Viv Dunstan, an academic historian based on Scotland, comments on SHARP and the digital publishing revolution. Read more of her blogs here.

I am grateful for the opportunity to expand here on something I touched on in passing in my review of the Dublin 2012 conference in SHARP News. I greatly enjoyed the conference, but was rather surprised that there was not a greater representation of new media publishing. Out of over 60 parallel sessions at Dublin, each generally with three talks, only two, or perhaps arguably three, of the sessions touched on this issue, particularly 5.5 on new media forms of books, and 7.8 on a variety of digital publishing issues. This was despite the conference's theme being "The Battle for Books", which is so topical in the transitional period that publishing finds itself in. Incidentally I spotted lots of people at SHARP Dublin carrying and reading from Kindles.

I appreciate that many SHARP members are specialists in earlier periods of book history. I am myself: my PhD examined reading habits in Scotland in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. And I also appreciate that many SHARP scholars are focused on print and bibliographic history, including books as physical objects to be studied. Yet we are living through a reading and publishing revolution, and I believe that this is one that SHARP as a group should engage with. Indeed it is enormously important that this happens.

Personally I am fascinated by reading habits, and for that it matters little whether I am studying an eighteenth century reader or a more modern one, even if the sources and methodology to explore the topics can be different. Equally, I do not see a huge distinction when it comes to the relative importance for reading habits of print books and ebooks. As a disabled reader who struggles increasingly with print books due to a progressive neurological disease, I find ebooks liberating and positive tools. I do have concerns about them, however,  for example restrictive publishing, often on geographical grounds, is a concern, as is DRM (Digital Rights Management) which can cause a lack of flexibility for readers in terms of how they are able to read their purchased books and move them around. There are also questions over long-term format and accessibility issues. Likewise will libraries be caretakers of books in the future, and if not who will? How should lending of ebooks work? For example in British public libraries where ebook lending services are available, a model is adopted which is based on DRM-enabled ePub books, which is not compatible with the popular Kindle e-reader many readers own.

Lise Jaillant, PhD candidate in English at the University of British Columbia, writes:

I attended a one-day symposium earlier this year at the University of Reading (Authors, Publishers and Readers: Selling and Distributing Literary Cultures, 1880-1940). It was a tremendous day. Andrew Nash and Nicola Wilson started with two excellent papers based on their research in the publishers' archives at Reading. Dr. Nash focused on nineteenth-century writers who sold their copyright (despite being advised not to do so by the newly-created Society of Authors). Dr. Wilson talked about working-class writers published by the Hogarth Press and Chatto & Windus in the 1930s.

I then went to the “Genre and Marketing” panel. It was a pleasure to hear Kate Macdonald present her research on Hodder & Stoughton (a subject that reminded me of my days as an MA student, when I was working in the H&S archives at the Guildhall Library in London). Claire Battershill then talked about genre at the Hogarth Press. Claire is a PhD candidate in the prestigious book history program at the University of Toronto. Finally, Vincent Trott presented a very engaging paper on the War Books Boom. Vincent is working on his PhD dissertation at the Open University.

During lunch, we had a discussion on the merits of one-day symposiums versus longer conferences. A young scholar said she avoids crossing the Atlantic to go to a conference (“simply not worth it”). Being based in Vancouver, I know how hard it is to get funding to travel to conferences. Many PhD students cannot afford to fly to a distant place and pay for four nights of accommodation. So one-day symposiums are a solution (at least for those who live in the South-East of England and other regions with extensive transport systems).

It is difficult to suffer from “conference fatigue” during a one-day symposium. The last panel of the day was composed of Shafquat Towheed, Mary Hammond and Nickianne Moody. Dr. Towheed talked about the Reading Experience Database, a helpful tool that Dr. Hammond used for her own project on the “photoplay” editions of popular novels. Finally, Dr. Moody presented her research on Boots Book-lovers’ Library. The main problem with one-day symposiums is that they are not longer…

On 17 March 2012, we celebrate twenty years of SHARP-L, our discussion group.  Patrick Leary, who has managed SHARP-L since its beginning, reports:

Twenty years of SHARP-L.  It’s a little hard to believe.  But there they are, in the archives, all 23,000 messages (just about) that have been posted since the very first announcement went out on St Patrick’s Day, 1992.  Today I’ve been browsing through those archives at random, remembering this and that.  The occasional absurdities, for instance, like the thread about prison libraries whose Subject line a typo transformed into the memorable, “BOOKS BEHIND BRAS.” Or the eminent historian who complained in a private email that another eminent historian (and listmember) was “anal retentive” – and then promptly sent the email by mistake to everyone on the list.

But of course the meat-and-potatoes of the list, percolating beneath the weekly flurry of announcements, are the constant queries, responses, and discussions, and to browse through these is to be reminded how deep and wide our field can be, spanning all places and periods.  Whether arguing about Eisenstein or trading examples of paratexts or explaining the arcana of bibliographic description or sharing ideas about literacy rates or book prizes or digitization schemes or Oprah’s Book Club, SHARP-L members have engaged one another week after week with courtesy and passion and deep erudition.

I couldn’t have envisioned such a long-running tangle of conversational threads twenty years ago, when the idea for SHARP-L first occurred to me.  The previous summer, at a wonderful conference in Santa Cruz on a theme in which I was passionately interested – the 19th-century publishing world – I’d attended a meeting about a proposal to start a new scholarly group to be called “SHARP.”  The organizers, Jonathan Rose and Simon Eliot, were eloquent, and I left Santa Cruz determined to help them get this idea off the ground.

The problem that SHARP was meant to solve was isolation. Too many of us who were exploring “the history of the book” were utterly out of touch with one another, stranded in departments with colleagues out of sympathy with what we were trying to do, or struggling to work outside of the academic world altogether. I had just come back to school to work on a PhD after years of pursuing my scholarly interests alone, so I knew a thing or two about isolation and how discouraging it could be.

We needed to build a new community, a place to share ideas across the traditional disciplinary divisions.  For a couple of years I’d been keeping in touch, by this new thing called “email,” with my former college roommate, Jeremy Butler, who was now teaching at the University of Alabama.  We had both played around with Usenet and other “bulletin board” kinds of sites, but that fall of 1991, Jeremy told me about his experiments with some software called “Listserv” that used email distribution itself to exchange messages within a pre-defined group.  He had started a “list” for scholars of television and film, and it seemed to be filling a real need.  With some trepidation, I decided to try to set up the same kind of thing for SHARP.  Luckily, it turned out that my campus at Indiana University was one of the most thoroughly “wired” campuses in the world, with all the tech support a neophyte would need – and, boy, did I need it.  The work was absurdly time-consuming and labor-intensive at first, but after a few years, as the software improved and I got a little more adept at managing things, the list became such a familiar part of every working day that I rarely begrudged the time it took.

I often think of the wonderful experiences and the abiding friendships that SHARP and SHARP-L have brought me. Looking back to the archive of messages for that first month, I’m most struck by the names of contributors who would go on to become familiar and welcome presences on SHARP-L for the next two decades, people like Germaine Warkentin and Terry Belanger and Charles Robinson, and of course the indefatigable Simon and Jonathan, too.  We’ve seen and heard from hundreds upon hundreds of our colleagues on the list over the years, and the list is old enough now that some SHARPists who started on SHARP-L as first-year grad students are now tenured professors, and still participating.  We’ve said goodbye on SHARP-L to a number of our book-history colleagues, as well, a distinguished roster that includes such familiar names as Philip Gaskell, Don McKenzie, William Fredeman, Michael Treadwell, Norman Feltes, Graham Rees, Peter Graham, Madeleine Stern, Kevin Sharpe, Harold Love, Matt Bruccoli, Katherine Pantzer, Robin Alston, and Trevor Howard-Hill. For a list like SHARP-L is not like a newsletter, or a bulletin board, or a blog.  It is, at its best, an active community of kindred spirits, and the rituals that have governed the give-and-take on the list, from announcements to pleas for help to advice on teaching to vigorous expressions of opinion, are part of what binds us all together.  I’m very proud and grateful to have been a part of that community.

Patrick Leary, one of SHARP's founders, has managed SHARP-L since 1992, maintained SHARP Web from 1994 to 2009, and has served the Society in various other capacities over the years. His The Punch Brotherhood: Table Talk and Print Culture in Mid-Victorian London was published in 2010 by the British Library, and he is at work on a study of authorship in 19th-century London.

Pooja Sinha, a research student at the Open University reports on a further seminar in the Open University/Institute of English Studies' Landmarks in Book History series:

The 'Landmarks in Book History' series has been organised around the theme of landmarks in the study of the book, drawing on works that have shaped the discipline. In her contribution to the series, Professor Claire Squires of the Stirling Centre for International Publishing and Communication discussed the impact of two works by John Sutherland, Fiction and the Fiction Industry (1978) and Bestsellers: Popular Fiction of the 1970s (1981), both of which examine popular fiction in the context of publishing history. 

In Fiction and the Fiction Industry, Squires commented, Sutherland looked at the circuit of production, distribution and reception, or the material conditions of the circulation of books in the market.  She further elaborated that what Sutherland brought to the study of popular fiction and publishing practices through his analysis of bookshops, public lending and the reviewing establishment, was to advance a methodology that combined both qualitative and quantitative analysis with the discourse on the materiality of the text, thus making Fiction and the Fiction Industry one of the landmark works that transformed critical perspectives on popular fiction. This was an important shift in emphasis, where the focus broadened from the kinds of books that people read and the numbers in which they bought them, to the economic conditions and market strategies that influenced the production and distribution of mass-market fiction.  Discussing her second example, Bestsellers: Popular Fiction of the 1970s, Squires talked about the manner in which Sutherland incorporated both literary criticism and book history in his analysis of popular genres and their authors, such as Mario Puzo’s The Godfather (1969) and Peter Benchley’s Jaws (1974). There was, furthermore, an overlap of the reception of these books with other media, most famously in the screen adaptations by Coppola and Spielberg, respectively. The contemporaneity of Sutherland’s research opened the way for cultural commentary of a new kind, Squires said, where books could be studied as media objects and placed into distinct mass-market categories, and new questions could be asked about the nature of bestsellers and the role of publishers in the particular route a book could take in the market.

Squires then analysed Sutherland’s later commentary on some of the research paradigms that have influenced book history. Sutherland has discussed the works of Robert Darnton, Jerome McGann and D F McKenzie in his essay ‘Publishing History: A Hole at the Centre of Literary Sociology’ (1988) (for hyperlink - http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/burt/filmphilology/publishinghistory.pdf ).  In his view, qualitative and quantitative analysis, or textual and contextual criticism, offer interesting points of contrast and intersection. For Sutherland, critical to literary sociology is an attempt to aggregate and collate data relating to the publishing industry and the book trade, which would provide insights into how books circulate in the market. Furthermore, as Squires explained, the individual history of a book needs to be plotted along developments in the economic and social context of literary production.

There is a new urgency to these concerns. Sutherland was writing before big chain bookshops, publishing conglomerates, and the marketing drives since the 1980s. In the discussion that followed Dr Squires’ talk, some of the issues that came under consideration were the perception of mass-market fiction as being standardised or, using the more popular media phrase, ‘dumbed-down’; questions of literariness and commercial success, often assumed to be in an inverse relation to each other; the concentration of media ownership and market deregulation, with the effect that books are increasingly competing in the market with other forms of media entertainment; and finally, the proliferation of niche markets for books with the advent of online retailing. In what ways can we situate these concerns in the present age of digitisation, eBooks, Kindle, audio books and e-retailers?

Today there are more niches than ever, and more genres than ever. The economies of scale are such that different kinds of books can be printed in small numbers and sold to a particular readership, while the logistics of distribution and sale have changed with online retailing. How literary genres adapt to these developments, their overlap with other media and their impact beyond the initial sale, Squires concluded, are some of the questions that could open the way for exciting new research.

Edmund G C King writes the the latest in our series of blogs from the 'Landmarks in Book History' seminar series held by the Open University with the Insitute of English Studies:

Prof. David Finkelstein gave us a fascinating glimpse into some of the possible futures of the discipline of the history of the book.  In a talk entitled “Assessing Don McKenzie’s Legacy in the Digital Age: A Case Study,” Finkelstein speculated about what a “sociology of texts” might look like in the twenty-first century, an age in which the definition of “text” seems to be ever-expanding, due to the rise of online media. In the years since McKenzie’s untimely death in 1999, broadband internet - and the profusion of mobile devices that allow users to access it wherever and whenever they please - are making textuality ubiquitous across a range of physical and social spaces. What might a study of textual culture look like in a world where technology makes so many objects and surfaces into potential platforms for the projection or embodiment of texts?

As Finkelstein noted, bibliographers and book historians have been cautious in their approach to new media. Indeed, for some, new media have seemed positively menacing: agents that threaten the very existence of traditional print culture by undermining the physical medium that has traditionally contained it. Yet, this merely reproduces an older “threat narrative,” in which the book (and the act of reading itself) is imperilled by technological change. In this version of the narrative, computers, the internet, and ebooks occupy the roles that film, radio, and television played in previous iterations of it. Finkelstein mentioned one further reason why academic book historians in general might be overly invested in books. Due to current funding regimes such as the UK's Research Assessment Exercise and now Research Excellence Framework, the measurement of academic value is very much tied up with the monograph itself. There are extrinsic - and not always edifying - reasons for our failure to “let go” of the codex.

However, perhaps the main reason why new media still seem more ephemeral and transient than the book is because of the apparent immateriality of the web and the virtual spaces it inhabits. One can’t pick up and “touch” the internet in the same way one can a book, and the forensics of webpages seem more arcane than the forensics of book production practised by physical bibliographers. Despite the interventions of scholars such as Matt G Kirschenbaum, this kind of work still seems ancillary to the discipline of book history—something that “other people” (the young; media studies theorists; computing historians) might want to do. Yet, D. F. McKenzie knew full well that we needed to expand our definition of “textuality” to encompass image and sound as well as print. These were prescient ideas, and ones that are very useful to us as practitioners of book history in an increasingly digital world. Perhaps, in keeping with McKenzie’s vision, Finkelstein suggested that we could expand the idea of textuality to embrace the materiality of the idea, or “meme” (to borrow a term from Dawkins), as exemplified in this case by the idea of the “film concept.”