Big Think interviews author Sherman Alexie
By Paul Biba
Received the following email:
This is Austin Allen, formerly of The Abbeville Manual of Style. I wanted to write you as a new editor for Big Think, a site that conducts video interviews with top experts in various fields. We interviewed Sherman Alexie this week and he shared his (strong) opinions on print vs. electronic books. I thought this might be something you would be interested in for TeleRead.
And I was interested, so here is the embedded video:
October 31st, 2009 at 9:41 am
Actually, I’m surprised Sherman would consider e-books “elitist” because “dedicated reading devices are $300.” It sounds like the dismissive kind of thing that an “elitist” author would say… as if he is blithely unaware that e-books can be read on cellphones, devices now more ubiquitous than computers on this planet.
It’s not surprising that, as a published author, he feels a closer affinity to the Big Pub community than to independent writers making the effort to self-publish. He is right in one point: Those self-publishers (like me) have a much harder time being found by the public than Big Pub writers (like him), expressly because of the money spent by his publishers to promote him.
But he seems to think the internet can’t change that, and it already has. He emphasizes that the money made by Big Pub is its own justification, and that justification will eventually take over the internet, and control e-books. I say that the internet is changing that economic justification, as well as its model, and that Big Pub is not necessarily the future of publishing… I suspect it is the past, fighting to justify itself before it dries up and blows away.