Monday, April 27, 2009

The Future of Poetry Publishing


What does it hold? Barrelhouse has an interview with Reb Livingston about it.

From the story...

I think print will continue to exist for a while, in various forms. I see two main routes, the book as artifact route, beautiful, but expensive to produce books and more print-on-demand titles, which already has become indistinguishable to traditionally printed books for most readers. I love both.

People my age and older will likely be partial to printed books. People in their 50’s and older seem incredibly attached to newspapers and other print media. Yes, people do adjust to change, some more enthusiastically than others. But I really believe the biggest changes have yet to be discovered and I think that’ll be done by poets much younger than me. Poets who didn’t grow up with newspapers and magazines in their households. Poets who don’t need the case for distribution and reaching a wide audience explained to them. Poets who will have no comprehension of the concept that a “printed” poem is more “legitimate” than a poem published online. Poets without print envy. These poets are still children. So I suspect what I have to look forward to is everything that I know about poetry and publishing being completely antiquated in about 20 years, possibly sooner.

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