As a continuation of my last post, I’ve been thinking quite a lot about this idea that once a photograph or piece of writing is committed to an online public domain it will remain there indefinitely. It’s so easy to create a site like this that any budding artist, poet, writer, photographer etc can display their creations for the world to see…forever.
In the past a publisher would only continue to reprint books that sell, and an author that wasn’t considered profitable for their literary agent would be quickly discarded and replaced. Now I’m sure that there have been many great works from some incredibly talented people which have drifted into obscurity simply because they lived long before the development of the internet and it’s powerful ability to record, store and recall pretty much anything.
Unfortunately for me, the book that I’ve written (sorry if I mention that a little too often) have never been taken up by any of the publishing houses. So had I lived through the earlier part of the twentieth century and was desperate to see my work in print, not only would I have been required to purchase a minimum print run and store the remaining unsold copies in my little ‘two up, two down’ terrace house, but on my demise some poor relative would be detailed the task of disposing of them, thus rendering my life’s work extinct...permanently.
But fortunately, I am living in this super age of technology, and with the development of ‘Print on Demand’ services and the ease of ‘self publication’ I, and many like minded, hard done by scribble merchants, can be reasonably assured that our brilliant manuscripts will live on for all time…unless of course our great benefactor Amazon needs to free up space on its futuristic country sized servers.
So there it is, we all actually have the potential to live on forever…at least the things we’ve worked hard to create can. And maybe many years after I’ve departed this mortal coil a spirited literary agent will download Penguins & Panamas, laugh themselves silly, and wonder how I slipped through the net all those years ago.
Never before have we all had the ability to get our ten minutes of ‘Andy Warhol’…but I would prefer it to happen within my lifetime so I could at least enjoy it 😀
Jamie Gray Writes 