6 posts tagged “podcast”
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.)
Do you listen to podcasts? Are there any you'd recommend?
Inspired by Alex.
Bwah ha! A topic right up my alley! Of course I listen to Podcasts. I also make my own.
First, stuff I'd recommend...
Michael and Evo's Dragon Page Cover 2 Cover and C2C With Class, as well as Slice of Sci Fi... news of genre books, movies, tv, and more. The C2C With Class is actually hosted by Mike and Evo's wives, who are teachers, and addresses books for younger authors.
Jason Rennie's The SciPhiShow... philosophy as explored through science.
GeeksOn... I don't always agree with what they say, but they're usually interesting.
And I always catch Hugh Hewitt's radio show via podcast. You can set that up at townhall.com.
I'll probably come back and add to this, throwing a nod at podiobooks... as well as plug my own stuff later.
Dinner comes first!
Just thought I'd throw this up here. In this quick 'cast, the geek is reminded that he should follow his own advice re: long grass and velociraptors.
Got up early today, after staying up too late last night. Laid some sod. Basically so I wouldn't have to do it later in the day, in the blazing sun, with others. So instead, I went myself during the cool of the day today, and did it myself. Many reasons for this. Mostly, I just wanted it done.
But on to musing. I upgraded my installation of Opera today, hoping it would play better with Vox (it doesn't, so I'm still using Firefox). In the process I saw an old e-mail that said I had a comment on my blog (my other blog). It basically said, "I'd listen to your podcast if I had an iPod".
As a podcaster, and as someone who is very interested in next-gen media and content, and even as a future lawyer, this thought disturbs me. Maybe it's because Mr. Laporte was talking about it in the latest TWiT. But I was listening to podcasts way before I got an iPod. Heck, I've been listening to Slice of SciFi since episode 1.
The fact of the matter is, you don't have to have an iPod to listen to podcasts. Podcasts, for the most part, are simply mp3 files. And if you've got an mp3 player, you can listen to podcasts. I was using a 256 meg iRiver ifp390T. Heck, if you really wanted to, you could listen to podcasts on your computer. You could burn them to cd. And that's fine, because a lot if not most podcasts are released under a Creative Commons license that specifically makes copying legal. What makes podcasts great is the automatic downloading that happens with RSS. Apple didn't create podcasting, podcasting isn't just done via iTunes. They streamlined the process, I'll grant you, but they didn't make it happen.
Why am I on a tear about this? I don't know. I just think that people shouldn't think that they are tied in to one specific product. The Microsoft Zune sounds cool, with updates via WiFi, and the ability to send things to your friends. Granted, it would be a pain to burn all my iTunes music to CD and re-rip to mp3 or wma, but it's do-able. Not that I'm in the market for a Zune. I want to see what happens in the market over the next few months.
I guess what I'm saying is, if anyone has questions about podcasting, or about how to get podcasts, feel free to ask. Speaking of which, I have to record at least two shows this week, and it's already Wednesday. I'd better get crackin'.
Here's a promo for my podcast, Geek Survival Guide. Why do I mention it? I'm pretty proud of the GSG episodes I've done so far. In fact, I have to put together another one this weekend on how to survive an alien invasion.
The podcast page is at gsguide.blogspot.com. I'm trying to do this one as cheaply as possible - the audio is hosted through ourmedia (all creative commons, all the time), and the page is a free blogger site. That takes the costs for hosting/bandwidth away, and I just have to pay for equipment (I eventually need a new headset) and movie rentals.
A guy's gotta do his research, right?
