Because of electronic books’ (e-books) rising popularity, publishers are producing fewer hard copy texts. The transition to digitally publishing poetry, however, has been slower.
According to a recent article in the New York Times (NYT), this is primarily because poetry often involves special formatting for line breaks and stanzas which is difficult to recreate on digital readers. But new technology makes digitally publishing poetry more feasible. Some publishers now have programmers to hand-code poetry e-books. Others use PDFs or static files to maintain the poems’ appearance.
Another reason the transition to digital poetry has been slower than for other written works is that publishers question whether there is as big a demand. Thus, the cost of producing digital poems may outweigh the demand for the product. But the NYT article explains that poetry publishers admit they must produce digital poetry, despite the cost.
