Our Friends Electric

E-books have something sort of inherently 80s about them, don't you think? They're a shiny new thing made of electronics, like all 80s music. Created in a spirit of optimism and distancing themselves from the previous generation, but maybe not reinventing quite everything. So it's only fitting that Berlin's first ever Electric Book Fair is being held in Wedding, at the 80s-licious Supermarkt.

It's this coming Saturday, all day long, combining talks and presentations and events with stalls, I believe, where you can chat to makers of electric books. Like your old school fair in the 80s, only without the country dancing. And it's also free, like all those parties on the South Bank when Thatcher closed down the GLC. I don't quite understand what will happen, so I'm just going to go along and see. There's all sorts of electrifying things on the programme, including an Electric Café and Electric Drinking (which I don't remember us having in the 80s unless you count Sodastream, which is not strictly electric). And publishing's answer to Maxwell Caulfield and Michelle Pfeiffer – Richard Nash and Elisabeth Ruge – will be there too.

Berlin being the beating heart of the e-book world, it will be like having all the stars from Band Aid and USA for Africa in one room, just before they were famous. So rock down to Electric Avenue this weekend, kids.

Two Uncles or Not Two Uncles

Last night I attended a very open and friendly panel discussion kindly organized by Transfiction, which was about money in the era of digital publishing. The speakers – (digital) publishing people – talked a little about Amazon and their frustration at being unable to work around it. I won’t go into great detail about that except to say that I’m trying harder not to buy books from Amazon now.

What I found most interesting was a discussion about payment models. I asked why e-publishers are using different payment models to print publishers for exactly the same services, i.e. translation and editing. The answer, essentially, was that they don’t have enough money to pay advances.

Volker Oppmann was one of the panelists, and told an interesting story. He set up the publishing house Onkel& Onkel in 2007 with a loan from his two uncles; hence the name. Apparently he paid it back recently after selling his other business, Textunes, to Thalia. My friend Nikola Richter (Mikrotext) said that new publishers don’t have the backlist income that established (print) publishers have, but that small publishers of all kinds pay smaller or no advances. I would argue that this is not necessarily the case in the UK, but we weren’t talking specifically about the UK. And Zoe Beck of Culturbooks said that what e-book publishers are investing is their time, which amounts to money. They’re experimenting to find ways to pay translators (I assume editing is done for free by members of the team) such as 100% royalties up to a certain cut-off point. They’re also, as far as I understand, only commissioning translators for short books.

The situation is difficult for me to deal with, as a professional translator. On the one hand, I’m excited by all these experiments and the idealism with which they’re being undertaken. Nikola pointed out that e-publishers are bringing out books of unusual lengths and with unusual content that otherwise wouldn’t be published at all – although Zoe (an author and translator as well as a new publisher) didn’t reflect on e-publishers’ role in her own point that writers are earning less through royalties now that publishers are bringing out more books. Although I see it as a good thing, more choice, including digital reading matter, means smaller shares of the pie.

On the other hand – and what comes next is not going to make me many friends, I suspect – I see translators as less attached to the literature we produce than the writers themselves are. My work contributes to the quality of the product but it’s not the only factor; the writer thinks up the plot and the characters, for instance. So while it may be acceptable to an author that she will be paid after the fact and depending on how well her book sells, I personally am not willing to take that risk. While my task is a creative one, I am usually commissioned by publishers to translate books they have selected. According to my logic, they should then assume the financial risk for that decision. I personally am not in a position to work without being paid a fixed sum to compensate for my time.

E-only publishing in Germany is at a very early stage. The way I see it, at the moment people are starting their own e-publishing houses with a great deal of enthusiasm but very little capital. It now seems possible to publish without borrowing money beforehand, because the costs of printing, storage and physical distribution have fallen away. And so the other costs – writing, translation, editing, design, etc. – must be got around too, by means of “investing time”.

Again, I’m torn. I think it’s a good thing that people without two uncles willing to lend them money can publish books. But if in doing so, they require others to assume part of the publisher’s traditional risk, my worry is that only those with two uncles willing to subsidize their creative lifestyles will be able to participate further down the line. I say this as a person with three uncles, none of whom is in a position to lend anyone money. And I say it at a time when we’ve actually achieved a situation in which someone like me can make a living, more or less, out of literary translation.

My hope for the future is that e-publishers will end up making enough money to use the payment models employed by traditional publishers. My worst fear in this respect, however, is that traditional publishers will pick up on these new payment models and try to use them too. In my disaster scenario, that would mean that translators (and editors, writers, designers, etc.) without two uncles could only afford to work on books that promised high sales figures. And that would not be good for literature.

The One Thing I Actually Did in Leipzig

I seem to know a lot of lovely translators who maintain blogs nowadays. Another friend, Jamie Lee Searle, writes at translatingbetweenthelines.wordpress.com. And she brightened up my short stay in Leipzig and has written much more about it than I managed, which you ought to read.

Anyway, her post has prompted me to say a little something after all about one of the events we attended together, a discussion on the future of the book. Yes, I am a sucker for punishment. I'd been drawing a tactful veil of silence over it to be honest. But now I think, why not just let it all out in one big therapeutic rant. Jamie's given it the polite treatment, so now I can vent.

First of all, the format. An hour and a half! With seven people on the panel! And one of them was a famous American who attracted an adoring audience, which meant they had to cart along extra chairs and there were still people standing at the back. And then despite the event having a rather cute title - The Perfect Reading Machine - all that happened was that two people defended print books to the hilt, two people defended ebooks with a little less enthusiasm, and two people sat on the fence. What made me want to vomit the most was the way the reactionaries got peals of applause every time they mentioned workmanship, binding methods or typefaces. What made me want to vomit second-most was that almost everyone on the panel assumed that everybody who reads books is equipped with unlimited wealth and space for building up enormous libraries.

There was one golden moment, when poetry publishing empress Daniela Seel questioned the whole notion of reading for understanding - we'd been told that students reading on computers were distracted and therefore comprehended less - by asking: What is understanding in the first place? But nobody picked up her thread to crochet a more imaginative future for readers. And nor did the genuine argument that seemed to be brewing between Seel and the reactionaries ever break out into full-blown mud wrestling. Jamie and I started shuffling in our seats after an hour or so and I encouraged her to join me in walking out extra specially loudly in our clacky analogue high heeled boots. I felt like Nancy Sinatra. It was good.

Of course, having mouthed off loudly outside about paper fetishists, I did blow a hole in my budget the next day on a 1966 edition of Ernst Jandl poems on deckle-edged handmade paper. I shall add it to my infinite library as a reminder not to go to any more discussions on the future of the book, unless they involve real mud.

Alexander Kluge: Die Entsprechung einer Oase

I feel a little uncomfortable writing about Alexander Kluge because I feel a little ignorant about his work. This results from an unfortunate combination of various factors: limited reading time in general, my concentration on younger writers and my irrational avoidance of older men's work (Kluge is in his early eighties). Under normal circumstances I can hide the gaps in my reading behind bluff and bravado, but now I've had a tiny taste of Kluge and find myself craving more.

The taster in question was Die Entsprechung einer Oase, subtitled "essay for the digital generation". Being aimed at the digital generation, it is only available digitally, from my friend Nikola Richter's new publishing venture mikrotext. It is also short, weighing in at 17 pages on my Sony reader or about 50 on a smartphone. I was quite intrigued by how it came about - according to Nikola, it began as an thirty-minute telephone conversation; a very enjoyable one by her account. She told me:

He didn't want to give any advice but he began thinking about his relationship to the younger generation, about the conditions of cultural production and creative activity, about reading on the net - and I just let him talk.

Nikola transcribed and edited what he said - apparently his ideas were pretty much printable the instant he expressed them - and obviously they sent the resulting essay to and fro a couple of times, added quotes, and so on. I'm terribly impressed by the process, by what he had to say and by the man himself. I think I can say he's a writer, a filmmaker, a critical theorist and a pioneer of intelligent private television production in Germany. I don't feel that sums it up adequately - it's particularly the combination of those creative and intellectual activities that makes him the kind of iconic figure my youthful iconoclasm made me ignore in the past. 

The young generation, he says, doesn't need his advice. But he looks to the younger generation to reflect on his own ideas. Kluge talks about the internet with its overwhelming wealth of information and our need to find personal oases within it, places of calm and sustenance dealing with things that interest us subjectively as individuals. He reflects on how the internet has broadened our opportunities for reading and the way in which we can write, both in terms of finding things we want to read and adding things to writing that might have seemed outlandish twenty years ago:

One never previously saw this presence of languages. I can risk writing twenty lines of Latin in a text – and I'm suddenly independent, I have a little independent fortress Memor esto sacerdotalis dignitatis linguam caelestis esse clavem imperii et clarissimam Christi tubam. Quapropter ne sileas, netaceas, ne formides loqui. This Latin has extisted for more than 2000 years. (...) Now I can add something like this in a literary context because young people have become more accustomed to unfamiliar elements in the midst of texts. They're not always instantly amazed to find something new, something they don't immediately understand. They're more tolerant in that respect.

He talks subjectively about intellectual property and the way we can watch opinion forming and crystallising via internet debate, about the unfairness of distribution models, about creative acts. Setting up a publishing house, a band, a gallery - or a website - he says, means creating an oasis, collecting individual voices to make creative statements as a small group rather than as individuals. 

Two things impressed me for the main part. They may both be related to Kluge's age. Firstly, while the essay isn't quite perfectly formed, it flows and returns to certain key points and is coherent. The author uses a variety of metaphors - oases, islands, boats, coral riffs - to get his point across in a poetic rather than informative manner; a distinction he makes himself. Fully formed ideas dictated down the phone, surely a dying art. And secondly, Kluge represents all sorts of ideas one might not expect from the older generation in Germany, particularly on the subject of intellectual property rights - an issue that often seems to split society in two by age. He never seems to want to get down with the kids, is never patronising, but shows so much respect for the new that I instantly felt I owed that same respect back to him.

Some of his work is available in English from New Directions and Seagull Books, translated mainly by the excellent Martin Chalmers. I'm told his Air Raid should also be out later this year from Seagull. This particular essay is a strong start for a new publishing house - I hope, a defining moment that will go on to establish respect and success for mikrotext.

Small Uproar over Hardcover-Only Bestseller List

It's terribly, terribly complicated. SPIEGEL magazine publishes the most prominent list of best-selling books every week, but the trade mag Buchreport does the actual compiling via an electronic survey of 350 bookstores every Saturday night. And like most countries, they have various different lists: hardcover, paperback, fiction, non-fiction, children's, crime, etc. Don't ask me for more details, I don't pay much attention to such lowly matters.

Anyway it turns out they've been rather lax about the whole hardback/paperback dichotomy thing, what with all the in-between formats you get nowadays. Certainly my copies of Charlotte Roche's books, which gathered dust on the hardback fiction list for months, are more like paperbacks if you ask me, just with an extra flap. I know there's a name for that format but I can't remember what it is.

So now the Buchreport people have decided to pull themselves together and make darn sure only proper hardbacks get listed on the hardcover list. From July of this year, to give the publishers advance warning not to use these disgusting innovative freaky formats. Paperback-only publishers dtv are up in arms but playing along reluctantly - although not without warning customers that prices will go up (see Deutschlandradio Kultur).

There are actually some major disadvantages that arise here. The Spiegel bestsellers are often displayed prominently in bookstores large and small, and that's obviously a major sales push. So excluding non-traditional formats is pretty mean and not exactly forward-looking. Plus it exacerbates the artificial quality/mass-market divide. The black mark of "going straight to paperback" also means certain books just don't get as much review coverage, relegated to the "in brief" section from day one. And if you've ever met a writer you'll know they all spend weeks agonising over their books' format status. A loop of false-modest whispers of "hardback with full-colour dust jacket and bookmark ribbon" is the soundtrack in the corridor to literary hell's pride section. Imagine the extra headaches they'll have now.

Meanwhile, blogger and all-round cool person Johnny Häusler launched an experiment to plumb the depths of the ebook charts in Germany. He whipped up his own ebook I Live by the River and watched how many copies it sold. He seems to have shifted 3188 units so far and moved up and down the Amazon and Apple charts - you can follow his progress behind that link. He's hardly getting rich at 99c a pop, but the plan has certainly given us a little more transparency between the doom and gloom of German publishers and the blind optimism of the platform providers. Fun.