The reasons have to do with market dynamics — costs faced by publishers and bookstores. In the Victorian era, novels could get tremendously long because they were published serially: writers could go on week after week providing chapter-length installments indefinitely, until either they or their readers threatened to get bored.

And remember those fat mass-market paperbacks in grocery stores in the 80s and 90s? Publishers had been forced to raise the prices on paperbacks owing to inflation, and distributors “pushed back,” according to Stross, demanding fatter novels for the higher price. (Production costs weren’t much higher.) Hence all those 4×6″ doorstops by Stephen King. Stross concludes with the hope that ebooks, if widely adopted commercially, will separate considerations of form from production considerations for the first time in history. Which is a thought we’ve heard before, but it’s an interesting piece all the same.

A couple weeks ago, the New York Review of Books ran a lengthy, somewhat rambling piece about the future of publishing by Jason Epstein, which is nevertheless worthwhile spending time with.

In the essay he makes a few remarks about about each aspect of publishing that is changing today, but refreshingly, he refuses to speculate too far into the future, limiting his predictions to only the few steps ahead that can really be foreseen, and where he has concerns, he voices them without immediately proclaiming that this problem will lead directly to the end of civilization. It’s a worthwhile read for anybody interested in the future of publishing.

Back in 2007, Justin Taylor wrote about the book in the Believer, and in 2009 he wrote a follow-up article about reader response to it over at HTMLGIANT. You may want to save these links for the weekend; it’s worth spending half a day or more with this amazing book and the stuff Justin has written about it.

But wait, what are Microscripts?

As described by the New Directions blog (scroll down the page a bit):

Robert Walser wrote many of his manuscripts in a highly enigmatic, shrunken-down form. These narrow strips of paper (many of them written during his hospitalization in the Waldau sanatorium) covered with tiny ant-like markings only a millimeter or two high, came to light only after the author’s death in 1956.

Even further down the page, Bernofsky elaborates: Although the writing was, at first, considered a secret code, “in fact they were written in a now-antiquated form of German handwriting shrunken down to a height of between one and two millimeters. What’s more, Walser wrote them in pencil, and his pencil was not always sharp.” Only about half a dozen people in the entire world can actually read them, Bernofsky says, and it took two scholars twelve years to transcribe the six volumes:

In the late ’80s I watched them at work, peering through tiny magnifying lenses and discussing each word at length. These published transcriptions are what I based the translations on. I think of Walser’s miniature writing as a sort of shorthand he developed for his rough drafts, and he wrote like this for many years. There’s been a lot of speculation about why and when he developed this technique.

But nobody really knows, because Walser never talked or wrote about it, and in fact he claimed to have stopped writing after 1933.

The Center for the Art of Translation is presenting a “Lit and Lunch” lecture by Bernofsky on Tuesday, February 9th at noon at the 111 Minna Gallery in San Francisco; and on the following day, Bernofsky will be lecturing and presenting a talk on Walser’s microscripts at Stanford. See the interview for details.

Of course, nonfiction cartooning, such as Joe Sacco practices, is exactly like reporting — except you have to draw pictures, so that practice should be even more difficult.

Anyway, at Seth’s essay, don’t miss the little included strip, Down the Stairs. And here’s an illuminating Q&A with Seth from the same magazine.

Doctorow begins by describing the threat of a group of copyright pirates who “dress up their thievery in high-minded rhetoric about how they are the true defenders and inheritors of creativity,” and that “what they really see is a future in which the electronic culture market grows by leaps and bounds and they get to be at the centre of it.”

Of course, the pirates he is talking about are those who would be sure that “when you buy an ebook or an audiobook that’s delivered digitally, you are demoted from an owner to a licensor. From a reader to a mere user. These thieves deliver our digital books and our audiobooks wrapped in license agreements and technologies that might as well be designed to destroy the emotional connection that readers have with their books.” Because, as he argues a little bit later, “the most important part of the experience of a book is knowing that it can be owned. That it can be inherited by your children, that it can come from your parents. That libraries can archive it, they can lend it, that patrons can borrow it.”

He concludes the first half of his speech with these lines: “Anyone who claims that readers can’t and won’t and shouldn’t own their books are bent on the destruction of the book, the destruction of publishing, and the destruction of authorship itself. We must stop them from being allowed to do it. The library of tomorrow should be better than the library of today. The ability to loan our books to more than one person at once is a feature, not a bug. We all know this. It’s time we stop pretending that the pirates of copyright are right.”

The first part of the speech can be read here, and here is the link to the second part.

Ahmad Saidullah reviews The Salt Smugglers, by Gerard de Nerval, in the current issue of the Quarterly Conversation.

In the wake of the failed 1848 revolution, “laws were enacted to curb populist fiction in newspapers, such as Dumas’ ephemera and Eugene Sue’s serial novels, that the authorities believed had stoked the masses into action.” This book was Nerval’s immediate reaction to the politics of the day, and he called it “not a novel,” but “a history,” in the form of letters addressed to the editor of the newspaper that published it.

The book, Saidullah writes, “embodies Bakhtin’s idea of the polyphonic or dialogic novel where narrative authority is undermined. In this playful, pre-postmodern work, the frame dominates the story.”

“I was sitting in the rafters next to a father and son for the morning set of fights going on during the Cuban National Boxing Championships held at Kid Chocolate gymnasium in Old Havana. My high school gym might’ve cost more to build, but with hundreds of millions of dollars you couldn’t recreate what this place looks like.

“The murals and chipped paint and scoreboards and rafters and ceiling takes your breath away — yet it’s the faces in the crowd that steal the show. The tickets don’t cost anything for Cubans. Everyone can come. There’s no advertising anywhere. Even though there are Olympic champions in the ring periodically who could cash in to the tune of millions, most don’t. Nobody here is making a dime off world class ability.”

Brin Friesen writes about Cuba, and boxing in Cuba, in an excerpt from his ongoing memoir/novel The Domino Diaries, over at the Nervous Breakdown.