Print vs. Online

Posted by Guest Writer in WBN News & Events      9 comments

Jan
30

Well, usually I’m writing here from the point of view of an editor of Anomalous Press, but I recently started submitting my own work again after a bit of a break working on a long project. And I found that the first few places that occurred to me to submit my work were print journals. I was surprised at myself–there are a lot of online journals I read regularly, subscribe to, and thoroughly love. But without even really considering it, I sent my work to a wonderful print journal I’ve read for years, and was really thrilled to have it accepted there.

Then I got to thinking. Who was going to read this work? And when? And for how long? Most of my other publications (primarily translation work) are available online, and I include links to them on my blog, email links to friends and family, post links on my Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. I even recently found out that a link to one of my translations was added to the Wikipedia page on the original language book! I’m certainly not deserving of my own Wikipedia page (yet…) but gosh it’s exciting to have my work linked from Wikipedia.

The print journal I’m being published in is respected and known, at least in certain circles. It’s one I read every issue of, and really like. But all of a sudden it felt so…impermanent. Isn’t that strange? Thinking of print as impermanent while the web has some kind of permanence to it. Of course, that’s exactly the reverse of how most people have thought (and still think?) of the mediums. That the web is some kind of ephemeral place where things disappear after a certain period of time. But somewhere among the media educators and media artists that I’ve been reading recently in preparation for a class I’m teaching this summer I came across this kernel of wisdom: The internet never forgets.

This is meant as a warning to all those people in their teens and early twenties who might post pictures of themselves doing really stupid things on Facebook, which of course in five or ten years an employer might stumble across because even if you delete it, someone else might have saved it, re-posted it, Facebook actually owns it, etc. But even outside of the posting-drunk-pictures realm there’s a certain truth to this now. Once a webpage goes up, anyone can copy it, save it, print it, grab a screen-shot of it, or even create an image of it using free citation browser plug-ins like Zotero. Not only that, there are organizations who do just that, Archive.org and their Way-back Machine being the most prominent.

The print journal will get distributed to bookstores and libraries and subscribers, remain on the shelves for a few weeks, a few months, even perhaps forever in a library, bound and collected. But to my mind that is somehow less permanent, because it is less accessible, than material available online. In all my thinking about this, I did discover a fabulous online journal called The Reprint, run from Zine Scene, which only publishes work that’s already been published in print, but is not available online. And they just started accepting poetry submissions.

But readers, what about your work? Do you prefer to find a home for it online, or in print? Or both?

Erica Mena is Founding Editor of Anomalous Press. She writes poetry, and translates, and makes hand-made books, and sometimes wishes she were braver. She moves more often than once a year, but never without her growing collection of mythical animals. She has been called Alluringly Short.