Studying the latest developments in print and digital publishing while earning my MA in Writing: Book Publishing helped me develop a comprehensive understanding of the publishing industry while exploring innovative solutions at the leading edge of the field.
PROJECT
I developed this business plan for a small-press publishing start-up as part of my study of emerging industry profit models for PSU Professor and Pub West Executive Director Kent Watson's intensive WR564 Business of Book Publishing course. Please see page 32 for a summary of my graduate-level research on current book business trends and my proposals for an agile, customer-centric publishing company suited to the innovations of the internet economy.
PROJECT
In this research paper completed for Professor Abbey Gaterud's WR560 Introduction to Book Publishing, I investigate the commodification of books and draw conclusions as to how the perceived commercial and cultural worth of books may continue to change in relation to increasing online availability. As economist Cameron M. Weber argues, "art contains properties that give value beyond exchange value," and it is precisely this perceived value that I investigate in this exploration of the effects of ebook price anchoring and the implications of open access for both publishers and readers.
PROJECT
This research paper written for Professor Abbey Gaterud's WR560 Introduction to Book Publishing offers a comparison of the missions, competitve strategies, and demonstrated values of Amazon Publishing and Hawthorne Books as case studies in corporate and independent publishing. In this comparison, I take scholar John B. Thompson's rubric of the five fields of influence at play in the publishing industry to offer an analysis of both houses' business practices in terms of (1) economic capital, or the house's financial assets; (2) human capital, the skills and expertise of its workforce; (3) social capital, as measured by the network of relationships the house commands; (4) intellectual capital, or the content it controls rights to; and (5) symbolic capital, or its reputation for literary quality and prestige.
PROJECT
I undertook this research as my term paper for Professor Per Henningsgaard's rigorous WR510 Editorial Theory course on the practical problems facing editors tasked with preserving or transmitting past texts to contemporary readers. I used my training in editorial theory to investigate the full bibliographic history of The Diary of Anne Frank and form a detailed critique its three authoritative editions: the 1947 edition published by Otto Frank, who claimed that "with the exception of a few sections of little interest to the reader, the original text has been retained"; the Revised Critical Edition published by the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation 1986 and 2003, which offered Anne's original dairy entries alongside the revelatory 324 loose pages Anne had revised during the spring of 1944 with plans to publish after the war was over; and finally, Miijam Pressler's Definitive Edition put out by the Anne Frank Foundation in 1995, which restored passages Otto had excised from his daughter's diary in a way that, according to Publisher's Weekly, "completely revises our understanding of one of the most moving and eloquent documents of the Holocaust."
With the understanding that documentary editing reproduces the exact text of a particular historical document in its entirety, whereas critical editing produces a new eclectic text based on editorial emendations to the copy-text, I conclude that Pressler's edition is an eclectic text that unethically revises Anne's words rather than restoring them. In preparing any critical edition, editorial intervention is only justified when it opens up new interpretive possibilities by providing historical context, opportunities for comparison, or helpful analysis for the reader's edification. To improve a text without interfering with it, we would do better to heed scholar Philip Gaskell's warning that "literary judgement alone, without the discipline of textual bibliography, will result in the production of misleading and inaccurate texts as surely as will the mechanical application of bibliographic rules. Textual bibliography is based on the union of literary judgement with bibliographic expertise." In proposing a more ethical critical edition of Anne Frank's work, I offer hypertextual solutions based on the work of scholars Yuri Cowan, Philip E. Doss, and Robert Darnton.
PROJECT
This honors English thesis, which I completed as an undergraduate at the University of Oregon's Robert D. Clark Honors College, takes up a rhetorical theoretical lens to critique existing theories of editing, analyze professional editorial correspondence, and review the state of the field. I investigate the compromises editors negotiate on behalf of authors, publishers, and readers while persuading texts towards publication and conclude that editing is best understood as a process of interpersonal persuasion rather than prescriptive textual correction.
