Read the original interview in Italian here
Fabrizio Venerandi is co-founder of the digital publishing house Quintadicopertina in Genoa. In this interview that starts the #ELRPUB series dedicated to digital publishing, Venerandi talks to us about the production, the market and the history of digital publishing, offering us some reflections on themes such as reading, aesthetics and archiving digital works in EPUB format.
ELR: Fabrizio Venerandi, in 2014 you gave an interview to the ELR in which you told us about the “Polistorie” (2010). In 2017 you created another equally innovative work: the “Poesie Elettroniche” (“Electronic Poems”). What is it about?
Fabrizio Venerandi: “Poesie Elettroniche” is an e-book of poems that I wrote and programmed in EPUB3 format. The idea behind this text of electronic literature is that code programming gives rise to new rhetorical tools that flank the traditional ones such as rhyme, hendiadys, similarity, alliteration, etc. Th ese new rhetorical tools are linked to the technology and therefore to the writing of algorithms that “make” things “make” to the verses that it would not be possible to do in the same way on a paper book.
“Poesie Elettroniche” is a first formalization of some of these new tools. I chose a very limited number of reader/text interactions and worked on those to show the expressive possibilities of each. What interested me most of all was to show how these new rhetorical tools were not just wunderkammers made to amaze the reader, but that they had a very specific expressive purpose.
In this case the sylloge collects a series of poems written in a very negative period of my life. I found myself writing things that I didn’t have the strength to reread and that – substantially – I didn’t want anyone to read. But that I still had to write to extract them and throw them out of me, because they were intoxicating me. The code was a natural way for me to do something new: I could write these things without having to read them and without having them read in the nakedness of their verse. The verses in fact, in the e-book, change, they modify over time, they hide in the hours of light, they move around the screen, they are generated only if solicited, they erase and avoid showing themselves in their entirety. The code is functional to my expressive need.
The second important thing for me was to produce this e-book as a commercial object. A market publishing product, offered for sale on the major digital distribution channels, with its own ISBN and its own price. I wanted to show how electronic literature is a natural way of reading a text, traceable within a general store, and distributed to as many readers as possible. To eliminate the idea that electronic literature means only and exclusively online experimentation, perhaps born and intended for a small circle of academics.
ELR: How does the way of reading with an electronic book in EPUB format change?
Fabrizio Venerandi: It depends on the awareness of who created the text and who is reading it. Ninety-nine percent of e-book texts on the market are not digital books, but digitized books. They offer nothing different than the traditional sequential reading of a paper book. Different is the case when the text is thought, programmed, designed to be read in digital format. Already in ePub2 it is possible to create “polyhistories”, afferent to what is called hypertext fiction. But even more in EPUB3 where the text can exploit real code.
ELR: Do you think there is an awareness and a strong will, in your working environment, for the development of new technologies that will facilitate the transition from print publishing to digital publishing?
Fabrizio Venerandi: No. There is a handbrake inserted by different subjects, both national and transnational. These are not technical limits, but purely economic and market limits. Publishers do not invest in native digital texts because it is a product that they could not spend on paper (while the opposite is true); some big players such as Amazon and Apple disempower the possibilities of digital reading with a poor or non-existent support to more advanced formats such as EPUB3, trying instead to close the reader in proprietary ecosystems; the specifications for electronic literature are primitive and incoherent, having in mind a paper book “enriched” with digital elements, instead of a native digital text; DRMs bind and discourage the creation of killer applications for reading. These and other factors are all interlinked and have in fact slowed down what – naively – I thought in 2010 would be the natural progress of digital reading. We will see what happens with DPUB.
ELR: In addition to writing and publishing e-books you also teach digital publishing. Who are the courses addressed to and how are they structured?
Fabrizio Venerandi: Our courses are listed on the site E-book Design School They are aimed at anyone dealing with writing and digital publishing: publishers, professionals, writers, teachers. The courses are structured in thematic modules: market, promotion, digital editing. The part of designing and building e-books is carried out in two workshops that start from the basics of marking to arrive at a complete e-book.
ELR: A short web research on electronic books shows that the history of digital publishing began around the year 1993 when two Italians, Franco Crugnola and his wife Isabella Rigamonti, created the first electronic book and when the poet Zahur Klemath Zapata published ” Murder as One of the Fine Arts” by Thomas de Quincey in DBF (digital book format). When do you think the history of digital books began and what are some of the highlights of the history of digital publishing?
Fabrizio Venerandi: I would move the hour hands back about twenty years. As far as I’m concerned, electronic literature is already such with the birth of the first text adventures, therefore in the mid-seventies for the English language and 1982 for Italy with Enrico Colombini. I note a certain reluctance in academic criticism to consider these works as electronic literature because they were (at least initially) games, they were not editorial works in the strict sense, in the sense that they in no way resemble a book and were in their early years literally very meagre. Instead, the fact that they did not resemble “something editorial or literary” is the sign that they were very advanced software in proposing a fabula that was not read as you read a book but that you approach with an intimately digital plot. Many concepts and structures of text adventures are still much more focused on a new narrative than many “augmented” e-books that instead appear as a simple expansion of the paper book.
ELR: For the preservation of digital works there are various strategies such as migration, duplication, emulation or use of metadata. Which of these strategies can be or are used for e-books?
Fabrizio Venerandi: Using open formats, removing DRM and copying. Closed formats are a risk for the preservation and especially for the continued fruition of their contents. To create a virtualized environment in which to “spin” a certain obsolete content is one thing, another is to think of digital content as something that does not become obsolete at all but is exploited in an ever-changing way as reading technologies evolve. In the moment in which I write the most solid technologies are those of W3C.
ELR: In one of your articles published in Nazione Indiana you described the “Formats for making e-books”: EPUB2, EPUB3, MOBI and KF8. Yet the format that is mainly used still seems to be the pdf. How did the market for static electronic books in pdf format and the market for electronic books enriched with multimedia and interactive features in EPUB format develop?
Fabrizio Venerandi: The pdf is not a format that was created to make e-books, but to make transportable a layout aimed at printing. Over the years it has developed, it has absorbed numerous accessibility functions, but I still think that liquid formats, tied by double thread with online reading tools, have greater possibilities of development in the medium to long term. Already today, reading fiction with small screens works considerably better in ePub or KF8 than in pdf. But for me it’s not a war of religion: many of our hypertext e-books are also published in pdf format. What’s important is that the publisher has in his hand, upstream, a development workflow that sees the pdf as one of the possible releases of its content, not the only one. With regard to the ePub with interactive features, as I said above, have so far had a marginal development. When I show the things that Quintadicopertina has developed in these seven years, from “Locusta Temporis” to “Poesie Elettroniche”, I still see amazement and interest in these things, a sign that something has not worked. The customs clearance of the native digital literary product has not yet been there.
ELR: Which of these formats (fixed layout and reflowable layout) is used for Quintadicopertina’s digital books and for what reasons?
Fabrizio Venerandi: To date we have always used the reflowable format. In such a small market, it’s a risk to be bound to a single reading dimension. But – again – it’s not a war of religion. There may be projects and tablet-oriented series, in which even the fixed layout could make sense.
ELR: What do you think are the most important aesthetic factors for the layout of an e-book?
Fabrizio Venerandi: We have to rethink the aesthetics of the page, because we don’t have a page, but at the same time we have contents inserted in a “page space” that can hybridize depending on who is reading that text and how he or she is doing it. In the most sophisticated texts, we can have content that changes adapting to the choices of the reader, so things that may or may not appear within the page itself. Certain elements that we cannot use today, such as footnotes, need to be completely rethought. Also, the graphic elements inserted in the text assume a great importance, because they become anchors of memorization of the contents, having disappeared the “sheet vision”, especially if these elements are no longer accessories of the text, but integrated and interacting with the contents themselves. It is a type of designing that is different from both that of the web page and that of the book, even though it has elements that are common to both. I wouldn’t even talk about ‘layout’, but about ‘instruction’. I don’t lay out content, but I teach it on what it is and how it should behave when it comes to relate to its neighbors.
ELR: How important is it to know the programming languages to create e-books in EPUB format? What advice would you give to those who want to start learning to program?
Fabrizio Venerandi: In the medium term I think it’s a point of no return. If you’re building digital content, that is texts, sounds, marked, coded, programmed, ‘instructed’ animations and images, knowing marking, CSS, programming and what’s under the hood allows you to have the whole production system in your hands. Quite trivially: there are things you simply wouldn’t want to do if you didn’t know the code you can use. Ideas that wouldn’t emerge in your head. And also the opposite is true: you would avoid dispersing resources in abnormal digital made in nonconformist projects that don’t make sense. As for which programming languages to learn I think at this moment it’s useful to know what XML and HTML5 are, style management with CSS, programming languages to query data like XQuery, practical tools like RegEx and obviously Javascript.