Electric Digital Magazine helps usher in new literary revolution

Ebooks are only a part of the digital revolution we are seeing in the world. Everything is becoming digitized; from literature to music and video. Computers are the new entertainment centers. Access to vast amounts of information is now at our fingertips and it’s only going to increase over time.

There’s one new literary magazine start-up that is helping take literature into the future. The quarterly publication is called Electric Literature Magazine. They are using more than just ebooks to help sell literature to a wider and more diverse audience.

What makes Electric Literature Magazine so unique? It’s not just the ebooks, which they make available on every platform possible, like the Kindle and the iPhone. According to this New York Times article, the magazine goes far beyond selling ebooks:

…they allow readers to enjoy the magazine any way they like: on paper, Kindle, e-book, iPhone and, starting next month, as an audiobook. YouTube videos feature collaborations among their writers and visual artists and musicians. Starting next month, Rick Moody will tweet a story over three days.

The article goes on to explain that this kind of new marketing has created quite the online buzz. This buzz has given the magazine a lot of exposure, and not just on the blogosphere:

With a debut issue in June and an autumn issue out last week, each consisting of five stories, the magazine has racked up complimentary reviews everywhere from The Washington Post to a blogger on Destructive Anachronism, who wrote, “High quality content + innovative marketing + multimedia could just equal the new model for literature, post-print.”

‘Post-print’ is a good term, and one we will likely hear more and more in the coming years.

A new age for short fiction

Electric Literature Magazine publishes short fiction (one of my favorite literary forms). It wasn’t that long ago when everyone wrote the short story off as a dead form. Magazines were only paying pennies on the dollar for a short story. And forget about getting a collection of stories printed by a large publishing house. In other words, the short story had been laid to rest in the grave and the literary world was throwing dirt on its casket.

Not anymore. I, along with a lot of others, have claimed that short fiction is making a renaissance because of the ebook. Short fiction is more accessible than ever before and authors are self-publishing their own works on websites like Smashwords, thus reaping more profits.

For example, I’m downloading short fiction onto my Sony Reader Pocket Edition from sites like Smashwords. The experience is great. I get a chance to read a diverse range of authors who write a very diverse range of fiction while not paying for an expensive print publication or anthology of short fiction. And more importantly, I’m still supporting these authors by paying the prices they set for their work.

Electric Literature Magazine – making literature exciting again

I’ve always found that literature is exciting. That’s just me. But in an era of incredibly short attention spans due to television, video games, and yes even the internet, it is hard to get people to sit down and enjoy a work of fiction with all these other distractions. By relying on multiple forms of media like YouTube videos, the Electric Literature Magazine is taking the ‘homework’ feel out of reading:

One thing Electric Literature seems good at is getting people to read serious literature, making it less like homework. As Sara Nelson, the books director of O, the Oprah Magazine, and former editor in chief of Publishers Weekly, said, “Anything that takes the starch out — go for it.”

Some might say this is somehow cheapening literature. I tend to think like Sara Nelson from the above quote, anything that gets people reading and away from the television is a great thing.

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