Ashraf Johaardien: A brief meditation on the economics of the published encounter.

I can see the lake on the wall.

Above the bed the window has laid its light across the plaster in a hard vertical cut. A dark line runs from the ceiling moulding nearly to the floor, splitting the rectangles of sun. Small clusters of leaf shadow sit inside one of the bright patches.

I notice this before I notice the phone. I only recognise the choice once I have already made the wrong one. Behind the wall, water is running. My husband is in the shower. My daughter’s shadow crosses the light as she moves into her room to dress.

The phone is in my hand and I am still in bed. This is where I now read most of what I read on a screen, and where I build my FlowBook™ publications. The arrangement is comfortable and a little shameful. The study is where the working day is supposed to begin, after the shower, at a desk arranged for work.

The bed is the lazy option for essays, yet it is the only place I can see what a reader will actually see. A desktop cannot approximate a phone held in one hand. I need the point where the online world and the room start to blur.

Nine years ago my sister gave me a USB drive of e-books, the writers she likes: Elizabeth Gilbert, Dan Brown, Paula Hawkins. It has sat in my desk ever since. In the same years I have bought hundreds of paper books by other authors and read those instead. At first I took this as a fault in me. I now think it tells me something about the file. An e-book is often just the book transposed, the same pages and the same order, dropped into a new container.

Conversion is cheaper than composition, so the incentive to recompose the work for the hand that holds it, or for the bed and the light, was weaker than the incentive to convert it. The cheapest form decides what the reader meets. Reading it on a device asked for a patience the object had not earned.

Books stay on shelves as objects, and they also stay in accounts, where each copy is a price and a payee. An anthology of my plays from the Baxter Theatre Centre, which includes “Coloured Son X,” is out of print. A secondhand copy is listed at R650. The seller is asking that price, and I will not receive a share of the resale. I do not recall ever being paid a royalty from the collection.

The Publishers’ Association of South Africa’s survey for April 2024 to March 2025, covering 37 publishers, puts digital formats at 6 percent of reported revenue, against 94 percent for print. The survey says it is not comparable with earlier years, so the figure describes one year rather than a trend. It shows where reported revenue sits, not why readers choose print.

Display comfort is what I can measure: line length, contrast, type size against the thumb. Attention comfort is harder. It is the condition under which a reader stays with a work long enough for it to do anything.

Composing for that condition is likely to cost more than converting a finished book, and someone has to pay for it. I have been testing word-count ranges of roughly six to seven thousand words for text-based publications and one to two thousand for magazine-like ones.

These are only hypotheses from my own phone; they may be wrong. What they do is make the question specific: what has to be true of a piece of writing if it is to be finished on a screen, in bed, and who pays for the making of it?

“Provenance” did not begin as an attempt to adapt “Certainties.” I asked Hermes, my editor on the novel, whether it could become a play, and he said no. I took that seriously. The play came from somewhere else. Its central character shares a name and an occupation with the novel’s, but he lives in another city in another decade, and the two never meet. The name and the trade carried across; almost nothing else did.

My experience with K. Sello Duiker’s “The Quiet Violence of Dreams” suggests that length is not the main obstacle to adaptation either. Adaptation is a kind of haunting. The source persists through fragments and unresolved pressures without being transferred intact. Fidelity and betrayal are the wrong pair of words.

The phone in bed and the play in the theatre both raise a question about what can cross over unchanged. Each has to accept that something will remain behind.

Language makes the threshold harder to see. It is a door that some can pass through and others cannot, because passage costs a coin that is not evenly distributed. Some are shut out by material conditions and institutions, and that exclusion is a real wrong. But there is another refusal: declining to translate oneself for an audience that assumes its legibility is owed. A person who cannot pay the coin is not in the same position as one who decides not to pay it. One may reproduce exclusion; the other may assert agency against a demand for transparency. I want to keep the two apart.

FlowBook™ can reduce some barriers to reading on a phone. It cannot make a difficult work easy, and it should not try. Access, translation and understanding are not the same thing. A work can travel without arriving unchanged.

So the problem may not be disposable content. A short piece can hold a reader for an hour, and a long one can be dropped in a minute.

The problem may be that work is composed to fit the conditions of circulation, and that what those conditions cost is asked only after the work is finished. A continuous stream rewards what is quick to take in and cheap to replace, and that reward shapes the drafting and the length before anyone has decided what the work needs.

I do not yet know whether a phone in bed can hold work that asks for the absorption a study was built for, or whether anyone will pay for the making of it. I know I am testing it there, with a daughter’s shadow crossing the wall and water running on the other side of the plaster, and the test is not an accident of my habits.

It may be the place where the question becomes visible.

Ashraf Johaardien is a South African writer\artist working across literary, dramatic and visual forms.

Ashraf Johaardien
ashrafjohaardien@me.com
M\e.
http://www.ashrafjohaardien.com

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