How to Frame the Internet II: Entertainment and Culture Post iPad
Mainstream since the 50s, but rarely used since the early 80s craze, 3D is now expected of every major movie these days.
Why? You can’t download 3d glasses, let alone an IMAX theater. It’s the staging of an event, a singular experience. Something that cannot be so easily replicated at home.
Likewise, in 2008, I wrote a post How to Frame the Internet, calling for the staging of events online:
The problem I see in terms of editing online content seems to be the absence of “frames.” Time frames as well as frames as a metaphor: ways of segmenting information so it doesn’t overlap with other content or ideas, complementary or not. Creating scarcity when there is abundance and understanding how to work with the desire that grows in anticipation of something.
I can’t remember the comedian — I want to say someone Saturday Night Live affiliated — but he was making a point about repetition in sketch comedy. You tell a joke once and it’s funny (well, sometimes, in the case of SNL.) Tell it again, it’s not funny. Tell it a third time it’s funny again. The next several times it’s really not funny, but if you keep repeating it after ten times and keep going, each of those times the joke is funny (this is, of course, a total perversion of the law of diminishing marginal returns.)
Art filmmakers are aware of the boredom they inflict when they hold a certain shot just a moment too long. Horror films especially are cruel games of anticipation. It is agonizing to watch the girl go down the steps to the basement tiptoe after tiptoe sooooo slowwwly.
The great change we are waiting for, the one that will make newsworthy information part of one’s daily media diet is online content that will acknowledge and work around a user’s lack of patience. This means creating an event out of what is being presented… Make viewers mark in their calendars for it. Make them miss it if they miss it.
Twitter often takes this role. For the past few years, I make a point of watching the State of the Union as it airs, rather than later on in the evening, at a time more convenient to my schedule. Only then can I keep up with the tweets and status updates from friends and bloggers I follow.
In terms of segmenting information, I’m very enthusiastic about the iPad. One aspect in particular is intriguing, and it is the very aspect that annoys Gizmodo so much: No Multitasking.
This is a backbreaker. If this is supposed to be a replacement for netbooks, how can it possibly not have multitasking? Are you saying I can’t listen to Pandora while writing a document? I can’t have my Twitter app open at the same time as my browser? I can’t have AIM open at the same time as my email? Are you kidding me? This alone guarantees that I will not buy this product.
- Gizmodo, 8 Things That Suck About the iPad
Here is the slow web in effect. The opportunity to focus on the one task at hand. Combined with the intimacy of the device, we’re going to see an entirely new way of interacting with information.
It is a more reflective way, one that might even correct some of the signal-to-noise issues we’ve for so long taken as a given of the digital age. Also in 2008, I wrote about how I feel the iPhone (and now the iPad) could gradually kill off some of the more inane youtube comments. From the post Reading Only Devices: Why iPhone, Kindle, and Tablet PCs Might Mean Smarter Blog Comments:
If more and more people start reading online media on mobile phones and Kindle, the incentive to leave a comment will go down dramatically. Do you really want to save this post for later and comment in a couple hours? Or do you want to struggle with writing something on the inadequate keyboard?
We might also see growth in devices that divorce writing from reading… A computer is designed to do both things at once so you no longer even think of reading while writing as multitasking. Often times the experience of writing an email is consuming and processing at once: as the message you are writing and the message you are responding to are in the same frame. I’m not old enough to remember the conventions of handwritten letters, but I doubt my grandmother sat at her desk composing a letter to her friend with her friend’s prior letter folded above it, going line by line, making sure she’s responded to every question in sequence.
The keyboard is closer to you than the screen. Many of us scroll the screen with the same keys we compose letters. It’s wonderful in that it has made us a more literary culture, but it also means a lot of great stuff gets lost in the abundance of online text.
If Kindle becomes more popular, and more laptops start including tablets, I think users will grow accustomed to reading without having to add their .02 once they get to the end. Which means those who do, might have something really interesting to say.
I actually prefer my iPhones inability to multitask. It’s putting a constraint on me… and my worst multi-tabbing, unfocused habits. If I can’t so easily navigate to another app or another page, I won’t.
The iPad is effectively dividing two experiences: reading and writing. This means actively listening to another person’s words, and having the time to think of what to say before typing. This is better communication. This is the future.
Previously:
Movie studios and publishing houses are rarely open to unsolicited manuscripts, due to fear over plagiarism charges dating back to when Art Buchwald sued Paramount for stealing his idea for “Coming to America.” “he slush pile has been transferred from the floor of the editor’s office to the attaché cases of representatives who can broker introductions to publishing, TV and film executives.” WSJ recently explained. Previously: Panning for Gold as Reading and the Creativity of Outsiders, Crazy Artists, Crazy Authors, and Blog Comments as a Slush Pile Unfiltered
“Long-form text-only narrative will continue to thrive as it has since cavemen gathered around the fire, just as painting has thrived since Lascaux. The advent of more and richer iterations of multimodal entertainment and edification will not kill off others (either multi or single mode) in the future, just as they did not in the past, though they certainly will kill businesses with an overdeveloped sense of entitlement based on past success in a given mode.” From Richard Nash/s predictions on book publishing in the next 10 years.
Bob Stein if:book (via.) talks about branding “Over time publishers yielded the primacy of publishing house brands to the aggregators (Barnes and Noble, Borders, Amazon). and having lost the power of their brands, publishers relied more on the star power of individual authors which made it much more difficult to launch new writers etc., making the publishers even weaker over time.” He uses the example of Criterion Collection DVDs in one shelf together, regardless of genre. Patrick Brown at Vroman’s further explains, “[If] Melville House publishes it, I will likely give it a shot. Why? Because somebody other than you — and somebody who reads a lot of fiction, no less — also says that it’s good.” Here’s my post from last year on the matter. Publishers need to act like a record labels. I trust the taste of the editors at Dalkey Archive and New York Review Books reprinting many overlooked classics, but no publisher of new titles. If there were a Tony Wilson of publishing, you bet I would buy every book printed, (disposable income permitting.)
20 of the top 50 Kindle downloads are free books.
The New Self-Publishing
Books ought to be so cheap that we can throw them away if we do not like them, or give them away if we do. Moreover, it is absurd to print every book as if it were fated to last a hundred years. The life of the average book is perhaps three months. Why not face this fact? Why not print the first edition on some perishable material which would crumble to a little heap of perfectly clean dust in about six months time? If a second edition were needed, this could be printed on good paper and well bound. Thus by far the greater number of books would die a natural death in three months or so. No space would be wasted and no dirt would be collected.
- Virginia Woolf (via Snarkmarket and The New Yorker’s Book Bench)
People will continue to read fiction for as long as people read text. The real questions about the state of publishing pertain to the ways fiction will be produced and distributed. Right now the business is cutting out middlemen, like so many industries before it. Many of the traditional ways of marketing books are, in a networked world, improper allocations of time and attention. These shifts occurring may be dramatic. It may seem like the recession alone is to blame, but what’s taking place isn’t just cost cutting. In the long run I think we’ll see publishers better equip to take on riskier authors, as well as find sympathetic audiences and build communities for them.
Right now, publishing a book takes too long, the results are enormously uncertain, and the economic risks are too great. This means less money upfront for authors, making alternatives to the book deal more and more attractive.
A recent article in Crain’s points out just how much less an author should expect to sign for, compared to last year: “$35,000 is the new $75,000,’ “ says Michael Morrison, president of the general books division at HarperCollins Publishers. But you can make $80,000 on Scribd, if 10,000 are willing to download your book for $10. This is a liberating alternative for someone who already has an audience.
Harland Miller, Too Cool to Die, 2002
One of the best known self-published authors, Wil Wheaton, tells Washington Times’ Kelly Jane Torrance, “The incredible ease of distribution online and the fact that more authors — and actually, all creative people — can reach their audience and their customers more easily and more directly than at any other time in history, I think makes self-publishing an option that can be considered in the first round of choices rather than the last resort it’s been perceived as up until, let’s say, 1998 to 2001.”
Torrance also speaks with Lulu’s Gail Jordan, “Who needs a travel agent when you have Expedia? We’re much more used to taking things into our own hands and controlling them. Lulu is not going to tell me they don’t like Chapter 10 … It’s up to the marketplace to decide if it has value.”
For now, a success story, like Lisa Genova, interviewed by Lev Grossman last winter in his story on the future of publishing, still ends with a big publisher making an offer and catapulting the book to the top of the New York Times Best Seller List.
I don’t believe any recent self-published books have topped best-seller lists, but it has happened in the past. A NYT story, dated July 9, 1990, is an interesting look at the model’s break from its stigma as “vanity publishing,” paying to see your name in print.
A bunch of mid-90s self help best sellers (What Color is Your Parachute, Chicken Soup for the Soul) were self-published. There was demand for self-help that the speed of publishing wasn’t able to address at the time. Trends are difficult to capitalize on in this industry and there are no publishing “coolhunters” looking out for what we’re going to be reading, thinking, talking about in 2011 — the earliest, conceivably, your book purchased today may be published and distributed.
For someone who’d never deign to read a self-help, much less write one, self-publishing might feel like giving up. I was talking about some of this the other night with Diana Kimball, who recently wrote a paper on the subject. (Update 5/25/09: Kimball’s paper, “Paper Houses: Vanity, Doubt, and the Perils of Self-Publishing”.) She made the often lost point about a major publisher’s role as validation for the author, as well as the reader. The author needs to know someone with expertise and good judgement found his or her material worthwhile. Otherwise, why risk the embarrassment of bringing unsatisfactory material to a wider audience?
For someone brave or crazy enough to believe the rejection letters were unjust, the creative control in self-publshing could be more of a draw. Moreover, if you do it and you’re a success, you could handpick your editors and build your own marketing team. You no longer need to worry about an agent or editor not getting you or wanting you to change something essential to your vision.
The worst argument against self-publishing is that it further floods the sea of books, making it harder and harder to find good reading. This is why I love that Virginia Woolf quote. We’ve always had more text than time to read, the limitation prior to the Internet was based on libraries within driving distance. Things will get lost, certainly, but a ours is the first generation whose process of learning involves retrieving obscure interesting information and feeding it to a wider audience.
Still, the major stumbling block for a self-published author is audience building. Maybe Wheaton could sell as many books this way if he never appeared on “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” But there’s no way self-publishing could be profitable for him without his broad Internet fanbase. Authors, by nature, tend to be a shy sort, who would rather not go about the business of shaking hands and kissing babies. But that’s also an issue easily corrected with folksonomy and greater participation in the book world social media like GoodReads. It’s pretty hard to find books similar to that last book you really loved, for reasons I described earlier. If I could enter Max Frisch’s “I’m Not Stiller” in a search engine and receive several recommendations of similar books, you bet I wouldn’t care if they’re self-published or not.
Previously:
Save or Delete: Post-Scarcity vs e-Clutter
Reading Only Devices: Why iPhone, Kindle, and Tablet PCs Might Mean Smarter Blog Comments
Literary Novels and Fan Culture
Matching Books and Readers: Publishers Need Better Websites
“@R_Nash if novel is dead, but still appears, novel = zombie. short story even deader than novel, s.s. = superzombie.” – @colsonwhitehead
Want to sell a screenplay? Make the leading man an architect and give the leading lady a job in publishing. Alison Flood considers Sandra Bullock in The Proposal: “it’s all about the shorthand that the role conjures up. Without having to go into details, it immediately presents her as intelligent, well-read, interesting. A similar thing is done in romantic fiction, which is peopled with architect and doctor male heroes: the first is shorthand for clever, rich and creative, the second for clever and caring.”
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