There have not been enough books aimed at people involved in technology who "don't necessarily see themselves as soldiers in the middle of a revolution," Eamon Dolan says. A 10-year New York publishing veteran at age 32, Dolan has been chosen by HarperCollins to head its new HarperEdge line of books. His mission: to cover the expanding world of digital culture.
With a selection of eight diverse books coming out this year, Dolan appears to be trying to tap into at least a few different markets. Says Dolan: "I'm a complete and unreconstituted English major, but one with a great interest in science - the stuff I was never able to learn about in school because it was delivered with too much complexity. I don't like future-centrism and I don't like elitism. I like a critical and opinionated, but not knee-jerk, approach to technology."
The first book, What Will Be by Michael Dertouzos of the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science, goes on sale 7 March. Upcoming releases this year include David Shenk on information overload, Timothy Leary on dying, and a novel by Douglass Rushkoff. Next year's list is rapidly taking shape with a novel from Netchick Carla Sinclair, a book on interfaces by FEED editor Steven Johnson, and a satire for and about new media managers by Suck's Carl Steadman and HotWired's Ed Anuff (who describe their work as a "digital-age Dilbert without the cartoons.")
Dolan stresses the need to draw parallels with the past, and asserts that the current state of technology is not without precedent. Although the title What Will Be places it very much in the future tense, Dolan plays up Dertouzos' sense of history. "He spends the first third of the book explaining where we are now, the extent to which tech does influence our lives, and why that's the case. He tries to teach us how to draw our own conclusions, how to do our own futurology."
Looking for ways to explain the current state of the art, the yet-to-be-named book by Johnson goes back even further, grasping at metaphors to explain the impact of digital interfaces. "Just as Victorian novels both reflected a rapidly changing culture and explained to readers how to orient themselves, so the interfaces do now.... You can't draw those conclusions unless you go way back." This is the kind of thinking that Dolan claims "boldly assaults the notions of people like Sven Birkharts - that we're at the end of a long intellectual continuum and now it's all going to fall off some sort of synthetic precipice. That's bullshit."
Although the publishing of speculative nonfiction was dominated in the recent past by the likes of MIT Press, Routledge, and Verso - publishers that seemed to care less about a popular market - there has been an increase in the number of books and publishing efforts aimed at a digitally aware popular culture, including titles like Digerati and Reality Check from HardWired. "Possibly half the population has access to a PC, which goes against the popular notion that tech is somehow off limits," Dolan says. "That is quite a market to tap into."
