It's just a lot easier to say "chapbook" than all of that. So, it would be of interest to prose poets who would like to have a sampling of their prose poems presented to readers. It ain't exactly a book, but this author's work is really good and so here's a batch of it and the author doesn't have to share the spotlight with anybody else." The answer to your question about the "point" of a digital chapbook, in the case of White Knuckle Press ("press," of course is a print publishing term), is that Right Hand Pointing and Left Hand Waving have earned us a small following, who we can contact via our email list (600-plus members) and we can present to those folks small collections of prose poems. But I honestly use the term because I can't think of another efficient way to say "here we present a small collection of the works of one author. Obviously, the term digital chapbook, or electronic chapbook, or online chapbook is a carryover from the print publishing world. I should do a survey.Īnyway, maybe it wouldn't hurt if I actually answered your question. I have no idea exactly how people read RHP, but the feedback I get sort of suggests people read the issues as issues. Lately, I've taken a kind of hybrid approach-I still encourage a front-to-back reading, but I've been supplying links to author's pages in a sidebar. It ends with contributor's bios at the "back." And so on. I give each issue a title, which I think is actually pretty unusual. I pay attention to the sequencing of the work. I put out RHP in "issues," as do a lot of "publishers." There's a cover, an introduction. Like print magazines, I've always intended for it to be read from "front to back." It's one of the reasons I try to keep it short.a lot of people simply don't like to read long blocks of text on a web browser. Right Hand Pointing is more of a compromise. You look at the table of contents page, click on any entry, and your read that and then you have to hit the back button of your browser and go back to the table of contents. That said, some of the very best online journals i really admire, like elimae, for example, use that. I'll click on that one and read it and then ignore the authors I don't know. most often, if I know the name of one of the poets. I'm not crazy about that approach either. Other sites put out "issues" but when you go, you see a list of the contributors and you click on individual ones to see the poems.
I can understand why: It's super-easy and convenient. Some look like blogs and use blogging software. On the other end are literary websites that abandon most of the conventions of the print world. It's an electronic version of something that's supposed to be experienced as if it's physically real. It's like saying, "look, we're almost real! The only thing missing is paper." I guess you could call that the "virtual magazine" approach. It is sort of cool, but I wonder what the point is, really. So, on one extreme we have these formats that some use that literally look like books or magazines in the browser. Something that interests me in this whole business of literary websites is the extent to which they either emulate print publishing as opposed to presenting content in a way more typical of the web.