A few years back I speculated what a book published online – rather than just marketed and distributed via the web – might look like. Apart from its more fluid, less canonical nature, it struck me that the web offers a way to serialise novels by publishing them in an RSS feed to a schedule, which is what the very cool lettrss does. Appropriately enough, its current book is A Christmas Carol.
The Victorians were great serialisers, not least because serialisation meant an author could earn more money than by just publishing a single novel. Readers also loved serials – long Victorian novels are made more digestible when they’re split into 50 bit…
A few years back I speculated what a book published online – rather than just marketed and distributed via the web – might look like. Apart from its more fluid, less canonical nature, it struck me that the web offers a way to serialise novels by publishing them in an RSS feed to a schedule, which is what the very cool lettrss does. Appropriately enough, its current book is A Christmas Carol.
The Victorians were great serialisers, not least because serialisation meant an author could earn more money than by just publishing a single novel. Readers also loved serials – long Victorian novels are made more digestible when they’re split into 50 bite-size snacks, and a story with cliffhangers and well-structured, complete-in-themselves episodes, is something for a subscriber to look forward to.
Magazines such as The Strand would publish novel episodes or short stories from collections such as The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes periodically. Publishing to a schedule – and in response to commercial needs – influenced the form of the novel as each episode had to provide entertainment on its own. This form probably reaches its apogee in Bleak House: I can’t think of many finer single episodes in literature than spoiler alert the account of Tulkinghorn’s murder. Of course, we won’t find out who committed the murder until a later episode.
RSS is a great publication medium because it can replicate the features of serialisation. In the same way we might have bought a copy of The Strand every week, we can anticipate a new entry in our feed. And once it lands there, we can control its appearance and even choose the device we read it on.
Of course, this only really works with novels and short stories that were written by now-dead authors – you can’t paywall or DRM RSS. The only cost is hosting static files and the labour involved in converting books to atom or RSS, which is trivial if you have the HTML to hand and can work with a static site generator.
But it would be interesting to see a yet unpublished work serialised in RSS. Perhaps it could work with a pay-what-you-want model, or, better still, perhaps we can envisage some sort of membership of a magazine-style collective publisher, giving you access to lots of new works.