This panel was a strangely familiar to me: in January of this year, I organised a panel at De Balie in Amsterdam under the title “Offline – Online Publishing: The Love for Print in an Age of Electronic Media”. Also here Alessandro and Simon participated. Now in Kassel: different setting, slightly different presentations, definitely different reactions from the audience.

Alessandro based his presentation on his article ‘The Persistence of Paper”, published in the Mag,net2 Reader, and reposted on this blog. Alessandro basically spoke about how we are experiencing a disembodiment of paper with the abundance of online text (and even text on PDAs and mobile phones), and how this phenomenon also evokes a kind of nostalgia for the reliability of paper. The industry has tried to accommodate this by the development of e-paper, which is not particularly user-friendly, but gives you the sense of paper, whilst at the same time reducing space. This is of course based on increasing consumption: have less spatially (not so many books crowding your bookshelves), but in effect to have more stuff (more books, texts, magazines and journals but in an other format than hard copy). The latter feeds in perfectly into changing patterns of consumption: we want more, but want it to be light and mobile.

However, attempts to marry cellulose and paper have till now been unsuccessful, according to Alessandro. Probably because the “dowry”, i.e. the technology, is still so expensive, and well…substituting one thing with an ersatz of the other never really worked; remember the paperless office?

So digital culture will probably not save us from the weight of paper, but we should ask ourselves whether we really want to be saved. Paper and pixel function differently, and the way they function is continuously in flux. In addition, they feed off each other. For example: print magazines will offer free content and free pdfs of their articles in order to get info on you as a consumer. This consumer info is vital to print publications, in order to structure their distribution network.

Simon Worthington, co-founder and co-director of Mute spoke about Print-On-Demand and how social networks aid to get distribution offline functioning better. Mute magazine has itself followed an interesting technological trajectory: it has evolved since 1994, from a newspaper format, to a print magazine, to now a quarterly PoD Reader and an open publishing network called metamute. I still very much appreciate Mute’s original motto “proud to be flesh”, and how they have remained true to it, though over the years it has come to mean something different. So actually the editorial process has developed from a more traditional top-down editorial model, to a more participatory model. The subject matter has evolved as well: whereas in the beginning Mute predominantly covered new media and digital art, its editorial line is gravitating now more towards socio-political themes.

Simon then discussed how changes the economy of who can actually produce a book. In other words, in democratises publishing. In addition, distribution is unfriendly to small publishers, so sharing resources becomes a necessity. Mute uses a tool for distribution that was originally developed for political campaigning (CVCRM), and has introduced a system if community couriering (i.e. people moving around and traveling and talking publications with them). I love this idea of community couriering: I have been actually been doing it for my artists friends in Lebanon: every time I visit I find myself with a suitcase full of envelopes stuffed with DVDs and CDs which I need to post in Europe for them. Due to the unreliability of the Lebanese postal services and censorship issues, it is far easier to have the goods travel with someone fro them to reach there destination. It’s a wonderful alternative to Fedex and DHL. :-))

nat muller