Laura Miner muses on the evolution of the magazine and the development of Pictory, her excellent new site for multi-author photo essays.

It’s interesting to think about Pictory in the context of a magazine, because, while some people will call it an online magazine, in reality it is something else entirely — something new that we don’t have a word for yet. Innovative sites that bill themselves as online lit journals have the same problem. They’re not journals at all — and the use of old labels muddies our thinking.

John Oakes, founder of OR books, explains how his company eliminates the middlemen in publishing by combining print-on-demand with direct sales through the company’s web site.

Imagine taking the guesswork out of publishing. Imagine a publisher printing only to fulfill orders, and with a minimum of waste; imagine further a system that sidesteps warehouses, wholesalers, and even–at least at the outset of a book's life–bookstores and online retailers. This would be a process wherein the publisher focuses on developing ideas into workable manuscripts, carefully editing them–and, above all, devoting substantial resources to marketing the finished product.

We are not just in transition from one state or model to another state or model, we’re in transition to a state of permanent accelerated transition where the model is continuous rapid reinvention.

— Richard Nash, publishing consultant and former editor of Soft Skull Press

Fictionaut founder Jurgen Fauth defends the community-based site’s place as a disruptive but inclusive step in the evolution of literary journals:

Attention creates more attention, and Fictionaut connects interested readers with new writers, journals, and small presses. On our blog, we feature weekly interviews with groups, and every Tuesday, Luna Digest surveys the landscape of literary magazines. Instead of usurping the market, Fictionaut creates a new layer on top of old structures — and invigorates them in the process.

Of all the experiments in online literary publishing that I’ve seen, Fictionaut is the one I’m most excited about.

PoetrySpeaks is a new online community and store that sells text and audio downloads of individual poems for 99 cents each. The site was created by Sourcebooks, a publishing company run by Dominique Raccah. From an article at Publisher’s Weekly:

PoetrySpeaks.com will sell individual poems for 99 cents for an audio or print download, $1.49 for a combination of text and audio and $1.99 for video.

…

The site is offering poetry from more than just Sourcebook material. Tupleo Press, Naxos Audiobooks, and Marick Press have already signed on, and Raccah expects to reach deals with other poetry publishers—both large and small—in the near future.

I tend to think that any experiment with publishing poetry online is good — and audio sales might have legs — but it’s hard for me to imagine paying for the text of a single poem. The basic problem is thus: Since the only way for me to know that I like and might want to buy a poem is for me to have already read it, and since it must already be available somewhere in order for me to have read it, why would I pay to download it?

PoetrySpeaks is obviously based on the iTunes model, but poetry isn’t like pop music. Most of the music I buy from iTunes I’ve already heard — either from friends or Pandora or the soundtrack of a movie — so they only need to give me a 30 second preview. It’s just enough to confirm a particular song is indeed the song I’m looking for. And even though that hypothetical song is available elsewhere for free (streaming services, etc), I buy it from iTunes for sheer convenience, because I intend to listen to it over and over again, and because decent audio quality is guaranteed.

With the text of a poem, there’s no qualitative difference between downloading the file, or just copying the text straight from another source — even if that means retyping 14 lines from a print journal. In this case, PoetrySpeaks allows you to read the full text of the poem, but a javascript prevents you from selecting and copying the text. (Although anyone who knows how to view page source in a web browser can easily get around this.)

Also, what am I going to do with the text of a single poem that I’ve downloaded? Print it out and set it on the coffee table? The greatest practical use I have for single poems — as opposed to books of poetry — is to share and discuss them with my friends. That’s most easily accomplished with a link to a web page that offers the full text of the poem, not with a downloaded file that I presumably don’t have permission to digitally share. Happily, you can link to individual poems on PoetrySpeaks, and then read the full text in your browser. That’s wonderful, and it guarantees the site a good amount of traffic from my web browser, but, again, it raises the question — what are you buying when you buy the text of a single poem?

What say you, Dear Readers? Let’s kick it around in the comments.

The New York Times interviews the founders of Electric Literature, a new multi-format fiction magazine that publishes editions for the iPhone, Kindle, and various eBook readers — in addition to print.

Their biggest challenge is to get enough subscribers so the venture is self-sustaining. The cost of a subscription is $24 for the electronic version and $48 for paper. So far, they have 800 subscribers and 1,600 in single-copy sales, as well as 1,300 friends on Facebook and an estimated readership of 4,000 and growing.

“We have an optimistic message at a time of pessimism,” Mr. Hunter said. “As writers, we got tired of the doom and gloom. The future is not something you acquiesce to, it’s something you create.”

A wonderful and welcome experiment. And interesting for the one format that it avoids — the Web.

Also: An interview with Electric Literature’s Anna Pru at the Fictionaut blog.

Eighteen Challenges in Contemporary Literature | Beyond The Beyond.

All eighteen deserve mulling over, but it’s the last that’s the most enigmatic: “The Gothic fate of poor slain Poetry is the specter at this dwindling feast.”

Mandy Brown on the future of the book:

That age has ended. We are now ushering in a new age of books which exist without any physical presence at all, which can be transmitted across oceans in moments, in which annotations and criticisms can be shared in ways no one of the seventeenth century could ever have imagined. (Indeed, ways we of the twenty-first century are only beginning to understand.) And yet we still stubbornly refer to them as “books,” tucking but a sly vowel up front (“ebook”), as if we’re afraid to really admit how much has changed. This naming convention is no less absurd than if the codex was called a “folded scroll” or the scroll a “soft, thin, rolled tablet.” Dramatic changes in form require equally dramatic changes in terms.

Amen to that. I feel this absurdity whenever I describe Linebreak as an “online journal,” when it isn’t a journal at all — it’s a web site that publishes the text and audio of one new poem each week. Phrases like “online journal” and “online magazine” persist only because we have yet to acknowledge the fundamental change that occurs when an online publication stops imitating paper publications in even a modest way.