But in fact it doesn't seem to have done much in the way of increasing the number of people subscribing to the magazine. We wanted more subscribers for the paper magazine. I suppose that in the back of my mind I hoped that those hitters would discover AGNI and want to subscribe.

Before that we'd been part of the Electronic Newsstand site - where we regularly received a hundred hits a week (seemed a lot to me) - until we quit that because it never brought in anywhere near enough in subscriptions to cover the $300 it cost to belong. The opportunity for going online without too much of one's own elbow grease to get things going seemed irresistible. I put AGNI on the Web because Mike Neff of Web del Sol called and offered to hoist it up. The real opportunities right now are in print. But it's important to remember which came first. This seems to be an exciting area for writer-producers with the temperament for intricately collaborative work. Your Kerouac CD-ROM is an example of a supplement to the reading experience which is helpful and entertaining. For this reason multimedia can be a terrifically useful teaching supplement. It is also harder and more expensive to teach people to appreciate it properly - it's easier to offer picturebooks to those who won't learn to read. Let's acknowledge just how rich and subtle is the medium of fiction: it takes millions of dollars to translate to the screen what one man, one woman, dreamed RL: Why did you decide to put your literary journal on the Web? What do you hope to see happen? Could you say how you view the Web and its literary prospects?ĪM: First, let me introduce an idea I hope you see as a leitmotif throughout my responses: this is a time of great opportunity for those editors and publishers able to keep their eyes on the ball and not just the bottom line. It's time for publishers to return the favor, writes Ralph Lombreglia.Īn e-mail exchange with Frederick Barthelme.

Digital Culture - An Exchange with Askold Melnyczukĭigital media are transforming the publishing industry.

What is Told by Askold Melnyczuk