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E-Lit Support Group Formed
Calvin Reid -- 8/7/00
ELO.org will study business models and
encourage digital literary forms
 | All the e-news: ELO.org offers chats,
e-pub links and upcoming e-vents. |
Print publishing has long had organizations such as the Book Industry Study Group, the National Book Foundation and PEN to provide support and industry analysis. Now e-publishers and new media professionals can look to the Electronic Literature Organization, a year-old nonprofit founded to do much the same for literature designed for electronic media.
Scott Rettberg, executive director of the Electronic Literature Organization (www.eliterature.org), told PW the organization grew out of a conference held at Brown University in early 1999, where he met with Jeff Ballowe, president of the consumer information Web site Deja.com and now a member of the ELO's board of directors. They agreed the fledgling e-publishing industry needed an organization to encourage writers and technologists to work together. With the help of Ballowe and such corporate sponsors as ZD-Net, NBC Internet and Jupiter Communications, Rettberg was able to raise initial funding to launch ELO.
ELO will "work to get more writers to experiment in electronic media," and to encourage people to read it, Rettberg explained. Rettberg himself is the coauthor of The Unknown, a prize-winning hypertext novel (hypertext novels are read online and use hyperlinks to produce a multiplicity of narrative threads and characters). Rettberg's hypertext novel shared first prize in the 1998 trAce/AltX International Hypertext Competition. Rettberg said he would describe ELO as a cross between "a think tank and the Academy of American P ts,", rather than a formal trade organization.
With the help of Ballowe, author and professor Robert Coover and others, Rettberg has organized three boards to oversee ELO's e-publishing programs. There is a traditional board of directors (primarily academics), an Internet advisory board (the CEOs of NBCi, About.com and ZD-Net, among others) and an international board of literary advisors (including authors George Plimpton and T.C. Boyle and publishers Morgan Entrekin and Barney Rosset).
Presently, the ELO Web site offers e-publishing news; technical information on hardware and software; regular online chats with e-publishing experts offered in collaboration with LinguaMOO, the academic virtual community; and links to resources on interactive p try, fiction and nonfiction.
ELO is organizing an annual symposium on digital media called "The Future of Publishing," to be held in New York City in the spring of 2001. "The symposium will focus on new publishing models, new electronic ventures and new digital works," Rettberg said. "We want to discuss what will sustain publishers and help spur a new kind of literary work."
"Some people might say that electronic literature is a contradiction in terms," said Rettberg. "Stephen King's efforts have helped, but most people still don't get it. That's why we're going to be holding events in the real world to demonstrate what this medium offers." (See E-Shorts, "Stephen King Happy About 'The Plant'")
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