I've started an online round robin tournament...
of Super Smash Bros. Brawl.
Join the fun at ssbbrrtt.ning.com, and follow ssbbrrtt on twitter to get updates and results.
What have I gotten myself into?
Yeah, I know, I know. "Every party needs a pooper" and all that.
Still, I've been thinking about this a little over the last couple of days, and just wanted to write my thoughts out and see if I can argue myself into some kind of rational, coherent position. I may end up as excited as others I follow on twitter (I'm there as, surprise, surprise, madpoet), but there's a part of me that is skeptical of the "publishing revolution".
Here's where I started, about a week ago. Publishing is going to go away at some point. It's just too easy and too fast to deliver something via the net. People aren't reading less, they're just not reading books - they're reading online, they're buying Kindles, and they're getting audiobooks in various places. We're getting more and more podcast novels. Kindles are selling out, I've never seen them in stock at Amazon.
Last night, though, I really started to question a couple of assumptions, and I think I'm realizing just how far out on the bleeding edge I may be.
The thought is that text will follow roughly the same path that music has been following over the last, oh, twenty years or so. There are, I suppose, three points in my lifetime that I can point at and say "Here is where the music industry changed forever." The first real music revolution, I'd say, occurred in 1979, with the production of the first Sony Walkman.
Music had been changing formats for some time previously, with the move from vinyl to 8-track to audiocassette, but with the Sony Walkman, you could now hitch your music to your belt and take it with you wherever you went. Portability becomes a major player.
Second music revolution, I think everyone would probably agree, is the mass produced Compact Disc. Music suddenly goes digital. Ease of moving from one song to the next. And with that comes the translation of the mix-tape into this new medium. Burnable cds.
And last but not least - mp3. Compression. All of a sudden, I can take that digital music, work some funky computer-fu on it, and shrink it down to a minuscule size. And I can fit a ton of music on my computer.
The mp3 player is the unholy perfect-app offspring of these three revolutions. Portability, compression, and easily moving from one song to the next. Good grief, it's a silver bullet, no wonder everyone is jumping on this bandwagon. Now my phone plays music, and music players are becoming phones.
In that time, what kind of similar revolution has occurred in text?
None. Nada. Zip. Zero. People joke about the publishing industry being a dinosaur that doesn't know it's dead yet, but it's been plodding along in fairly the same way (as far as the end-user is concerned) for at least the last hundred years. It's taken advantage of new printing technologies, but the end product is almost always the exact same thing: A rectangular collection of tree-pulp with squiggles on it.
Now then, there's a sense building that text may start to move more digital, but you can immediately see that this is not as revolutionary a change as three music changes I listed above are.
First - portability. Hang on, lemme pick up this book I have here... Yup. It's portable. And there's not a huge difference between reading at home, reading on the bus, etc. I never have to worry about the clearness of the signal I'm getting unless I lose my glasses somewhere.
Second - Ease of use. Well, shy of a paper cut, I can flip forward and back in the book, there's an index in the book I'm reading now, footnotes, a table of contents, I can search for what I want pretty quickly. AND I never have to recharge the book's batteries.
Third - Compression in digital formats. Well, here digital may have an edge. The rise of high-capacity mp3 players means that I can take most if not all of my music collection (I have a LOT of Rush cds, I realized yesterday) with me anywhere I go. But I can't take my entire library of books. Text files are already very compact. As an example, an mp3 audiobook of Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea As Performed By Harlan Ellison weighs in at (using some quick napkin-math-fu), about 78 Megs. Meanwhile, a plain text file of Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues under the Sea is 608KB.The audio, even compressed, is two orders of magnitude larger than uncompressed text.
Having said all that, why hasn't publishing made the same move to digital downloads? Where is the text version of iTunes challenging Borders and Barnes and Nobles?
There are a couple of obstacles in the way. First, we don't have a similar device to the Sony Walkman. We're getting closer. The Kindle seems too locked down, and tied down into one distribution chain (although I understand it can read other files you upload to it). The iPod touch has a great screen, but there's no real e-book reading application for that device yet. And who knows what will or will not come out for it considering Apple's approval for any app developed using the SDK. Jailbreaking may help, but for this to really penetrate, my non-technical grandma needs to be able to use it out of the box.
We're just not there yet.
So while I applaud the success of podcasting novelists such as Scott Sigler (go ORDER his BOOK already), I don't see his success as a change in the publishing model so much as it is a change in marketing.
LAST THOUGHT: HOW WILL I KNOW WE'VE GOTTEN THERE?
#1. Standard format. .txt works, or .rtf works. Why do I pick those two and not .pdf?
#2. DRM-less. It's taken the music industry a while to get here. Considering how open they've been to format changes in the past, and how the publishing industry has NOT had to make the same kinds of adjustments, how far out do you think this is?
#3. Ease of use. Maybe it's the Kindle's whispernet, maybe it's syncing a la iTunes, but the sucker has to work, has to work simply, and has to be fairly idiot proof.
#4. Multiple Manufacturers using the Same Format. The Kindle may be everything I've talked about above, but Amazon is the only company making it. When I see three or more manufacturers making similar devices that can use a standard format, I think we'll be there.
Maybe I'm off my nut on this one. It's certainly happened before. And I'd really like to hear what people think about this. New media gets people all kinds of excited. It is changing music, and it's changing news. But until the evidence weighs in on how it's really changing publishing, well, sure I'll be there for the revolution. I'll be the one toting the wet blanket.
(By the way, I'm deadly serious about ordering Sigler's "Infected". You'll
never look at skin rashes or *shudder* chicken scissors the same way
again. You may also like his other books, EarthCore and Ancestor - Ancestor being my favorite published Sigler novel so far.)
I admit it. I just don't "get" the whole "OpenID" thing. A lot of sites are jumping on this particular bandwagon, particularly blogs where you may need to sign in to leave a comment. I can appreciate that we want to make it easier for people to remember logins and passwords, and making one standard way of doing that may be a good idea.
Here's the problem. Apparently, through no real fault of my own, I now have four or five different OpenIDs. A whole bunch of people have signed up and signed on as being OpenID providers. But I have no way of reconciling the different IDs. First, there's the openID I signed up for at myopenid.com. Then there's the flickr OpenID, the Yahoo! OpenID, and now apparently also a Vox OpenID. But I have no way of associating those OpenIDs with each other. So, let's say that I've been using one OpenID at plaxo.com (which is true). Let's also say that for whatever reason, I decide I want to use a different OpenID.
Now, plaxo allows me to associate more than one OpenID with my profile, but the process is kind of a pain, and it's not the only place I use OpenID. I guess I'm mostly looking forward. If some site I use regularly becomes an OpenID provider, am I forever stuck with having to remember the extra OpenID I may not want to use any more? How is this helping? (Yes, yes, I'm a whiner. Waaaaahhhh!)
First, read this article...
I may have complained about this in the past, but it reminded me again of my third year in law school, when I wanted to join the Federalist Society... and they had zero events for the entire year. Why?
Well, the scuttlebutt was that the students in charge "just wanted to get through their last year of law school". Maybe they were easily intimidated. Maybe it was that we were attending what someone referred to as "the most liberal law school in the country". I don't know. But it's something I still think about. When people with legitimate differences are scared or shamed into silence, what is that if not... fascism?
According to an article on CNN.com today (thanks, twitter friends for bringing it to my attention), 1-in-4 teenage girls has an STD. The statistics are even worse for African-American teenage girls, where the ratio is nearly 1-in-2. The most common STD is Human Papilloma Virus, or HPV, which among other things can cause genital warts, infertility, and cervical cancer.
I think this is very disturbing. Something, somewhere, is terribly broken. Personally, it's a reminder to me to be there teaching my daughter values, responsibility, and (though it's terribly out of fashion) chastity. While the twitter friend who mentioned it said something about condom use, I can't help but point out that the transmission of STDs among teens would go way, way, WAAAAY down, if teens kept their pants on, zippers up. Some people might call that "out of touch". I'm reminded of my favorite line from "Aliens".
It's the only way to be sure.
