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Molly Tinsley’s visit this week sparked discussion about the relationship between the literary and the business sides of publishing. Her career as a writer spans genres—she’s written a novel, short stories, a creative writing textbook and award winning plays. In 2009, she and Karetta Hubbard founded FUZE Publishing, which published Satan’s Chamber and The Gift of El Tio.

Tinsley explained the consolidation of the publishing industry in the 1980s and she described how the resulting moves to increase profit margins blurred the separation between art and commerce . As a result, large publishers gave increased priority to profitable instant books (including the celebrity bio genre), they took fewer risks (resulting in less diversity in what got published, fewer “quiet books,” and fewer chances–or second chances–for authors). As Ryland Taylor phrased it, censorship by business model was a result.

Tinsley also suggested that ebooks have the potential to restore the balance between commerce and art. Ebook publishing gives authors and independent publishers more direct access to readers and to the fruits of their work. As readers embrace ebooks, more will be published and the roles of author and publisher will blur.

As big publishers lose their gatekeeper role to small publishers and self-publishing authors, who will assume that role? The turn to ebooks will also change the work of editors, copy edits, designers and publicists, all of which will become more technology-oriented. (We’ll learn more about the impact of ebooks on libraries in Courtney Remington’s forthcoming paper.) The new model will require authors to become more entrepreneurial—more like musicians, to use Steve Scholl’s analogy. And I wonder especially about the roles of book reviewers and readers. Is serious book reviewing moribund. Can reviewing still be a force in guiding readers to books?

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A few of our guest speakers have explained the difficulties (and sometimes the benefits) of having an editor change their work. Lately, I’ve had some great experiences with editors– but I realize this probably isn’t a common occurrence.

I am currently doing a freelance journalism internship and had my first two publications last week. I found it interesting to examine what the editors decided to change and what they left untouched. Surprisingly, I completely agreed with their changes and felt they greatly improved my articles. The thought crossed my mind that since journalism is essentially reporting the facts, it’s easier to accept an editor’s changes than it would be for creative work, like poetry or fiction.

I originally wrote this as the first paragraph for a fitness article for Healthy Living magazine:

“If you haven’t discovered it yet, your smart phone is a gateway to a range of fun, free fitness apps to whip you into shape — especially on those days when you can’t seem to make it to the gym. From yoga and toning to cardiovascular and resistance workouts — it’s all there, just a click away in your App Store.”

The editor changed it to this:

“If you have a smartphone, you have a personal trainer in your pocket and may not even know it. Your local app “store” offers dozens of fun, free, fitness apps that can whip you into running shape, teach you yoga, tone your muscles and provide cardiovascular and resistance workouts– it’s all there, just a click away.”

While the gist is the same, I thought the editor’s version was more compelling and detailed, maybe due to the “you” language he added.

I’m glad to have had positive experiences with editors so far, but I know not to expect such a smooth road every time I write something.

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Last week on The Daily Show, Jon Stewart talked with David Barton, a historian and the founder of WallBuilders, a national pro-family organization that presents America’s forgotten history and heroes, with an emphasis on our moral, religious and constitutional heritage. The interview was really interesting and they covered a lot of political and constitutional hot topics but the part that I found most interesting was when Barton talked about writing history and social studies textbooks.

Apparently, Barton is quite a controversial figure especially because of his right-wing involvement in the government and his association to conservative religious politics. He doesn’t seem like too far out of the mold of right-wingers but he does play a large part in the education of kids in many states across the country by writing history textbooks and he is very proud of that but the funny thing is that he does not want his name on any of the textbooks he writes. So essentially he is a ghost writer because he doesn’t want people to know who their kids are getting their supposedly “true” account of history from.

All controversy aside, I thought it was really interesting to think about the who, how, and why of textbook writing and the pros and cons of revealing the writer(s). I feel like in textbooks, especially history ones, we should be getting the unbiased account of the subject in the same way we are supposed to get that from the news. We all know the media is anything but unbiased and I am starting to realize how our textbooks fit right in there too. So maybe if you want to change people’s views you should get into the textbook business and rewrite history?

Here’s the link to the video. The whole thing is on the thedailyshow.com

http://www.hulu.com/watch/238864/the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart-david-barton-part-1

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I saw Ray Kurzweil on TV the other night (actually a web-cast of a TV show) where, as part of his Singularity hypothesis, he predicted that man and machine would be joined by, roughly, the year 2045. This melding of human and artificial intelligence will, by Kurzweil’s estimation, increase our intellect by something like a factor of one billion. OK. Maybe. Maybe not.

But, whether Kurzweil’s predictions are chronologically accurate or not, his concept seems inevitable. Living in a hyper-consumerist society where any edge or advantage can be worth millions of dollars (and clearly the bottom line trumps ethics), sooner or later augmenting our cognition is going to become the norm. (Oddly enough, it seems to me that the only way we might escape this predicament would lie in the first person to be 1,000,000,000 times more intelligent being clever enough not to let on or, greedily protective of the secret, blocking the access of others to the requisite technology. In that case the rest of us can soldier on in our relative imbecility as if nothing ever happened.)

In a post-Singularity world, humanity’s greatest literary accomplishments – let’s say the works of Shakespeare or Goethe – will seem something cute and quaint (at best). Our masterpieces will be akin to a second-grader’s finger painting compared to La Guernica.  Hamlet will have all the literary merit of an ill-conceived grocery list.

What I am wondering is whether or not we are at the end of a certain intellectual paradigm where nothing we’ve created artistically will endure. Are we as little as two generations away from being rendered meaningless? Will we seem pathetic 50 years from now? Is it possible to hope to leave a creative legacy in such a paradigm? I suppose that is not a publishing issue, per se, but one which will obviously effect what we think of as publishing. It’s also damned depressing.