Shtuff is Happenin’

Its about 9:00 am and I’m here reporting from my cousins’ home in Brooklyn (though I probably won’t be able to post this until later today). There’s not much to do this early in the morning, so I think I’ll do some recapping and reporting. In my last post, I mentioned that I was a bit sick. I got a scratchy throat on Tuesday and I blew it off as just an aftereffect of eating too many salty cashews. It worsened by Wednesday, but now it’s finally better. I guess I wasn’t very productive through the week, but I came up with an idea that I presented to Keans Writers’ Workshop at our meeting. It’s for a monthly serial publication that would feature the individual fictions of our lead writers and a collaborative story that would be written by the writers together.

A serial works by presenting a new chapter of the story each week, just like those old radio shows a la A Christmas Story. I think it’ll be a great project for the workshop because it enforces deadlines. I would also say that it enforces creativity, but isn’t that a bit paradoxical? The collaborative story will be particularly fun, because each chapter will be written in parts, each part from the perspective of each writer’s narrators and characters. The group seemed to like the idea, and our first issue is slated to launch in October. We’ve got a lot to do before then, but somehow we still worked in a field trip for this coming week!

Actually, I planned this trip weeks ago to see the Espresso Book Machine at the New York Public Library (the science, industry and business one.) Throughout the Columbia Publishing Course, I heard about print-on-demand and machines like these taking over a major part of the publishing industry. The good news is, it will cut out the cost of over-producing books and more money will go to the publishers and/or agents and/or authors. The bad news is that printers will lose a lot of business. But don’t worry; you won’t stroll into your local bookstore one day only to find all the shelves replaces by whirring, beeping book vendors. More likely, the machines will be in the back room, ready to replace a book bought from the store shelf. It’ll be like this at first, anyway.

I’m not sure what this will mean for our beloved independent book stores. Maybe, with a machine that can print out a volume from a catalogue of thousands of books, they’ll be able to keep up with chain stores and prosper. I’m sure I’m missing some factor in this equation though; the indies have always had it hard. In any case, this Espresso Book Machine is the first of its kind and I hear that the quality of the things it prints out is deplorable in comparison to current mass-print books. Cheap and disposable come to mind. Nevertheless, it’s a catalyst that will revolutionize the industry, and the machine will inevitably become smaller and more qualified. I don’t know whether to love it or hate it; I’ll have to wait until the big picture starts changing.

Well, that’s all for now. It’s just about time to make the drive back home, so I’ll report in again later.

Ray