Notes on "What Dreams Need Come: A Task List for Visionaries" Potlatch 24 panel

What Dreams need Come: A Task List for Visionaries

Glenn Glazer (mod), Janna Silverstein, Jeanne Gomoll, Dan Trefethen

Panel description (from the program guide): At the National Book Awards, Ursula K. Le Guin issued a call to auctorial arms. She warns of hard times to come, charges us to dream alternatives to the ways we live now. But is she right? Science fiction is rarely predictive, so what is it good for? I speculative fiction a tool for change, a gate to better futures, or just another obsessive technology of popular distraction? Other than amusing ourselves, what good do we really expect from dreaming new worlds?

The program guide provides URLs to a video clip of the speech and to a transcript:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Et9Nf-rsALk

http://parkerhiggins.net/2014/11/will-need-writers-can-remember-freedom-ursula-k-le-guin-national-book-awards/

As with my notes on the Women Destroy panel, these are partial and scattered notations of statements that interested me.

Janna: Editors now have to be advocates for books as different from other commodities. Publishers have a responsibility to be a standard-bearer for that.

Dan: I'm not an editor or publisher—I think she [Ursula Le Guin] was speaking for art for art's sake. In that speech, she is storming the castle. She has the credentials to do that. [Later, this is characterized as “speaking truth to power.”]

Jeanne: She was identifying science fiction to the people in the room as being a key part of any movement that seeks to change the world. She is posing the question: what kind of world are we ideally moving toward? So many people outside of the sf world do not think of science fiction in connection with revolution or change. Le Guin is pointing out its social value.

Glenn: These publishers [reference to the Big Five, and generally to the publishing people sitting in the audience Le Guin was speaking to] are driven by changes in the technology that we did not see coming. What do authors need to do to survive?

Janna: Ursula may be 6 months ahead of what's going on, but the publishers are years behind—when they should have seen it coming and prepared for it. Publishing is having a real hard time with this transition. 

Aud (Huw Evans): Le Guin talked a lot about freedom in her speech. Science fiction should be the first to embrace technological change. Readers are the gatekeepers.

Aud: Booksellers and librarians are mediators between books and readers and the books' authors.

[In the course of the discussion that followed, panelists and audience members displayed a diverse and contradictory range of notions about who or what are “gatekeepers” and how rating systems and algorithims work. Vonda mentions one of the earliest recommendation programs designed by Dave Howell and how well it worked, one with different aims to, say, Amazon’s recommendation algorithims.]

Janna: Signal to noise ratio is off-kilter with self-publishing. There's a higher proportion of noise now. But bloggers can be discriminatory filters.

Glenn: [Expresses worry about the vanishing of indie bookstore, which has been an important discriminatory filter. The sad closing of Borderlands came up during the ensuing discussion.]

Aud: There’s a difference between gatekeepers and arbiters. It's not always a good thing that gatekeepers have a diminished role.

Janna: We need something that provides a faithful reflection of readers' ratings and preferences.

Jeanne: Women Destroy SF is evidence about the myopia in the field.

Dan: WDSF was crowd-sourced, not produced by big publishing.

Janna insists that the reason it couldn't have been published by the Big Five only because it was an anthology, not because its contributors were all women. [Because anthologies don’t sell enough to be published with the print-runs all books published by them have recently come to need.]

Aud (Nisi) We need not more gatekeepers, but gate-openers.

(Aud) Readers ratings can be (and are) gamed. They can't solve the signal-to-noise ratio problem.

Aud: Le Guin is addressing two audiences-- writers (that they live with integrity and write with integrity) and publishers. I think she was trying to shove writers into greater integrity in their writing.

Aud: It's important to remember that writers are reflecting back the values of mainstream society.

Dan: I think if she were here today, she would say, “I'm talking about you people. Don't sell your soul for a mess of pottage, so to speak.”

Janna: These days, decisions have to be made more consciously than in the past (precisely because these conversations are happening). Everyone in publishing has become more conscious of how their decisions will be read.

Aud (Vicki R.) Often books are rejected because of the marketing dept. Editors might love a book and reject it because they think it won't sell.

Janna: That's the reason I left publishing.

Aud (Tom Becker) Amazon's algorithims are measuring biases & decisions people have already made; they don’t suggest departures [from what people are in the habit of reading]. Algorithims are not going to suggest paths of bold reading.

Dan: UKL says we need to know the difference between art and commerce.

Dan: Small presses are the one bright light in all this.

Janna: We as a community need to heed Ursula's clarion call.

Jeanne: One of the things Ursula does, more than telling us, is that she shows us by her own work. [Cites Tehanu, as an example of revisioning one’s own past work and ideas.]

This panel could have gone in one of several clear directions; instead, it took a scattershot approach. Because it began with an emphasis on technological change and the mainstream publishing industry's apparent cluelessness about it and its inability to do more than attempt to play catch-up, I began with the impression that the discussion would be centering on that. But when the audience entered the discussion (which, being Potlatch, was fairly early), the discussion got bogged down in generalities about the quantity of work being published and the lack of filters (authoritative or otherwise) for helping readers find what they want to read. Although both panelists and audience members made a lot of references to things Ursula said in her speech, I noticed a general avoidance of pursuing the ramifications of what the difference between art and commerce is and whether that difference will vanish (which is clearly one of the concerns UKL expresses in her speech). For all its excellent intentions, we were not collectively bold in our discussion. (I say "we" because I was present, even though I did not speak. As an indie publisher, I always feel I risk appearing self-serving in voicing my opinions on such matters.)

It occurs to me that it might be interesting to see someone unpack the sentences of that very brief speech. That wasn't, of course, the point of the panel, but such an exercise might be fruitful.

Ursula Le Guin accepts the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters

Here's her inspiring speech:

Reissues and fonts

I used to spend hours every week browsing in bookstores, new and used. I'd even think nothing of devoting an entire day to doing so. In recent years, all that has changed. Instead, I do a lot of browsing online and have a good idea of what I hope to find before I set foot in a bookstore. I followed that procedure yesterday on a visit to University Bookstore here in Seattle, but since I didn't find a single one of the books I specifically looked for, I ended up spending a couple of hours browsing instead and thus buying a lot of books I hadn't given a though to in advance, just as I used to. I was surprised to find on the shelves a number of books from the early and middle parts of the 20th century I knew of but had never actually read, all newly printed complete with modern new prices, too.

After I bought them and sat down in the cafe with an iced tea and my booty, however, was that though these books were all newly printed, they had not been set in modern fonts, but simply reproduced as if they were nothing more than digitally printed pdfs of the original pages. (I suspect that's exactly how they were produced.) It would have reduced the cost to the publisher considerably to do, I suppose. To my annoyance, in two cases the books don't even have the grace of showing the date of the reissue, presumably on the pretense that the copyright date is the only date that matters.  Since the book is not, of course, being sold as a part of the original print run half a century (or more) earlier, this pretense leaves me feeling deprived of data about the book's publication history. Have these books been in continuous print all this time? Or is it just that the changing technology of printing and its economics has made a no-muss, no-fuss reissue economically feasible? 

 Does it sound as though I'm complaining? I guess I am. I will admit it: I find many of the older fonts uncomfortable to read. That isn't to say I won't read them when I have to. Back in the 1970s I read hundreds of books printed in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, most of them florid or even Gothic,  fonts that, for instance, turned esses into effs. I've always been willing to read old books set in old fonts when that's the only choice for books I really want to read. Just last year, for instance, inspired by a chapter in Alexis Lothian's thesis, I read a pdf of Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbett's late ninetheenth-century New Amazonia that took considerable effort to read, partly because the pdf reproduction is rather poor, partly because the font was tiresome-- and then typed the whole thing out it in preparation for having it typeset for Aqueduct's Heirloom Books series. Most older fonts just can't be read by an optical character reader, and so they have to be keyed in by hand. Seeing these graphically reproduced reissues, it occurred to me that unlike all those publishers, neither Kath nor I would ever have thought of merely reproducing the pdf of the Corbett novel (or any other) book. Apparently, book design and ease of reading matter to us tremendously. Now that I think of it, I recall, in the first months of our preparing to start Aqueduct, Kath's intense interest in choosing our house fonts, all based on her own experiences as a reader-- and I also her complaints over the years about various fonts (of which I had previously been less conscious than she).

Clearly, fashions in fonts change. You have only to look at books published in different decades to see that. One of the reprinted books mentioned above, one with a 1951 copyright date and the statement "Vintage Books are published by Alfred A. Knopf and Random House, Inc." and no other date after that, apart from a bio of the author which mentions his death and two awards won post-1951 that Vintage must have added in a later reprint that the copyright page does not bother to mention, has a font one never sees now, though it's a font I would have found familiar in the 1970s. (Don't ask me for its name: there are very few fonts I can actually identify by name.) I find myself wondering whether the fonts I find the most readable now would have seemed as readable to me in the 1970s as they do to me now. Are publishers actually using increasingly readable fonts (perhaps due to better and better design), or is readability an illusion created by changes in taste? Fashions do affect how we view clothing, shoes, and hair styles (not to mention home, car, and book cover designs).

It seems I have a subject of conversation when next I see the one font-designer I actually know. And who knows, maybe neurobiologists will someday serve up new evidence shedding light on the question, particularly given the interest they've been taking in investigating what happens in people's brains when they read different sorts of things and finding perceptible differences in the brain between reading printed and electronic texts. 

Priorities

In the new issue of the American Book Review (33,3 March/April 2012), Jeffrey  R. Di Leo's editorial-- "Another One Bites the Dust"-- notes the continuing closure of university presses. "Another one" refers to The University of Missouri Press, which was founded in 1958 and has published around 2000 titles in its life time. Di Leo notes that university presses "are non-profit enterprises. Though these presses may reach a level of financial self-sufficiency in their operation, they are by and large underwritten by their host university. This is part of the investment of higher education." Indeed. The work published by university presses could, collectively, be said to constitute the bones holding many academic disciplines together, both nourishing their development and providing them with their primary frames of reference. Di Leo also insists that "one of the measures of a great university is the strength of its press. Press strength is determined by its catalogue, and its catalogue by the choices of its editors and the impact of its authors."

Sadly, many university presses have been shut down, and some of those that haven't been shut down are now trying to be run as though they were for-profit businesses, with disastrous results for scholars and the academy generally. Why is the University of Missouri Press being shut down? Because the the people who determine the university's budget have chosen to eliminate the $400,000 a year subsidy that has allowed them to publish the titles the press's editors find worthy of publication. As Di Leo notes, in the same year that the press's subsidy was eliminated, the University of Missouri chose to give its football coach a $650,000 raise. I was shocked to read in Di Leo's editorial this: "Louisiana State University, another football powerhouse, slated its university press for closure in 2009." I was shocked, because I know that press continues to exist. Somehow, it survived its budget crisis. But for how long?

All I have to do is look at my own bookshelves to see how valuable, for me, university presses have been (including numerous volumes from both University of Missouri Press and Louisiana State University press). Di Leo says that "University of Missouri administrators are said to be hashing out ways to create a new and sustainable model to operate a university press." That sentence made my heart sink. I've heard terrible things from scholar after scholar about their experiences with presses that have "created a new and sustainable model" for operation. And I've noticed that many of these no longer non-profit presses often charge exorbitant prices for the books they do publish-- including e-book editions, which are often burdened with the same price (or only slightly lower) than that of the hard-cover edition, putting them out of the reach of even someone like me.

Di Leo closes by noting that after Rice University closed its press in 1996, they re-opened an all-digital press in 2006. The all-digital press cost Rice $150,000-200,000 a year. "What they found out was that there 'are base costs that are irreducible'-- 'and that printing is only one of them.'"

Since college football is so important to the world, why bother having a college at all, I wonder? I'm just waiting for state legislators to start asking themselves that. Once they do, you can be sure there will be proposals to eliminate every department except the athletics program (and maybe the business school) of the colleges and universities that were once actually supported by state funding (but are now mainly dictated to by state legislatures, regardless of how little support they actually provide). It seems only a matter of time, don't you think?