Flak Magazine: Just Your Average Book Signing, x.xx.06

Instead, as fans flocked to McNally Robinson Booksellers on Prince Street, Atwood settled into a conference room in London. This was to be the day she would debut her new invention: the LongPen, the device enabling her to hold the afternoon's event — the world's first transatlantic book signing.

It works as such: Patrons sit in front of a flat-panel screen, underneath which a small camera is placed. Via a picture-in-picture set-up, they can see themselves in the lower-right-hand corner of the screen (to allow self-monitoring to ensure they stay in the frame) while viewing the author in the rest of the screen. Fan and author talk as they would at any ordinary book signing, until the moment of the autograph. Instead of shyly sliding the to-be-autographed book across the table to the author, the fan instead places their book into a contraption equipped with a robotic pen. The arm of the device holding the pen has a camera on it, projecting the image of the book to a screen (like the magnetic one you'd use to sign your credit card at a store) in front of the author. The author 'signs' the screen as the fan requests, then hits a button that sends the signature to the robotic arm, which creates an exact replica of her signature on the title page.

Or, it would have worked that way had it worked at all.

Due to a malfunction shortly before (something to do with a light blowing a fuse, though the details were fuzzy and the Atwood enthusiasts who had showed up didn't seem to be all that interested the technical reason for the machine's failure), the machine wasn't working.

"Technology always fails at the worst of times," Atwood sighed.

So, instead, Atwood sat in London, signing books with a plain old pen. Eventually, her staffers got the London-based LongPen working and so, instead of shooting her signature across the Atlantic, Atwood settled for sending it just a few feet to the machine sitting on the other side of the conference room.

The malfunction was obviously upsetting to everyone involved. The LongPen had received much media coverage in advance of the signing, in part because it was touted by its inventor as pioneering technology that would revolutionize book tour and the publishing publicity process in general. In fact, Atwood and her minions resolutely referred to the signing as their "Marconi moment" in a reference to Guglielmo Marconi, the Italian inventor who sent the first transatlantic wireless signal 2100 miles from Cornwall to Newfoundland in December of 1901.

The invention surely has its applications. In interviews leading up to what she promised would be a momentous event, Atwood spoke about the exhaustion that was such an implicit part of previous book tours.

"As I was whizzing around the United States on yet another demented book tour, getting up at four in the morning to catch planes, doing two cities a day, eating the Pringle food object out of the mini-bar at night as I crawled around on the hotel room floor, too tired even to phone room service, I thought, 'There must be a better way of doing this,'" she told The Independent, a British newspaper, when interviewed about the invention and subsequent inception of Unotchit (say it aloud with me, people: "You no touch it"), the company Atwood set up to launch the device.

But it's not just about enabling high-profile authors to sit at home instead of embarking on wearying book tours. The LongPen has double-sided potential in democratizing the publicity process. First of all, it gives lower-profile authors (who would never otherwise be granted the opportunity to go on extended book tours) to tour remotely, thereby reaching a larger audience. Secondly, it brings authors — high-profile as well as low- — to more isolated areas (small-town libraries and independent bookstores, for example) that would otherwise be bypassed. When you live in small-town Arkansas and you get to sit in front of a monitor and talk to your very favorite author, that's a pretty big deal.

In an interview with a Canadian television station, Atwood admitted "readers probably do really want to be in the same room as the author," but, on the FAQ section of her website, she's careful to clarify that, "it won't be a choice between the author-in-the-flesh and the remote signing. It'll be a choice between the remote signing and nothing."

Now, I must admit: Atwood's pre-signing publicity had me slightly suckered. Though I had originally been adamantly opposed to what I felt was a preposterous idea, reading more about the LongPen and its wide array of possible applications seduced me. I showed up at the signing excited to see it in action.

But then the darn machine broke and, standing around, waiting for them to fix it, I had a change of heart.

It didn't matter that the LongPen didn't work. Had the machine functioned perfectly, it would still be disregarding a crucial part of the book signing experience that cannot be ignored: sheer physicality.

An author's devotees don't spend hours in line in the cold for the end-product of that signed book. They arrive in droves to be in the presence of a literary idol, to press their palm together with that of their hero in a handshake. Excitement stems not from a personalized note, but from the possession of a book that, for a moment, a nearly-deified author has held in their very own hands. Part of the magic of books lies in their physicality: the weight of the paper, the swell of the ink on the page, the heft of the volume. But this all seemed to have been shoved aside in the quest for (allegedly) improved technology.

Books matter. And books are matter. Technology will surely progress and ebooks may or may not alter the equation, but there will never be anything that tops clutching a book in one's hands, rifling through the pages as one zooms to the conclusion of the story. When holding a book, a reader is able to hold a whole world in their hands. And no technology will ever change that.

— Iris Blasi (iris.l.blasi at gmail dot com)