Crossing the "Digital Divide"-Online Publishing Flirts with Tradition

Ah-tai later came up with a method of escape.

In the future, whenever either of us arranged to meet alone somewhere with a girl that we had met online, we would always take a beeper.

We would work as a team, having the other call us on the beeper after a little while.

If the girl was a total dog, we'd call back and scream, "Huh? The dorm is on fire?!"

If she was just your average ugly, we'd call back and say, "Huh? Somebody broke into the room?!"

Ah-tai's room caught fire four times and got hit by thieves another six.

I was luckier, I only got hit by thieves five times.

So I had already worked my heart muscle into good shape by the time I arranged to meet with "Whirling Dancer."

Even when a girl turned out to be ugly, my heart kept right going at a steady 72 beats per minute.

Ah-tai said that "Whirling Dancer" would be either a long-haired girl or somebody dreaming about romance,because when a girl gets to whirling on the dance floor, she whirls two things: her hair and her skirt.

It's pretty to see long hair whirling around, of course, but if her nickname was referring to a whirling skirt, then she was getting very suggestive.

This is an excerpt from Tsai Chih-heng's Internet novel The First Intimate Contact, the story of two students going by the Internet handles of "Slicker Tsai" and "Whirling Dancer" who meet online and end up involved in a tragic romance. The literary style is straightforward and very readable, and the writing is peppered with Internet-style humor. The story, published in installments from March through May of 1998 on a BBS discussion board frequented by youth, was such a runaway success that it even forced the traditional publishing industry to sit up and take notice. Cite Publishing released the novel in book format in September of that same year, and began distributing it in mainland China in 1999. So far the book has sold 240,000 copies in Taiwan. In the PRC it has sold 360,000 hard copies, and another 50,000 have been distributed via various book clubs. Since publishers usually assume that pirated sales in mainland China outnumber legitimate sales by a ratio of 5:1, it would seem reasonable to put total sales of The First Intimate Contact at nearly 3 million copies so far. Some have called it a publishing miracle.

The First Intimate Contact was made into a movie last year, with the leading roles played by young idols Jordan Chan, Fanny Hsu, and Chang Chen. Although the movie didn't make as big a splash as the novel, it nevertheless created a stir within filmmaking circles, since it was the first Chinese movie to be adapted from an Internet novel.

Sunny Doll has followed a trajectory very similar to that of The First Intimate Contact.

It is the story of an innocent high school girl and her secret admiration for a classmate, and is very reminiscent of the comics read by young Japanese girls. The novel was originally published in installments on a BBS forum in February 1998 and zoomed to immediate popularity. Even before the story was finished, a film director had contacted the author, Chi Chi, with an offer to make it into a movie. Both Sunny Doll and another novel by Chi Chi, Can't Be Bothered to Say I Love You, were published in printed format last year. They sold over 20,000 copies in Taiwan. In just a few months, the author had gone from unknown high school girl to celebrated online author. Her meteoric rise seemed to capture the essence of the Internet-speed!

Traditional publishers switch gears

Online authors, backed by their immense popularity on the Internet, swept to incredible success on their very first foray into print publishing. According to Chan Hung-chih, of Cite Publishing, online publishing has overturned the established order of the publishing world. In the past, authors were "discovered" by editors at publishing companies, but with online publishing it is readers who decide what makes for good reading, while the slow-moving publishing industry moves in afterwards to offer its stamp of approval. Says Chan, "Publishing companies have moved from the 'manufacturing sector' into the 'service sector.'"

The popularity of Internet literature has sparked a rush among publishers to snoop out the up-and-coming stars of tomorrow, and they've begun publishing large quantities of literature that appeared first online. Over ten works of Internet literature are now being published every month in printed form in Taiwan, and conventional publishers are getting very creative about it. In addition to the conventional "one book, one author" format, there are also quarterly anthologies of short stories by various authors. Examples of the latter include LOVEPOST (Red Ink Publishing Co.) and E-WRITER (Christian Literature Crusade). And some publishers have gotten involved with the websites of well known writers. A notable case is comic book author Alice Chang (alias "Whale of Aquarius"), whose online magazine Lost focuses on the problems of lost love. Readers write in to recount their own personal experiences, and Yuan Liou Publishing has zeroed in on the site, collecting the sad stories and publishing them periodically. Thanks to their association with a famous author like Whale of Aquarius, these collections have sold fairly well.

DIY romance novels

Although a lot of Internet literature is coming out in print, and publishers are getting very creative with the format, the content of the literature does not actually show all that much diversity. Liang Yung-hua, manager of the Yungho branch of Eslite Bookstore, figures that Internet literature has probably had the biggest impact on the market for romance novels, which are very popular with young girls, while the market for pure literature has remained untouched.

"It's all high school students buying that stuff," says Liang. Romance novels are written by "craftsman" authors, who must meet strict publisher requirements about the ratio of sex scenes, the types of characters, etc. These formulaic novels are too divorced from reality, however, and the market naturally has taken a jolt now that online love stories have come along with more realistic story lines and language.

It is a fact that love stories have been the main staple for publishers looking to bring out cyber-literature in printed format. According to Vertigo Lin, an Internet-based book reviewer, the body of Internet literature that has jumped the gap to print publishing can practically be viewed as a genre in itself-"DIY romances."

Says Lin, "Because of the way the pieces are selected and the fact that most online readers are students, almost all the online works that get published in book format offer very realistic descriptions of school romance. I think these novels give young authors a chance to achieve a sense of closure in real-life romances gone wrong, and to use their experiences as a source of creative energy." Lin feels that the popularity of such works is natural, since both the authors and readers are everyday people.

"Another distinctive feature of the Internet literature that has crossed over into print," adds Lin, "is that the printed works seek to preserve the unique flavor of online literature, including youth vocabulary, a very casual usage of punctuation, and unconventional layouts that are used to create a certain attitude and flow. This makes Internet literature feel all the more familiar to people."

Putting the "online" in literature

But to what extent do the printed versions of online literature actually reflect what online literature is really like? How much of the "online feel" survives the crossover intact?

The most commonly accepted definition of online literature is: "Any type of literature that is distributed via the medium of networked computers." Going by that definition, it appears that only a very small segment of online literature has made it into print. There are many different types of BBS discussion groups where young people tend to congregate online. Publishing companies focus most on the so-called "story boards." Other common sources including "feeling boards" (where writers post short essays to get things off their chest), "love boards" (where contributors dwell on the subject of romance), "poem boards" (where people write and discuss modern poetry), "FHN boards" (historical fiction groups where people speculate about such questions as, 'If Zhuge Liang hadn't died, how would the Romance of the Three Kingdoms have turned out?'), and "sex story boards" (where young minds let their imaginations run wild).

These boards are basically communities that have grown up in cyberspace. People with particular interests get together via the Internet and discuss matters of common concern. They express their opinions and get to know each other. The online authors that publishing companies are focusing on are but a tiny fraction of the online population. What is more, even a cursory search of the Web will bring up hundreds of websites devoted to online literature. The body of literature represented therein is both vast and varied in format, and only a tiny bit of it can be reflected in the output of traditional publishers.

Fact or fantasy?

And that brings us to the question of selection criteria. Yeh Tzu-lin, chief editor at Red Ink Publishing, says that for a work of online literature to get published in book format, it has to pass muster with both online readers and publishing house editors. Because publishers are concerned about achieving success in the marketplace, the reaction of online readers to a particular work naturally enters into their considerations, but the reading habits of the online community are not the same as those of society at large. It is still up to the editor to make a judgment about which online works will go over well in print, and in making this decision the editor must keep in mind the company's overall focus.

Love stories have been selling relatively well in Taiwan, and publishers dipping into online literature have concentrated on this same genre. As for the mainstay of online literature-essays-Yeh confides that Red Ink Publishing has plans to put out some online works of this type in the near future, but the first effort will be nothing but a trial balloon. No one knows yet what the market reaction will be.

Yeh also states that even a medium as diverse and freewheeling as the Internet still has to conform to conventional publishing practices when it makes the crossover to print publishing. Press releases have to be sent out. Writers have to be played up in the media. And publishing houses have to set up their own websites to discover talented authors and sign them to contracts, so as to build up the publishers' brand strength. The commercial side of the publishing business inevitably affects the online literary environment. School romances have been pouring onto the Internet, and many people have consciously or unconsciously hopped on the bandwagon, becoming authors in the process. But once a person becomes a noted author, there is a price to be paid. A certain amount of creative freedom is lost.

Author Tsai Chih-heng agrees with this assessment. With his first novel, The First Intimate Contact, he hewed very close to his own personal experiences and emotions, but subsequent writings have had much less to do with his own life. "Yet most online readers think that online novels are all true stories. If I include references in my writing to people, places, or events that readers can clearly recognize, someone is sure to say to me, 'Whirling Dancer just died so recently. How can you go falling in love with somebody else again so quickly?'" Such is the price of fame. Tsai can't write as freely as he once did.

A genius for the ages?

Perhaps print publishing cannot convey the full scope of online literature, and it may be true that the online works finding their way into print are targeted at mass readership and therefore do not give a feel for the depth that can be found in cyber-literature. Nevertheless, it is undeniable that the promotion of crossover works by conventional publishers has brought a glimpse of something new for many readers.

What are the hallmarks of good literature? Some regard truth and sincerity as important. Although Vertigo Lin notes that Oscar Wilde once said that all bad poetry is sincere, author Wang Wen-hsing points out that Chinese thinkers have long considered sincerity the foundation of good writing. Says Wang, "The key question is: Does the reader perceive a sincere emotion in the writing, be it happiness, sadness, a longing for love or sex, or even something antisocial? If this sincerity of feeling is present, there will be poetry in the words, even if the message is a powerfully destructive one."

The poet Xiang Yang also argues that online literature need not necessarily be mundane or shallow. He points out that the Internet is free of restrictions, and a writer does not have to run the gauntlet of mainstream values in order to publish, as one must do with a printed publication. This could provide young writers with more breathing space that might enable them to develop new literary concepts. Some young writer out there, he says, might just become "the Hu Shih of the Internet" (referring to an influential literary reform leader who helped bring about the acceptance of a more vernacular style of Chinese writing in the early 20th century).

Li Shun-hsing, an assistant professor in the department of foreign languages at National Chung Hsing University, is championing the use of an entirely new type of medium for literature. He encourages online authors to take full advantage of their digital format by creating texts using hypertext tags that allow the reader to jump directly between related texts. With hypertext, one is presented with more than just a simple combination of text, images, and layout, because conventional considerations of space are done away with.

"For example," Li explains, "hypertext tags can be used to add special images to a conventional literary text, and you can click on these images for an interactive experience. So there's more to the text than just pure text. It also has an extra aesthetic component." Now that Photoshop and other popular image processing software programs are becoming easier and easier to use, says Li, it will not be long before a lot of online literature goes to hypertext format.

Online literature hasn't yet overthrown conventional print publishing, nor have conventional publishers completely co-opted online authors. The hunt continues. While people stuck in traditional modes of thinking are still worrying about whether print publishing might place constraints on cyber-literature, such concerns would seem unwarranted, for the unbridled Internet has already bolted the corral and is now galloping off in a new direction, as if to say, "Catch me if you can!"