My publisher may be switching to an electronic review of copy-edited manuscripts, and goddamn, am I excited. Currently we do things the old-fashioned way: They mail me a pile of steaming paper with handwritten edits and I stet away with my blue pencil until my wrist aches (bastards dare to edit my glorious prose). Now there’s a possibility that in the future I will get a nice tidy file in my email, and it’s about time. And not only because I can search-and-replace my name in place of the main character.
I love books, the printed, bound wonders that they are. I hate piles of paper, however. I have filing cabinets filled with my old manuscripts, tomes written back in the days before I caved in to word processing, and now I wish I’d caved a long time ago, as those brittle pieces of paper are either going to burn up in a blaze someday or simply bury me in paper, leaving me to tap out desperate sandwich orders on my Twitter account. Someday I intend to spend about 5 years scanning everything down to nifty PDF files, probably just in time for PDF to stop being a universal format and leaving them as useful as my old Commodore 64 Kwik Writer files (which I still have, for reasons I can’t articulate, on ancient 5.25″ floppies).
Forget eBooks and Kindles – this is what technology is going to change. The way we produce and work, not necessarily how we experience completed work. I remain unconvinced that anyone’s going to want to ditch printed books entirely – at least not in significant numbers – but I personally will ditch printed page proofs in a second. Faster, even. Eventually, I want my proofs and copyediting beamed directly into my brain. And then I want that Stephen King Typewriter of the Gods.
Ah, I hear you, so to speak. As a freelance editor/proofreader I encounter publishers that like to work both ways, and I’m constantly shifting back and forth. As time moves along I’m getting more comfortable with online editing where I used to feel more comfortable with pen[cil] in hand.
Just make sure you put that typewriter to better use than King did. The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon fucking sucked.
Dude, get an intern. I am sure you can get some sucker, um, I mean college student, to come and suckle at the teet of your wisdom, and scan in tons of paper.
In the meantime, how about something like this:
http://www.amazon.com/ScanJet-Flatbed-Document-L1940A-B1H/dp/B0007O983O
many scanners now come with auto feeders meaning not only that you don’t need pants, but you can be fairly drunk while you do it…
Damaso,
Excellent suggestions, except I have an uncanny habit of breaking both interns (several buried in the flower boxes on the deck) and printer-scanners. We’re talking a LOT of paper to scan.
As for being fairly drunk, I’m well-practiced in doing a lot of things that require coordination while drunk. Like writing blog posts and responding to comments. I got skilz.
DK,
Didn’t read that one. Always thought it was a bold but failed move to include a real-life sports star like that. In 10 more years, who’s going to remember Flash?
J
Jay,
I’m down with the electronic editing. I’ve done quite a bit of it, and it’s soooo much better than piles of paper sitting around rotting.
J
“I stet away with my blue pencil until my wrist aches.” Hilarious.
I edited my high school son’s report last week and scratched something by accident. He’s plugging away at the keyboard, sticking periods in the middle of fifty run-on sentences, and all of a sudden hollers: “What is a ‘stet’?”
Ah, how I long for the days of innocence before I took my first editing job and learned what a stet was. And also too all those damn proofreader marks. I have nightmares about those marks.