Arriving on a different platform

 by: Geordie Williamson - From:The Australian - April 14, 2012

Zoe Foster, daughter of ornery satiric genius David Foster, has become the doyenne of Australian chicklit. Picture: Belinda O'Neill Source: Supplied

OURS is the era of the great migration, when books in their hundreds and thousands wend their way from the snug county of the printed page to the endless steppe of the digital screen.

It is an upheaval so great that those who venture to discuss literature have an obligation, not only to address the messages encoded in a text, but also to grapple with the medium in which they come.
A case in point is the Review of Australian Fiction, conceived, edited and published by the enterprising Brisbane-based writer Matthew Lamb. The six issues of its first volume (published fortnightly, with four volumes planned for the year) each contain two short stories or novel extracts: one by an established writer, the other by an emerging author picked by their senior partner. This simple pairing has seen Christos Tsiolkas appear with Kalinda Ashton, David Foster with his daughter Zoe, Susan Johnson and Sandra Hogan, among others.

What makes Lamb's undertaking different is that it is wholly digital, with subscriptions sold though the booki.sh ebook platform, which allows access to the stories across a range of e-reading devices (I read the first issue on my desktop's screen and the rest on a tablet device). Each writer is paid on a royalty basis only, but the lion's share of an issue's $3 cover price goes to them. The elegant, minimal, uniform covers for the volume look as if they came off an old-school small press, yet the wider project follows the revolutionary potential of digital publishing to its logical conclusion.
Of course the Review is not the first of its kind. Literary journals designed for tablet reading have proliferated throughout the Anglosphere since Apple released the iPad two years ago. But the Review of Australian Fiction is the most sophisticated and best-designed Australian digital-only magazine that I am aware of. Should this idealistic yet cannily conceived venture be successful in economic terms, it will mark the moment when Australia's literary community finally found a way to make the web pay.
Full story at The Australian