I just finished up a course called Professional Editing. It might sound a little boring, but I have actually loved it. For six weeks, I have been reviewing every grammar rule that I learned from a grammar workbook in the sixth grade. Every tool an editor might need to make a work nothing short of fantastic. I loved the professor. To wrap up our six weeks together, he issued us a final exam that was simply to write a brief essay explaining what we thought the publishing industry should be doing and how we saw ourselves being involved in making this happen. Brilliant, right? Well here was my answer:

It is my firm belief that every person should read at least one piece of fiction in their lifetime which so immerses him in the content that it is a rude awakening to finish it and be chucked out into the real world. In order for everyone to experience this, every reader has to be comfortable with the carrier of the content. A commuter benefits from an electronic device that affords him great literature and mobility. A book-hoarder benefits from the persistence of legacy publishers which continues to enable him to stock his shelves. A reader with a short attention span benefits from shorter publications produced by sites like Byliner and Atavist, enabling him to complete a great work before getting bored. And then there is a reader like me. I own a kindle and a nook and a tablet with both applications; I am a serial book purchaser in love with hard-covers, paperbacks and mass market paperbacks alike; and I subscribe to both Byliner and purchase stories from Atavist in order to fulfill a quick fix for contemporary literature. I like this literary world in which we live which affords me all of these options in publications. Unfortunately, I do not think that every reader agrees with me. The readers which I have described here feel threatened by each other’s preferred formats. One format to bring them all and in the darkness bind them. Clearly I am being a bit overdramatic, but what if that is not so far off? If we limit ourselves to one format when so many others are endeared to different types, are we not subjecting them to a type of darkness? My future publishing industry would continue to invest in all of these readers to bring them what they want to read and from what they want to read it. And with how strongly many readers feel about the particular format to which they are so inclined to protect, I do not think that the immediate future is far from my ideal. As for my part in this world, I hope to help authors continue to produce great content, specifically by focusing my efforts on the words themselves. It does not really matter to me how the final product is read as long as it is magnificent and shared by commuters, book-hoarders, readers with short attention spans, and word-lovers alike.