I am happy to have produced and uploaded a video about ebooks and Personville Press last week. It is below:
I have been dipping my feet in the water of video production. But I really wanted to learn the ins and outs of video production and editing. It was something that I had been meaning to do for a while.
This video is my “learning project.” I really tried to make it look presentable and a cut-above an amateur video. At the same time I recognize that parts of it don’t work very well, and I’m not particularly happy with how I look in the footage. I could have done it more smoothly and with more eye contact.
I’m going to talk about lessons learned from making this video on my blog eventually. But my goal for this video is to allow visitors to learn a little bit about me and my interest and passion about ebooks. Yes, it certainly had a semi-promotional purpose, but I mainly just wanted to talk about ebooks I liked.
Despite my relative obscurity both as an author and publisher, I feel that I have accomplished some major things in the ebook world. I have done some pretty sophisticated ebook layouts for ebooks and found a way to recontextualize some older titles so that they still seem relevant to the contemporary reader. The video ended with this thought:
I know people talk about movies and videogames being more culturally relevant than novels. But finding top quality fiction at affordable prices has never been easier or cheaper. Milan Kundera once wrote that the sole raison d’etre of a novel is to discover what only the novel can discover. As much as I love a good sitcom or movie, I am shocked by how often I pick up a novel and find something deliciously unexpected or profound. Reading is a way for people to discover lost worlds, lost truths and lost joys.
The video includes many recommendations of public domain titles. Some of the links are already included with the YouTube video. I wanted to paste here the content from what I believed to be an incredible slide.
I had been praising a book of interviews that Joyce Kilmer did in the 1910s (which is found in his 1917 book Literature in the Making, by Some of Its Makers — freely downloadable at Project Gutenberg (PG).
You can view the ebook completely online here. But I provided an annotated table of contents (which is easier to read than how PG did it). All of the authors interviewed have their own wiki page and books which are often found at PG. Here it is below:
Table of Contents
WAR STOPS LITERATURE (William Dean Howells, critic and author of realistic/sympathetic portrayals of American life)
THE JOYS OF THE POOR (Kathleen Norris, prolific and bestselling author of novels about motherhood and family)
NATIONAL PROSPERITY AND ART (Booth Tarkington, author of the satirical PENROD and novels about midwestern U.S. life)
ROMANTICISM AND AMERICAN HUMOR (Montague Glass, Jewish author of light-hearted stories about two businessmen named Potash and Perlmutter)
THE “MOVIES” BENEFIT LITERATURE (Rex Beach, author of adventure novels on the frontier)
WHAT IS GENIUS? (Robert W. Chambers, prolific author of romantic fiction and supernatural tales )
DETERIORATION OF THE SHORT STORY (James Lane Allen, Kentucky author of fiction about Southern life)
SOME HARMFUL INFLUENCES (Harry Leon Wilson on peculiarly American humor)
THE PASSING OF THE SNOB (Edward Sandford Martin, essayist on modern life)
COMMERCIALIZING THE SEX INSTINCT (Robert Herrick, author of novels which question modern social institutions)
SIXTEEN DON’TS FOR POETS (Arthur Guiterman, author of light verse)
MAGAZINES CHEAPEN FICTION (George Barr McCutchen, author of adventure tales)
BUSINESS INCOMPATIBLE WITH ART (Frank H. Spearman, novelist about business and industry)
THE NOVEL MUST GO (Will N. Harben, novelist and interpreter of Southern life)
LITERATURE IN THE COLLEGES (John Erskine, literary critic)
CITY LIFE VERSUS LITERATURE (John Burroughs, author of nature books)
“EVASIVE IDEALISM” IN LITERATURE (Ellen Glasgow, whose Southern novels explore social and psychological problems)
“CHOCOLATE FUDGE” IN THE MAGAZINE (Fannie Hurst, short stories about life of a working woman)
THE NEW SPIRIT IN POETRY (Amy Lowell, imagist poet)
A NEW DEFINITION OF POETRY (E.A. Robinson, whose poems are often studies in character)
LET POETRY BE FREE (Josephine Preston Peabody, dramatist and poet)
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