In the last few days I've gotten e-word about 2 large web-portals that will be closing down:

1. The Well (@ age 25), now owned by Salon, which is failing, too
2. VOX.com

For the last few years I've been using both as 2nd & 3rd publication back-ups for the poetry I write on my Blogspot blog.

I'm considering rescinding my 68yr-old semitecchie poetic-assertion that being widely e-published has become a better viability strategy than being hardbound-published now that e-publishing shows itself to be suicidal by its wiping-out whole constellations of people's writings of all sorts, beginning with conversational ephemera aka chats. Maybe the WWWorld may be able to read those living ephemera archivally, etc., but...for how much longer? Server maintenance cost seems to the actual bottom-line cyberlimiter.

Unless some e-sites become so archival that they can be read 'forever' as curated archives by Those in the know. But just who are They?

Ex. My posts to Digital Equipment Corporation's internal Engineering Net (later re-named E-net, then EasyNet) from 1975~88 can still be read IF you know where to find them out there in vast cyberspace. But Who would you have to be to know they'd ever existed@all? [Ans.] a DECcie. (flashback: DEC was eaten by COMPAQ which was then eaten by HP which now inherits/holds all those years of internal e-posts.)

Blog portals now closing down makes me realize my recently concentrating on 99% e-pubs subject to e-vaporation has been all too e-trusting, so I'm once again seeking paper publication of my poems (begun @ 18/1961 by getting my early poems published in Boston College's STYLUS qtly.) Paper (obviously) lasts: my little 4-line shape-poem ("Wine-glass Elm" written in Camb MA in 1966, soon pub. in small-press magapaper Brown Sweater), was much-later republished as 'a toast' in GRACES (HarperSF, 1989) - now into 27 reprintings. [QED]

3 of my (4) 20pg small-press chapbooks are (I assume) now collector's items as are all of Hugh Fox's Ghost Dance Mag/Press issues&books. I've been canny/lucky in choosing my principal small-press publishers (Dr. Hugh Fox PhD, @ MSU in E. Lansing MI; Dr. Bob Chute DSc, @ Bates College, in Lewiston ME; S. Marshall Brooks, jr., Waban, later Spencer MA, now W. Dover VT) in dissimilar small-press orbits (e.g., Alice Rogoff, an ed. of The [annual] Haight-Ashbury Lit Review/SF recently told me she was in a 1971 iss. of Chute's The Small Pond mag./Auburn ME with me); likewise, with the commercial antho. GRACES (above.) Like most writers, I publish what I can where & when I can, so I can now see it's time to head back to lasting paper publication while the blinking WWWeb appears to self-destruct (here & there.) The new e-books are hybrids (non-WWWeb physical e-pubs.) but how long will their present book-sized media-formats last? When will they go eyeglass-viewed optical-virtual? (As an exDECcie, I'm an habitually cautious late-adopter.)

Hardbound books&mags still have the material-virtue of a [semi-stable] physical existence: being on public & other libraries' shelves (if steadily DISCARDed), in many university archives (lots of my hardcopy stuff's collected at UCONN's Thomas J. Dodd Research Ctr. in Storrs CT). Since my teens, I've shopped Salvation Army & other 'thrift' stores for paper-bound books donated from people's personal bookshelves, bulky physical evidence of books having existed for (lo!) these many centuries (cf. the Royal Library of Alexandria, Egypt, [328BCE-48BCE] would be evidentiary - if it hadn't been accidentally burnt by Julius Caesar.)

But for now, we can still depend upon paper books' duration & (yes, even) worldwide {migratory} distribution. [QED]

Note: For me, newspapering is quite another matter. As a hardcopy newspaper journalist since 1968 (age 26; I'm now 68) I'm consciously enjoying this on-line cyber-format. Why? Because I realize that all my decades of newspaper copy aren't likely to have been preserved (even in the consciously self-curating Wellesley MA [weekly] TOWNSMAN that accidentally discarded years of their archives after a very short-haul office-move.)

~ Bill Costley

(Santa Clara CA, Labor Day weekend, 2010)