The Great American Wovel

Did you hear/read about the Wovel on National Public Radio this morning? No, not the world's safest snow shovel (although the videos on that site are oddly compelling), but rather the hybrid baby of the print and electronic publishing worlds. You know: the Wovel. As in the Web Novel, created by Underland Press and saddled with an unfortunate name that sounds anything but literary.

Never mind that the last installment posted on the Web site is dated December 5, 2008. (You'd think that with an NPR interview in the can, the publisher would move heaven and earth to make sure that the weekly novel is actually up-to-date, but I digress.) As someone who moves easily between both on- and offline media, I should be the ideal target audience for this kind of literary innovation, right? I mean, I spend half my days working on the Internet, sending emails, doing research, reading reports, downloading documents, and yes, blogging and Twitter-ing. (If you're so inclined, my Twitter account name is innerfrenchgirl.) I've been on the Internet since 1993. (And yup, I like to throw that into cocktail parties every so often. Not that anyone cares.) Until recently, I even had Internet access on my handy-dandy Palm Centro. That is, until I realized how little I was using it for other than to Twitter and check the Weather, neither of which is worth the $30+/month fee. Not in this economy.

In any case, I was born at the right age and have the right credentials to be suitably fascinated with, and get all lusty about this latest, desperate attempt to shore up the ailing publishing industry. And it is, indeed, ailing. Did you hear that Random House is cutting its 2009 book list, including the latest edition of a book I consider one of the must-reads of freelance writers? (That would be Kelly James-Enger's Six-Figure Freelancing.) That publishers in general are retrenching and buying fewer manuscripts in 2009? Some are even announcing that they will not be buying any new manuscripts, at least for the time being. That doesn't bode well for writers, readers and booksellers, especially those indie ones who have managed to survive for this long. It certainly doesn't bode well for someone like me, who's still working on that endless novel.

In any case, you would think that the report about the Wovel would be just perfect for someone like me, especially since I was one of those who did enjoy those Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books as a child.

But I'm not.

I still buy books, both new and used, at bookstores from here to Dublin. I probably spent half of my time in Singapore wandering in and out of bookstores. A four- or five-story shopping complex near the Raffles Hotel now houses about a dozen or so used and new bookstores, some of which only offer Chinese-language titles, but others are treasure troves of novels, photo books and histories of the storied former colonial city. I've visited books in London, haunting Charing Cross Road; Dublin; Sydney; Manila; Launceston, Tasmania; a dozen Japanese cities, including the Kinokuniya in Fukuoka; San Francisco; Washington, DC; Columbia, South Carolina; New Delhi; Old Delhi; and yes, Dallas, Texas, my home. I'm one of those people who buy books even when I've nothing but ten dollars left in my bank account. I've a chronic addiction, fed constantly when I was a child by a relentless insomnia that rendered me happily wrapped in a Nancy Drew or Harriet the Spy or Ramona the Brave through the wee hours of the morning. My mother never told me to turn off the light and go to sleep. She understood the obsession. She let me read whenever I want and even whatever I want. (Well, except for a few occult books she found in my library stack. My ever-superstitious mother drew the line at those.)

I'm all for encouraging a new generation of potential readers to explore whatever media they're most comfortable with, whether it's the traditional paper-and-ink or the flashy gleam of the Kindle. But I'm stubborn and old-fashioned, and I think there's something odd and false about the comment in the NPR report about bringing an industry "born in the 15th century into the 21st." Reports of the death of book publishing have been greatly exaggerated and endlessly repeated for decades. Perhaps I'm just naive, but I'd like to believe that all this hand-wringing about the doom and gloom of the book industry is just another symptom of the overall economic malaise we're all feeling and not the death throes of publishing itself. That the horribly-named Wovel (which makes one sound as if one swallowed a handful of marbles) is just a blip in the radar and not the terrifying future of book publishing.

Apparently, even Paris booksellers aren't immune. If literary geeks have a Nirvana, it would likely be Paris, where all of us dream of writing and living someday, even for just an afternoon at a sidewalk cafe. But now it appears that even that dream may be fading. No one wants to buy books anymore. A bouquiniste is quoted in the article as saying, "It's impossible to live just from books." But that's exactly the opposite of my own life philosophy -- one can live just from books! Right? -- and now it appears that I was wrong. One can live from books, but only if they're accompanied by plastic Eiffel Towers, key rings and ash trays.

And in the form of Wovels.