We’re never sure about articles that chew over the range of possible futures for literary magazines, but this one from Bud Parr in The Age of Sand seems to talk a lot of sense as it reports on the decision by eminent journal The Virginia Quarterly Review to embrace EPUB, the current standard for ebooks, and produce a version for Apple’s iPad.
Whatever you think about the over-hyped iPad and the claim, made by Apple zealots in almost every other breath, that it’s going to save publishing, the EPUB format does seem to be shaking out well in the battle to be the leading ebook format. It’s still early days and its functionality and elegance are limited, but the feeling is that it has the potential to eventually become the literary equivalent of the MP3 file, meaning that it’ll be usable everywhere and by anyone.
But here’s the really compelling thought we took from the article:
“Lit journals in particular should embrace EPUB immediately. I love you all, but paying $12 for every issue of every journal packed to the gills with writers most people have never heard of has value only to the culture at large, but rarely to actual readers (as my friend Richard Nash points out ‘your slush-pile are your readers’). There is no greater planned obsolescence than a lit journal, yet there has never been a more opportune time to bring literature and ideas into the greater cultural conversation. Web sites are great, but leave out the immersive qualities that ebooks promise for reading things that require sustained attention.”
We’ve made it clear since starting > kill author that we want to investigate other ways of getting ourselves out there, and that while print is still undeniably wonderful and nothing can ever replace holding and reading a physical object, the plain financial reality means that a print run of this journal would be very limited and would most likely only be bought by, well, people like you, me, us. People who buy literary magazines. And we don’t want to just preach to the converted.
So we’ve got it on our list to check out EPUB, but the last time we took a look it was an unfriendly, unwelcoming thing to use and didn’t produce results that satisfied us. Guess we need to sit down and learn more. If anyone out there has experience of putting together EPUB files and wants to offer some advice or point us in the direction of a simple guide that we can understand, get in touch with us.