most of the panels at the BA or the MLA or the AWP.
Not most, but you always see a good collection
of those kinds of talks.
And I did want to say, I am aware that probably most people
here are writers and not publishers.
And I think that if I start talking about publishing,
and the nuts and bolts of how distribution works,
and the back-end book industry stuff,
I actually don't personally believe
that a writer necessarily needs to know about that stuff.
I think for some writers, it's extremely useful.
And it's a fascinating thing.
It illuminates why certain things
happen that seem sometimes mysterious to us as writers
in terms of what books are on bookshelves,
and how these things operate, why your publisher--
if you're lucky enough to have one--
is asking you for such and such information.
But I personally am pretty passionate about the idea
that writers do benefit from it.
But I also understand it's sometimes quite boring
to certain writers.
And I think it's important to have both.
Certain writers should probably be investigating
in other directions.
But I may sound a little bit like I'm
talking to publishers here and there, because that's mostly
what I do.
So I just to sort of tie in with off the page.
And this is the most recent SPD catalog.
Our catalogs usually cover about six months worth of books,
and this is the last SPD book catalog that will ever exist.
So you might get yourself one.
You can certainly ask for one, since it's
about to be a rare book.
So we are going to exist as a catalog
only online, only virtually--
certainly talk about that.
And one thing that SPD has been doing for the last year that
is relevant to both publishers and writers
is moving into e-books.
And we're trying to figure out what our role is.
If you are a print book distributor in a world where
books are now electronic, it can--
and you have a big warehouse and pay rent for it,
it can be mysterious as to why you might need to exist.
And so, we're trying to figure out what everybody's role is.
For anybody who doesn't know, by the way, SPD is a nonprofit.
We're the only nonprofit book distributor.
So we have a mission to try to support the field--
small press publishing.
About 60% of what we carry is poetry,
which is the genre that most of the big for-profit distributors
wouldn't touch with a 10 foot pole, to be honest.
And so, we've ended up-- we both have a role
of just merely getting the books out, but also
advocating for writers, and trying
to think about what writers need, what publishers need,
and what the future's going to look like.
I think that so one thing we started to do
was to talk to some people about e-books.
In the last 12 months, I've learned more about e-books
than I ever thought I could learn about anything, frankly.
And they are a really interesting shift.
And I think they're relevant to what
we're talking about thinking about writers
moving into electronic modes.
So that's certainly a direction I'd
be happy to talk about as well.
And then, if I'm not--
I also wanted to ask you to indulge me
just while I read something.
When I do some of these talks--
I'll try to make this brief-- but when I do some of these
talks, there's a tendency for the direction to go towards--
well, let me put it this way.
There are a lot of people with a lot of money-- a lot
of companies with a lot of money involved in e-books,
and involved in publishing, and involved in digital printing,
involved in metadata, and other exciting things like that.
And they have a tendency just like they do to consumers
to imagine that the next new thing is always digital,
that print books are going to be gone in five years.
I mean, pretty much since I started working for SPD,
there have been panels sponsored by major corporations, people
who produce different kinds of electronic devices,
saying this is the last year of the print book.
So even though we are in an off the page seminar,
I also have kind of a side interest
just personally in the history of printing-- early printing
technology.
And this is a book by a fellow named Roger Chartier, called
"Inscription and Erasure."
And he's dealing with 17th century manuscripts
so the continuation of the habit of there being manuscripts.
This is like-- let's see, what's Gutenberg?
1439, something like that.
So Gutenberg's movable type is 1439.
So this is 200, 250 years after Gutenberg.
And this might be a little long.
But I think it's kind of a really interesting factoid,
and hopefully people will enjoy it.
So one should be careful not to be
misled by the relative scarcity-- oh, I'm sorry.
Sorry, the wrong place.
In the 17th century, manuscript publication in various forms
was still one of the fundamental ways in which texts circulated.
There were numerous reasons for this,
and not all had to do with the desire
to circumvent the rigors of censorship
as they apply to works at odds with religious orthodoxy,
political authority, or common standards of morality.
Some genres that had nothing subversive about them, relied
primarily on the manuscript medium--
not only handwritten news reports and copies
of parliamentary speeches, but also anthologies of poetry,
intended for limited circulation in aristocratic or literary
circles, as well as musical scores, of which printed
and engraved editions were more costly than manuscript copies.
In Golden Age Castile, the same was true--
Books of Instructions that nobles prepared for their sons,
family histories, accounts of political events and battles,
defamatory lampoons, and books of magic.
The invention of the printing press--
this is the key line-- the invention of the printing press
did not put an end to the circulation of manuscripts,
not by a long shot.
So there are-- the point is that,
and I think that in different ways
both Dan and Ander sort of alluded to this
and are interested in this.
The printing press as a technology appears,
but there are still--
for hundreds and hundreds of years.
There is a coexistence of manuscripts--
places you can go in, and get things
manually written out for you.
And I think that that's probably the future of print books.
It's going to interact with the digital for much
longer than any of these companies
really seem to indicate in their presentations.
So I can talk more about that as well.
But I just wanted to kind of put that out there
as an anchor point, to say, in my personal opinion,
it is very exciting in many ways that things
are going off the page.
But I don't think that we're going
to be completely off the page in any huge way, rapidly.
So anyway, that's kind of an overview.
And yeah, maybe it opens up to some questions.