A Dispatch from the Publishing Frontier
As part of my research into the positioning of TextFlows in the world of authoring and publishing, I’ve been tracking a number of sources from the publishing world.
While there’s been a lot of talk recently about the demise of newspapers, its pretty clear that the publishing world as a whole is bracing itself for the digital onslaught. In large part this is coming to a head because of the massive recent success of the Kindle and the creation of reading titles on the iPhone.
I’ve posted from a WSJ journal article below but heres another good one from the Publishing Frontier blog: At the Apex by John Warren. While a passionate advocate for the beauty and value of books and the printed word, John sees the value of an interactive and evolving form of publication. Here’s a (longish) quote:
“Jumping just a bit into the future, let’s grab our podkinfliptop, with its color touch screen and multimedia capabilities, and run. Placing the cursor next to an unfamiliar term in Cunliffe’s book, like Bosphorus, brings up its definition. Clicking on the place-name of Tyre deploys Google Earth. Maps of migrations or empires, instead of static, depict the spread and flow over time. Instead of a single picture depicting the ancient city of Miletos, or a bronze warrior god from the 12th century, a gallery of photos is embedded in the e-text. Links lead to further scholarship or modules about topics of particular interest to the reader. Cunliffe’s tome is a big book, nearly too hefty to curl up in bed with comfortably for a nice reading session, but in its e-format it poses no problem on the podkinfliptop, which you read while touring the Aegean region with your family. At the ruins of the Byzantine fortress in Anadolu Kavagi, you take a striking photo and instantly upload the photo to the book’s gallery.”
Its going to be very interesting to see how things evolve.
Clearly aesthetics are important in these new formats. The business model is the big stumper. Beyond that however, exposing the ‘dark matter’ of the printed word to the digital, indexed, social and hyperlinked world seems to me to hold great promise.
At TextFlows we are currently focusing on poetry as our content matter - it fits most appealingly with the initial versions of our tools. We can leverage the visual beauty (IMO) of a Flow, to help expose the cerebral beauty of a poem, and present it in stark simplicity on a handheld device, like the iPhone. (Check out some Frost).
Both of my cited authors (above and below) note the potential for texts to be broken apart, and to be sold or consumed in smaller chunks. This seems to me to be particularly applicable to poetry. I’m hoping this might be rich enough soil in which to plant our first commercial seedlings…
