Media Options
The principal aim of publishing Selections, rather than To Arcadia, is to expand the book’s audience — to have it read by more “charming strangers.” Given this aim, it would be preferable to print physical copies of Selections rather than publish it on the web as free content. It is all too likely that an online literary publication — without already having garnered some sizable audience and prestige — will only be buried underneath the surfeit of the online marketplace. The internet is more often, in the first instance, a tool for searching rather than one for browsing, and anyone who is intentionally searching for something, searches for something with which they have prior familiarity. Moreover, the options present on the first page of a search engine often do not facilitate accidental discoveries to the same extent as does, say, the average bookshelf at a library or bookstore. Thus, if published online, Selections would likely only be of interest to those who knew the author, and — given that that the web in no way reinforces focus — would receive sustained attention only from the most devoted of his friends. For everyone else, it would invariably lose the competition for attention to more polished or reputable content. Indeed, even if someone familiar with the author is aware that the book is available online, her utility calculus — taking into account opportunity costs — is simply stacked against it. Why read a 21-year-old’s angsty thoughts, when you can read Nietzsche’s angsty thoughts, if they cost exactly the same amount in time and energy?
The chances are somewhat better for Selections surviving into if it is printed and distributed correctly. Rather than paying some hefty sum to have it published and sell it to bookstores with sparse hope of any return on investment, it seems best to receive additional money from Yale to print a few dozen copies of the book and distribute them to the original recipients of To Arcadia as well as to Yale and perhaps other universities to include in their collections as an example of published student work. While each copy would, once distributed to universities, join library shelves with at least hundreds of other books in the same section, there is nevertheless a non-negligible possibility that some student browsing the shelves a few years or even decades in the future will happen upon the book and check it out in order to see what one of his more eccentric coevals may have been thinking and writing. Selections would then not have to compete in the physical marketplace with books written by more mature writers but can helpfully cater to a specific audience comprised of college-age aspiring writers.
All this said, if I were to publish the original version of Logan’s book, To Arcadia, I would do so online and design a website for it, as it seems to best complement the book’s central analogy between the loss of memory and the corrosion of data. To illustrate:
The book begins with the following “digital” preamble:
In - complete
Processing (83%)
Data File
Corrupted
Deleting…
Deleting…
Deleting…
Deleting…
Deleting…
Deleting…
Deleting…
Deleting…
Deleting…
Deleting…
Deleting…
Deleting…
Error...
Infinite repetitions of a
dream
It would be interesting to implement the underlying idea online, as the effect is somewhat unconvincing on paper. That said, I do not myself believe that the analogy permeates with sufficient force and consistency throughout the book in order to justify retaining it in Selections, which I would prefer to be read as a somewhat loose collection of short stories and aphorisms.
