When they realised even Miles Franklin winners can be sent to the pulp pile, authors, librarians and academics began building a digital ark for bereft books
Consider the life cycle of the average book. It begins with acclaim, if the author’s very lucky. Readings and publisher parties. General hobnobbing. Canapés are often involved. There are whispers of a film adaptation starring Eric Bana. Then time passes. The book stops selling and drifts out of print, getting sucked away from the shore and out into the dark, empty ocean of forgotten literature. Copies of it trickle down from bookstores to secondhand bookstores, and from there to op-shops and neighbourhood garage sales, before finally they get pulped or chucked into landfill. In rare cases, it will come to rest on the dusty shelves of antiquarian booksellers, where it will, in all likelihood, live forever as a graveyard for lost flies.
This is the unfortunate fate of most books, even literary prize-winners. In fact, of the 62 books that won Australia’s Miles Franklin Award between 1957 and 2019, 23 are currently not available as ebooks, 40 are not available as audiobooks, and 10 are not available anywhere, in any format whatsoever. They’re officially out of print. This is something that Untapped: The Australian Literary Heritage Project is trying to rectify.
Continue reading...from The Guardian https://ift.tt/3gX7rW7
via
0 Comments