Why I Publish EBooks

by Richard Kostelanetz (September 2012)

As my writing has been profoundly radical, not only in content but in styles, while I lacked any position affording me power to intimidate editors, my manuscripts had from the beginning encountered all kinds of obstacles before appearing in print. Some books were done by commercial publishers, others by presses connected to universities, yet others by small presses and micropresses. (I can go on at length about the differences among them.) More than one appeared from publishers other than those originally commissioning them. A few were necessarily self-published, never with apology or regret. Nonetheless, no matter how they appeared first, only shelves of bound books emblazoned with my name authenticated my writing career.

With a book of my otherwise uncollected literary essays from 1985 to 2012, I was able to produce two editions almost similar in contents but with a radically different ordering sequence, one of them proposed by the intern Elizabeth Bonapfel who edited the book. Whereas her sequence is titled Person of Letters (in the Contemporary World), my sequence is Son of Letters. While two simultaneous editions of the same text would be expensive in print, on the Internet they cost me only additional time in moving chapters around.

One advantage of Internet publishing is that new editions can be made quite easily, wth some effort but no expense. Just as Book-Art has become abridged, so others have been enlarged and revised.

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