How to Read Womans World: Some Thoughts Not My Own
I moved to write this entry not by my desire to hustle this book—though readers know that hustling books (baby on knee) is what gets me up in the morning and keeps me up at night—but this magnificent piece written about it by the brain trust at the Institute for the Future of the Book. That's also the reason why I have this in my The Future is Now category. First off, a little bit of the piece, then some general thoughts about p-books and e-books, and then some other folks ways-of-looking-at-Womans-World.
Just as Barthes finds structures by which to decipher what the reader experiences in "Sarrasine", there can be found structures to decipher what the reader experiences when reading Woman's World. At one level, there is the story – a sequence of words that could be put into a .TXT file and be exactly the same. At another level, there's the presentation. This is something that's hard to precisely pin down, but it's best explained by pointing out the difference between reading a plain text version of Rawle's story and the collaged version of the same. Try looking at Rawle's p. 307 and my neutral typesetting of it...
So, one thing I've noticed when I make my gauntlet-down-throwing at various panel discussions about how critical it is for independent publishers to be publishing electronically is that my corollary to that—the need to create print books whose objectness is far more unique than the generic widgets that populate most bookstores—gets ignored. Something like Woman's World is not currently possible electronically, not in any dynamic sense. It suggests a rich future, in fact, for p-books, provided that we cut down trees to fashion them into something more transporting and sui generis than the 10's of 1000's of broadly identical objects currently produced.
But I wouldn't be properly respecting Rawle's Womans World if I left it just at that—herewith Jezebel's post on the topic with, critically, all the comments—most though not all, are speculative, but starting points for conversation, nevertheless. And here is Bethanne Patrick's blog entry on Publishers Weekly, itself in a dialog with the book, with Jezebel, with PW's own review...