Life is a puzzlement and like the King, I could sing (if I had the looks and voice of Yul Brynner!)

There are times I almost think
I am not sure of what I absolutely know.
Very often find confusion
In conclusion I concluded long ago
In my head are many facts
that, as a student, I have studied to procure,
In my head are many facts..
Of which I wish I was more certain I was sure!

You guessed it.  I have been doing contracts while it rains again like we need some born again Noah on hand.  I used to have a simple clause that allowed agreement on “Electronic Rights in any and every form now known or hereafter developed”. You would think that would cover it wouldn’t you? It seems we need to give names to countless widgets as well as the open ender; widgets like Tablets for example.  I am more familiar with the Roman wax tablet and the Mycenaean brick (for lack of a better description) than I am capable of being with all the tablet variations being served up today but we struggle on with the lists: “ iPods, Blackberries, Palm Pilots, Smartphones, Pocket PCs, and other similar or competitive devices now existing or hereafter developed and hand-held computers, mobile telephones, personal data assistants and any other devices that provide computing and information storage and/or retrieval capabilities and are able to display images, graphics and text,, whether now existing or hereinafter acquired or developed, including, without limitation, all iPod, Blackberry, Palm, Apple’s Tablet, Google devices and mobile tablets”. There you go… I can see the Future!

Greg Mably

As for the whole concept of the electronic book which is and isn’t, exists and doesn’t, in that inimitable now-you-see-now-you-don’t fashion I feel like the character in Greg Mably’s poster.  Our Teck Chief is up on a visit and when not dazzling us with wizardry likes to sit on the porch with her Kindle which is stuffed with a thousand novels. The one she’s reading must be 5 inches thick in the original mass market codex version but, like the other thousand or so on her “device”,  it looks exactly the same as all the others which you can only see one or two pages at a time. Films make her anxious as she does not like suspense. E-books give me the same feeling. I don’t trust the next page to be there. Silly I know, but then Life is, as we have said, a puzzlement!

St Augustine once observed his master St Anselm and wrote: “When he read, his eyes scanned the page and his heart sought out the meaning, but his voice was silent and his tongue was still.” This was more than sixteen hundred years ago, when reading to oneself was virtually unheard of. In his History of Reading (Penguin, 1997), the translator and editor Alberto Manguel suggests this did not become a habit until the 10^th century, when the Vikings were settling into Northern France and William the Conqueror was not even a glimmer in an Olaf’s eye.

Since then, reading has become a personal affair, a private communion between consumer and book. So used are we to this that we no longer think of the book as a technology, much less an engine for the voice.  True, book clubs have been on the rise of late, but they are formed largely to discuss the individual interpretations and opinions of their members rather than to listen to a recitation.

Not long ago, and just before the new boom in digital and social marketing, these clubs were lauded as the new Eldorado of bookselling. They seem much less threatening now to those of us who cussedly favor privacy in our reading (pace the Patriot Act).  Now they seem quaint reunions of old timers desperately clinging to a reenacted past that includes an absence of television.

So where are we now, with our Kindles and iPads? What can we say after five thousand years of book collecting of one type or another (no pun intended) when faced with something so fragile as a digital connection and a screen which we cannot mark or dog-ear? My private possession of a book is now transformed, a public list of downloaded files that Mr. Jobs and his ilk can seemingly interfere with at will. What I read is quite literally posted property that I can pay to view but cannot own, cannot shelve, cannot take down and put back in a different order.  I cannot look at the spines and see old friends and new acquaintances sharing my life with me. I can no longer have a library of my own.

As a part of this unwieldy market, I will have become a satellite of unpredictable and unknown sources, of what I used to be able to buy, keep, toss, or use as a doorstop. Now I can purchase only its shadow, which I can only have and hold on a screen. Like Plato’s prisoners staring at the wall of their cave, I can only see a reflection of a reality I cannot grasp.  I am no longer in possession of a faithful (or unfaithful) copy of an author’s oeuvre as I would be otherwise.. Now I have sight of something I cannot control or check, compare with another edition or, more mundanely, just lend to someone.

E-books are not published in the same sense as the printed book. We readers are given only piecemeal reproductions and a limited viewfinder. When presses e-publish, we do not publish in multiples but provide one copy at a time vicariously.

This reminds me of another fad from the fifties and sixties, of publishing collections of slides packaged with a book. One put them in a portable viewfinder with one hand and read the book in the other, or so it was proposed.  It didn’t work, but, then again, these slides were printed (if transparent) and tangible documents… Unlike the e-book, which is seemingly as erasable (pun intended) as chalk on a blackboard.

So, for those of you wedded to this new fashion, what to make of Bunker Hill Publishing producing its own e-book versions of our list? More to the point, what are we at Bunker Hill Publishing supposed to make of it? Will we publish e-books without the printed versions? The temptations are there, as the production costs must be significantly less. We independent publishers have to count our pennies.  Can we succeed in giving you, our clients, something physical to treasure in return for your hard won greenbacks, or will we be simply a source of digital files that can only be download?  There are so many questions, and more that we haven’t even thought of asking in the face of something we have little precedent for. For now, let’s settle in for the duration and make the best of a strange new world.

Our first publication was Disney Looking at Painting, after which any title has been a doddle to produce! Reconciling high Brit culture with the demotic of Disney was a gas. Overall, it turned out quite well, with 110,000 copies in print.

Then we met Rob DeSalle, Ian Tattersall, and Patrica J. Wynne, sciences professionals at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and devised Bones, Brains, and DNA and Brain. Next, after doing The Summer of Cecily, a story of author Nan Lincoln‘s heroic rescue of a harbor seal, it seemed like a good idea to do the story through the seal’s eyes–thus Cecily’s Summer. The trick is finding the right people to do the right books and in this we have been very fortunate. Of course, you want a strong text and great illustration but you also want to create a book that doesn’t look like all the others on the shelf. Luckily for us, our writers and artists have strong stylistic senses and return to us with new, fresh material time and again. We work around their skills and the subject at hand, designing the format to suit. Authors are never wrong and artists are always right. The rest is, er, finesse!

In all seriousness, though, we maintain that the aesthetics and sensibilities of our authors, illustrators, and author-illustrators are of the most importance. Commodity publishing, or “just giving the public what they want,” is a distracting idea when what we publishers do is fall in love with an idea and work out a way to share it.

And these ways are changing. Looking at and reading books will soon be only the first step in the adventure, with website tie-ins, multimedia components, and interactive materials to follow. Hardback, paperback, audio, digital, and the rest are all zones of publishing, different ways of reaching what remains the same public. Though fads and fashions change the pitch and alter the balance of forms as time goes by, the zeal of their audiences remain a constant.  It’s a case of “play it again, Sam,” as the famous mishearing of the old Bogart line goes. Only now we’re “playing it” on a new set of instruments and in a shifted key.

Amid such a constantly-shifting technology, it is interesting to note that children’s books haven’t changed substantially in content since the Victorians invented the genre. Still, reprints of old favorites are hard to come by. There are fewer and fewer “classics” now. Quality is also an issue, as older books — like the French Babar series, for instance – that had a high quality of production now appear in a tatty, cheapening form.  Beatrix Potter’s long-running Peter Rabbit has fared better with Penguin, but such cases are rare.

My advice? Hoard your precious, dog-eared copies of Caps for Sale, your (original!) Curious George, the Madelines and Ferdinands and Flat Stanelys of your childhood — if you still have them. If they’ve disappeared from your parents’ house, your storage space, or been hand-me-downed to friends and family, fear not. Likely within months or minutes of this writing, you will be able to read them to your favorite tots from the screen of your Kindle.