In 1974, when a friend and I took classes in video at the community college, signing out the relatively expensive equipment of the time, we noticed instantly what anyone who has seriously compared video with cinema immediately recognizes. Video is of the moment. Cinema has the timeless nature of the photograph. Undoubtedly the difference has something to do with the dot. The random shape of the photographic dot, combined with its relatively infinitesimal size, makes the photograph timeless by nature. The photographers famous for producing photographs 'of the moment' are, in many respects, fighting the medium itself.
            Cinema is also projected and not self-luminous. It is whole frame by whole frame rather than by dot and refresh rate. Thus, while video is also frame by frame, the frame is built on the flicker of the electron gun. Wave your hand in front of the analogue television, and you get the same effect as waving your hand under neon lights. In other words, video began with a radically different 'feel'.
            But part of it is in the medium itself. Cinema begins with the conventions of the theater, storytelling in a fixed and limited frame, and thus with relatively arbitrary conventions of narrative and punctuation. Undoubtedly as program television, video may begin in theater as well, at its commencement with even more limited sets, staging that makes some high school productions look sophisticated.  But these sets not only reflect the minimal funding of early television, they also correspond with the 'live production'. From the first, television was of the moment. Some of the shows were never recorded. Others were rerecorded over the same tapes.  
            Television already had the history of the cinema up to the 50s. It also instantly inherited the function of the newsreel, with the portable video camera eventually replacing the film camera in the telecasting of the news. And, of course, journalism is the most evanescent of the media.

            All of this is by way of preface. The present convergence of cinema and video does not change the history, or some of the basics. But both cinema and video have an altogether different history from the printed page. And what has been largely missing from the conversation about the 'digitization of publishing' is the indigenous nature of the media, in the literal sense, the actual 'substance' through which 'substance' of content is transmitted.
            The potency of both cinema and television has profoundly affected what is published. The radicalizing of the techniques of storytelling is not simply a function of the proliferation of the mfa programs in 'creative' writing - which have largely reduced narrative structure to technical exercises in extremist 'imagination' - it is also a function of the convergence of genres and media. The 'thriller', as a book, is already structured as a 'treatment' for a film or series. What difference if the book is digitized? A second reading will undoubtedly bore the literate reader to tears; that is, if we know the real history of characterization and narrative in 'classical' literature. But, of course, classical literature is precisely what is being cannibalized in terms of the current fads of storytelling. And this, of course, presumes that we are speaking of the 'sophisticated' bestseller lists, and not of romance novels.
            But this is also a reflection of the publishing market itself. The names of the great houses are still commonly the names of booklovers who sometimes seemed to fall into publishing by chance. But now publishing is a great 'industry'. So, naturally, it is now being run by mba's and other industrial and commercial 'experts'. But what is really being reflected in publishing is the kind of cash imperialism - or perhaps I should say credit imperialism - that is destroying other industries. Granted, the market is no longer expanding, or at least not expanding at the rate it did just before the digital world began its encroachment. The aggregation and 'vertical integration' of the 'industry' as much reflects the softening of the market as supposedly 'positive' economic forces. But, while, like the newspapers, the 'consolidation' of the business is a symptom and not the cause, it fairly clearly accelerated the process.
            But many of the same forces were altering the business from within, fixating it on the blockbuster, the million seller. Where, in the old days, a publisher might be satisfied to take the profits from an array of relatively successful works, the profitability of the bestseller became such that, with the basic weakening of the substructure, it requisitioned profits from other areas, from lesser works and their authors. That the focus on the bestseller and the mass market books has debased the overall quality of published works is something of a cliché. But what it has developed is a potential bifurcation in the market itself, a bifurcation more or less reinforced by the development, not only of the internet, but of the computer driven changes in publishing itself.

            I am always slightly awed when I hear inside defenders of the publishing industry rationalizing the archaic contractual structures with authors on the basis that 'this is how we have always done it'. Apart from these contracts - contracts for other than bestselling authors - with their less than equitable distribution of rights and profits, given the present realities of the 'industry' and the marketplace, there is probably not a single aspect of publishing that has not been revolutionized by the computer and the internet. Since I am also familiar with the economic setup of academe, it reminds me of the peculiar persistence of the now not only archaic but actually totally perverted system of tenure. Once tenure protected the young scholar from bureaucratic intrusion into his research. Now it is the blunt instrument by which the young scholar is beaten into bureaucratic submission. But its real purpose is financial. Because of tenure, certified scholars can be paid less than a living wage to teach advanced as well as introductory courses. While college and university level teaching has expanded exponentially, the number of tenured professors has barely increased.
            Anyone familiar with the actual editing, design and printing of books knows that not only the physical process, but the entire structure of contracts and business models, as well as production sequences, has been completely overturned in the development of contemporary digital electronics. While some aspects of offset printing remain the same, pre-press is completely altered. And, of course, print on demand alternatives are burgeoning. In marketing, historically, print media were a primary tool. Today, only a handful of mass printed book review features remain. So-called 'viral campaigns' for books apparently develop on the internet. But most seem to be legitimately spontaneous, the actions of booklovers who have lost their traditional sources for book information. But the major publishers are apparently too distracted by their own fears for the fading blockbuster to descend to the 'street level' of internet traffic.
            What is developing is a double level in the 'industry', in which small presses and alternative publishing modes are making their inroads. And the majors, at this point, have largely lost the credit power to mop up all the emerging presses, the small presses developing to a level of noticeable profit from the vantage of the corporate corner offices. Presumably, the future holds one of those 'sudden' changes.

            Which brings us back to paper.
            Perhaps the Kindl has already developed some equivalent for holding your fingers in three places at once in the text. But I wouldn't know. I doubt to own one soon. I was more than a little surprised to find a nearly contemporary Liddell, Scott and Jones Greek dictionary at a used book sale for a dollar. But the text is now sold only in digital, and so the hard copy, for the moment, is considered essentially valueless. It tells me something about the contemporary classicist and precisely the struggle for tenure. The dictionary embodies an extended scholarly history of the early Greek language. But the casual perusal of the text - again, at least for the moment - is a thing of the past. Apparently the usual purchaser is a scholar in a hurry.
            For light reading, nowadays, I tend to read scholarly historical biographies and general histories. A single text can easily take a week or two. Part of the process involves stopping at a given page because of some striking comment that tallies with one of the ongoing thematic threads I always carry with me - like the inventory of unpurchased books that I carry in mind to book sales. And part of the process often involves reversion and review. Of course, a computer chip is great if one has a word or phrase in mind. But, often, the issue is 'atmospheric', at which point the essentially physical memory that accompanies reading of the text becomes imperative, something altogether lost in a single page screen.
            Moreover, it is this 'physical' presence of the printed page that no 'reader' will ever recover. Perhaps the new modes of digital presentation can simulate paper more nearly as a photograph than as a video screen, just as television has become more movie-like. But the 'weight' of the book is not simply measured in avoirdupois. And the 'presence' of the printed page is precisely that it does not change.