Basically, the issue is that poetry is a massive failure in e-book formats because ePub and other e-book software have no respect for line breaks. This is not such a big deal when you’re talking about prose, but it’s death for poetry.

As e-books become a larger and larger segment of the book market, the failure of poetry to be included will become more and more of a problem for poetry in America.

Right now, about the only solution out there consist of using PDFs, rather than than “traditional” (what is the best word to use here? I don’t know) e-books. Bookmobile’s Ampersand is an example of this.

The Allen Foundation did recently give Copper Canyon Press a $100,000 grant to search for a solution to this problem. While I have somewhat mixed feelings about Copper Canyon – they are the most prominent publisher of poetry in America, but they are also amazingly conservative in the poets they choose to publish – there is no doubt that, of all publishers of poetry, they have the commitment and profile to actually get this done.