Archive for December, 2006
Everyone Says I Love You; it’s about Time
Time magazine just chose it’s person of the year, and it’s you. Meaning me. Or rather, it’s us, the information age and everyone who is incorporating technology into every phase of their life. It’s an interesting concept to be sure (personally, I thought it’d be that crazy guy from Iran). But what’s more interesting are all of the corresponding articles that tie into the theme, such as articles on YouTube, the new Internet bubble, and Web 2.0.
Excerpt: “The new Web is a very different thing. It’s a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter. Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But it’s really a revolution. And we are so ready for it…”
Time Magazine Person of the Year
The Long Goodbye; bidding farewell to physical formats
Writing on the SciFi Channel’s blog, Adam Frucci has a funny posting in form of a “eulogy for physical media.” The posting is being delivered in 2010, when pretty much all physical media is, well, “dead” (check out the accompanying graphic which shows CDs and cassettes as headstones). I of course agree that these various forms of media will be, if not extinct in a few more years, certain endangered species. But to add the “print is dead” wrinkle to the mix, I’d say that books should be mentioned in there somewhere as well.
Excerpt: “You had a good run, physical media, and we’ll miss you. There was something so comforting about having something to hold in your hands to represent that album or movie you loved so much, but progress has no need for sentimentality. So we lay you down to rest and hope that you went peacefully, happy in knowing that you did your jobs to the best of your ability. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”
Another brick in the wall (of user-generated content)
Jon Pareles had a story in The New York Times over the weekend about user-generated content; it doesn’t say anything new, but is a nice recap of what’s happened over the past year. The article focuses mostly on music, but has brief mentions of things like LonelyGirl15 on YouTube, and mentions “online novels” as one of the ways users can spread their creativity across the Web.
Excerpt: “Tech oracles predicted long ago that by making worldwide distribution instantaneous, the Web would democratize art as well as other discourse, at least for those who are connected. The virtual painting galleries, the free songs, the video blogs, the comedy clips, the online novels — all of them followed the rise of the Internet and the spread of broadband as inevitably as water spills through a crack in a dam. Why keep your creativity, or the lack of it, to yourself when you can invite the world to see?”
The way we blur: the line between TV and Web is getting smaller and smaller
A story from a week or so ago in the Washington Post entitled “Video Visionaries Meld Traditional TV and the Web” talks about how, in a very “attention economy” way, more and more television networks are offering bits of their shows to online audiences. This is of course due to the growing popularity of on-demand video recording, and the rise of “clip culture” spawned by YouTube and other video sites. In terms of what this means for the “print is dead” idea, it shows that, more and more, the boundaries between what’s considered “content” and “product” are being thoroughly broken down. For instance, does NBC broadcast a half-hour sitcom once a week at a certain time and that’s it? Or does it chunk up the episode so viewers can see them for free online or on cell phones, and sell the episode on iTunes for $1.99 (as well as producing web-only content that acts as entertainment all by itself, but also fosters the original brand)? And of course for traditional trade publishers, this will mean thinking beyond the covers of a hardback book…
Excerpt: “It’s a nontraditional approach to broadcast television that’s been growing in popularity in recent months: broadcasting shows on both the Internet and traditional TV to give advertisers as many viewers as possible. At the same time, the blurred line between traditional and online video is accommodating a growing variety of viewers: those who prefer to watch on a TV, those who gravitate more toward the Web and even those who like to watch on their mobile phones or TiVo recorders.”
Video Visionaries Meld Traditional TV and the Web
Not so OK Computer: “It used to be a novel; now it’s a coaster”
The Guardian book blog today had a funny post about a writer whose new laptop locked up, trapping her book inside the computer. True, for modern writers who write on laptops and computers, there is much ease is editing and composing, but there is of course a very large downside: one computer crash, and — unless you back-up your work relentlessly — your book may be gone. It reminds me of an episode of “Mad About You” from years ago, where Paul Reiser was screwing around on the roof of his Manhattan apartment building, and he knocked out the power. When he went back to his apartment, he was greeted by a gathering of angry tenants, including one who was writer. Apparently the writer had been working on his book, only to lose it during the blackout. He handed Reiser a floppy disc. “What’s this?” Reiser asked. “It used to be my novel,” the writer answered, “now it’s a coaster.” None of which means, of course, writers — or anyone, really — is going to go back to typewriters or pencil, but it does show that these technological marvels we deal with everyday are indeed just machines.
From the Guardian: “Your new Mac has died, you can’t access your hard drive, and the parts will take at least 10 days. Welcome to the modern novelist’s nightmare.”
The chime of death
The End of DRM?
Interesting article today in USA Today which talks about how more and more big-time record labels are selling content as restriction-free MP3s that come without any kind of Digital Rights Management. If this policy starts to catch on, it would be a real about-face for the music industry, which has long insisted on wrapping content in as much DRM as possible (in fact, Sony got so paranoid about it that they produced CDs earlier this year that were so restrictive on the part of the user that they actually contained spyware, tracking the user’s every move and reporting it back to Sony). So if this takes off in the music business, maybe trade publishers would follow suit, and issue novels and non-fiction text in a DRM-less format which anyone could read anywhere on any device. If that happened, the Attention Economy would have finally arrived. As it is now, we’re still very much in the DRM economy.
Major labels to offer unrestricted MP3s
Never mind what androids dream of; do consumers dream of electric cars? Or electronic books?
Last night I saw the documentary “Who Killed the Electric Car?” And as I watched it, absorbing the story about how super-efficient electric cars — which could have solved a host of problems, from our dependence on foreign oil to the rise in global warming — were in effect killed by the oil and car companies, it made me think of electronic books and the fact that they have not yet taken off. First, going back to the electric car: even though GM produced them, it never really got behind them; GM never made selling them a priority. Why? Well, because if they were successful, it would then drive down the profit or need for their other products and services. This has happened before in numerous industries. For instance, why won’t the cigarette manufacturers produce the more healthy, smokeless cigarette that they’ve long been developing? Because to do so would point out how unhealthy their regular products are. Why doesn’t McDonalds have at least one low or non-fat burger on their menu? Or make a kind of French fry that won’t clog up your arteries with grease? Because to do so would mean that everything else that they’re selling is bad for you. The bottom-line is that auto manufacturers, tobacco companies, and fast food franchises have each already made billions of dollars off of consumers who purchase things that are either bad for themselves or bad for the environment, and the production of an alternative would be a tacit admission that these companies had known all along that what they were doing was wrong. Now, to put this through the “print is dead” prism, it struck me that, while publishers have indeed participated in eBooks over the past five years, none of them really whole-heartedly jumped into it. Why? Perhaps because they have so much staked on print-on-paper books, and that if eBooks succeed — on almost any level — then their entire way of doing business will be jeopardized, from in-house production to marketing and advertising. And of course the same way that oil companies were wary of electric cars — since, if people could charge them at home, there’d be no need for gas stations — so too are bookstores reluctant to promote electronic books, afraid to be cut out of the ever-shrinking consumer-loop. I realize that most of this argument is a stretch (electronic books are quite different from electric cars), but it did strike me that, in big business — and books are indeed a big business — there is often intense pressure to keep things as they are, to not rock the boat and to keep the status quo. And I think that a lot of the resistance to electronic books, from the book industry, has to do with just that: trying to keep things the same. Meanwhile, of course, things are changing all around us…
Chicago is not Microsoft’s kind of town
Yikes; the Chicago Sun Times this week reviewed Microsoft’s new portable music device (and hopeful iPod killer), and didn’t pull any punches, calling the Zune a flat-out “failure.” As publishers try to tackle downloadable books and digital reading, this kind of critique/take-down goes to show the level of interaction that consumers are going to expect, and how high the bar has been set because of iTunes and the iPod (for instance, look at all the lukewarm reviews the Sony device has received).
Excerpt: “Yes, Microsoft’s new Zune digital music player is just plain dreadful. I’ve spent a week setting this thing up and using it, and the overall experience is about as pleasant as having an airbag deploy in your face.”
Avoid the loony Zune
