Rosalind Porter talks to Margaret Atwood

On a hot day in June, I went to Margaret Atwood's Toronto home to ask her some questions about how the digital revolution that is currently shaking up the publishing industry feels from a writer's perspective. Her interest in technology and the ways in which it shapes civil society has featured in many of her novels, not least The Handmaid's Tale and, most recently, The Year of the Flood; she's an avid blogger and Tweeter, and she's the inventor of the LongPen. As well as being technologically literate, she earned a reputation as something of a psychic in 2008 after the publication of Payback, a book about debt culture that rather presciently appeared to predict the ensuing economic downturn. As publishers, editors and writers continue to brace themselves for the great unknown, I welcomed her characteristically lucid and far-sighted thoughts on a subject ridden with hyperbole.

RP: In a recent interview for the iPhone app of The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, Philip Pullman likened being a writer, at this moment of technological uncertainty, to being strapped to the front of a speeding train with no driver. Does that metaphor ring true for you?

MA: A similar thing happened with the invention of the printing press, and also with the invention of the paperback. With the invention of the printing press, everybody thought it was the end of the world because the masses were going to get literate, which they then did. They started reading the Bible and breaking off from the Roman Catholic Church, and there were a lot of religious wars. Then came the eighteenth century, which was an age when literacy was spreading very quickly indeed and novel reading took off. There was actually a novel-reading mania! Every time there is a new medium, people get hypnotised by it. You remember what happened with radio, which fuelled the rise of a certain kind of dictator. And then what happened with the television, when people really did sit mesmerised in front of their television sets with TV dinners on their TV tables, eating as they watched. Every time there is a new thing like this it 1) rivets people and 2) upsets people who think it's the end of the world. It isn't ever quite the end of the world. It's certainly a change in the world, which then somehow adapts.

RP: I still think history will settle on the invention of the paperback as the most revolutionary moment of modern book publishing - these cheap and rather light editions that traded in slightly austere, and perhaps intimidating, jackets for sexier, more commercially viable ones.

MA: Well, they weren't sexy to begin with. They had the standard Penguin cover, which was red and white or blue and white striped, and then the mass market kind of sleazy paperback came out, which would have William Faulkner with a blonde in a red negligee in your corner drugstore. What that actually did was disseminate literature into places where people weren't expecting literature, and probably a lot of people read literature who otherwise wouldn't have done so because what they thought they were getting was a hardboiled detective story.

RP: On your blog, you've listed three arguments in favour of paper books. Firstly, solar storms, which can fry transformers and wipe out online libraries and downloads. Secondly, the very real possibility of energy shortages which, if we do run out, will shut down the Internet, not to mention one's ability to recharge one's e-reader. And thirdly, the possibility of an overloaded Internet. These are all practical, rather than sentimental, reasons for continuing to publish print books, which I found very refreshing. I feel we need to move the debate away from emotive discussions about how you can't read an ebook in the bath or feel the weight of the paper in your hand, and take a closer look at how, if at all, ebooks will change the way people write and the way people read.

MA: What seems to come out of people posting comments on my blog is that they want both. They want to have paper books for things they want to keep, to read at home, to read in bed, to read in the bathtub - all those comfy things that people do. And books have a rather decorative function too and most people want to have them on their bookshelves. But for books you want to read only once - for books you are in the process of reading but don't want to cart around with you - electronic books can be very useful.

RP: Do you feel that what you do is devalued by the medium of electronic text? That something of your craft might be lost without the experience of reading it on a pristine page?

MA: Well, we don't know that yet because we don't know whether the reading experience from a neurological point of view is different for people who read only in e-form. And yes, there is the thrill of looking at a pristine page, but only because we're used to it. The question is, will the thrill be the same as opening the cover of a pristine ebook that you've never seen before? I think the operative word is 'pristine' rather than 'page', and I would think that the ability to follow - to translate text (which is what reading is), to translate the black marks, mainly print, into words - is going to be much the same, whether you're reading it from the piece of paper, from a scroll, or from an ebook.

RP: What are your thoughts about enhanced ebooks? Ebooks which include the integrated mediums of videos and sound to accompany the text?

MA: Very distracting, though there have been illustrated books for ever. Many medieval Bibles were illustrated and often very copiously, so is it a distraction? Is it an enhancement?

RP: Perhaps we simply need to categorise enhanced ebooks in the way that we categorise audio books or film adaptations of books. Something based on, but something separate from, the book itself.

MA: Enhancements also dictate how you are seeing, how you are viewing, how you are interacting with somebody else's version of Mr Darcy rather than your version. So your brain becomes less active. But mostly I think they are essentially for people who don't like reading or who don't like reading as such. They are quite interested in having the plot, but they don't like the sensuous experience of verbal texture. How about that as a phrase! They don't like the words. Like Joseph II saying to Mozart, about The Marriage of Figaro, 'Too many notes!' In High School, we used to have to take apart a Shakespeare sonnet and write about what the sonnet meant in twenty-five words, so you'd think about it and write your little thing which would then come out as, 'Love is great, war is hell, life is shit,' and you'd think...

RP: Why didn't he just say that then?

MA: Why didn't he just say it!

RP: As an editor, I am constantly being told that I need to 'engage' with the digital revolution.

MA: Why? In what way?

RP: Well, firstly, editors are now expected to understand it and embrace it.

MA: 1) Nobody understands it and 2) nobody has fully embraced it. 3) Think about it - you maybe need to do that - but other people will think about it for you.

RP: One would hope. I see my job as making sure that the best books are published and that the words on the page are all in the best place they can possibly be in...

MA: That is what your job as an editor is.

RP: ...and that once those words are in the right place, it is the responsibility of the sales, marketing and publicity departments to get those words to the greatest number of readers through whatever publishing platforms are available. But as sales and marketing departments dictate, more and more, what sorts of books are published, so too are editors expected to participate more actively in the publishing of their own books. As a writer, how important do you feel it is to engage with the digital revolution?

MA: I don't think it's important. If I do it, it's because of my insatiable curiosity. But people are trying to pile stuff onto authors, like you have to have a blog, you have to have this, you have to have that. Various party tricks. You actually don't. I would say that having done it, the blogging and Tweeting and so forth reaches possibly a different kind of reader than the kind you may have been used to hearing from. But an author's job is to concentrate on the writing, and once the writing is finished what you essentially do is throw it into a bottle and heave it into the sea, and that's the same for any method of dissemination. There's still a voyage between the text and the unknown reader; the book will still arrive at the door of some readers who don't understand it - who don't like it. It will still find some readers who hopefully do, and the process is still a scattergun approach.

RP: How do you feel about these large companies - Apple, Google, Sony, Amazon - aggressively entering the publishing fray?

MA: Good luck to them. A lot of businessfolk have thought before now that they know how to publish. Many have come to grief, because books are not like beer. You can't sell them in bulk, as it were. Each book is unique.

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RP: These are huge corporations whose area of expertise is technology and who not only have never competed with one another for the same product before, but have no experience selling, making, or publishing books; no interest in literature...

MA: I would beg to differ on that. Amazon actually has a number of dedicated people who are very interested in literature. I don't know about the others, but I know that the Kobo people are dedicated to reading [Kobo is a global ebook retailer backed by, among others, Borders and Indigo, Canada's largest bookshop]. I'm about to give a speech called 'The Future of Reading' and what everybody thinks it's going to be about, I'm sure, is just what we've been discussing: what about ebooks, and that kind of thing. I would rather talk about whether anybody is going to be literate or not, which seems to me much more to the point, and who is going to be literate and how are they going to become literate and how does literacy actually change the brain. Now that's interesting. Whether it's in an ebook, and who is in control of the market - will that matter as much? It's also true that if you create these giants, sooner or later they get top heavy and they topple, and that creates space in the clearing and something else comes along, which is why the middle-range publishing companies are doing quite well. They haven't accumulated a great big bunch of real estate that they have to finance and they don't have an enormous bunch of infrastructure and other expenses that they have to cover, so they can actually concentrate on books.

RP: Do you think that publishers have enough of the author's interest in mind when they consider the digital future?

MA: No. I mean they do sort of, in the way they always, sort of, do. But their main goal, of course, is staying afloat.

RP: At whatever cost?

MA: Well, I think their reasoning would be if there's no rowboat, the authors won't have a method of transportation. But publishers seem always to have a moment of not quite understanding that the whole enterprise is based on authors, though they might very well say, 'Well, we've got enough authors. We can just keep publishing people's backlists! We don't need any new ones!'

RP: So you don't feel that publishing's marginalisation of writers looks any different with the digital future on the horizon...

MA: No.

RP: ...than it has done in the past, with the advent of other, new publishing platforms...

MA: No.

RP: ...like really cheap paperbacks...

MA: No.

RP: ...with highly commercial jackets that often have nothing to do with what's going on in the book...

MA: No! No!

RP: ...or when publishers withdrew from the Net Book Agreement...

MA: No. We formed The Writers' Union in Canada because the publishers were telling authors that everybody else only got five cents for world rights, so they should too - only it wasn't true. The publishers are always, of course, thinking about their margins. They have to. Otherwise they're not going to stay in business, and that's not to fault them in any way. They aren't granting agencies or charities, and it's not their job to make sure that every author is nicely supported in their old age.

RP: It will be interesting to see, though, whether they'll put certain pressures on writers in response to whatever is coming for us down the digital pipeline.

MA: Some will and some will not, and if they are putting too much pressure on you as an author, you either knuckle under and make it so that Napoleon has five kids and marries Josephine and wins the Battle of Waterloo, or whatever other garbage they want you to put in, or else you go to somebody who likes your book. That's number one. If your publisher doesn't like your book, you shouldn't be with that publisher!

RP: No matter how many bells and whistles...

MA: No matter how many bells and whistles. If they don't like your book, then you need somebody who does like your book. If it's a game in which the author will do anything to be published and the publisher will do anything to sell, then we might as well just all give up. Because then all you can claim to be is a thermometer of some idea of public taste, which will probably turn out to be wrong.