It’s the Browser…
by Bud Parr on November 8, 2011
The Web OS is already here… it’s just not what you thought it would be. Web technologies are currently powering content and interactions across multiple devices effectively turning the most popular native applications into Web browsers. The end result is a widely distributed and used Web-based operating system. Just not the one you imagined.
Link to the rest: www.lukew.com
Treesaver is Fabulous
by Bud Parr on November 12, 2010
Treesaver is a new way of presenting narrative content that combines a website with the structure of an ebook that scales to whatever device it’s being viewed on. While this first example, “Looting the Seas,” won’t be of interest to everyone, Nomad editions will also be launching with this format.
There’s been a fair amount written about Treesaver already, so I’ll limit my comments to a couple of things. The execution is really well done. So many projects I’ve seen in the ebook space have an amateurish air to them, but this is really polished. But the remarkable thing is its scalability. It’s not just that the site gets smaller or bigger, but it’s the way that it actually scales.
Web developers have long grappled with the idea of “fluid” designs - sites that change size with the size of the browser. I’ve never used the fluid design technique on my sites because they have a fatal flaw. Fluid designs tend to grow or shrink column sizes to fill the space of the viewport. To be readable, text needs to be scannable, that is, your eye needs to flow from one line to the next without having to stop and think about it. The width of the column needs to have a relationship with the size of the text or your eye loses the flow of the text. Treesaver uses a responsive design that keeps the columns of text at a proportionate size no matter the space. I find this terribly exciting.
Making Ebooks is as Easy as Blogging: My Instapaper(book) on Paul Muldoon
by Bud Parr on November 11, 2010
In the not-distant future, the idea of a book or magazine will be much more fluid than it is today, partly because they are easier to produce than in the past, and partly because we will come to expect them to be different.
Repackaging Content
One wonders how many of the hundreds of thousands of books published every year are collections of work already published, such as stories or essays. What is the value in repackaging previously published material? Sometimes, like the case with short stories, they are inaccessible in their original form because they were published in many different journals of varying levels of availability. Also, putting a collection together gives the individual pieces some needed context or force of argument, as is the case with Alex Ross’s collection of essays, Listen to This, bringing together Ross’s New Yorker articles that, so far as I can tell, aim specifically to bridge a gap between popular and classical music (there is one previously unpublished essay in the book). For a long time now professors have pulled together “books” of a variety of material for their students, and today you can put your own “book” together of Wikipedia articles with the click of a button (in PDF, OpenDocument Text, or Print-on-demand).
Reading Content Outside of its Original Home
We’ve become promiscuous with our nonfiction reading. Atomization began with RSS readers, which display content by date or topic, rather than just the source. Then, the swift change in the media environment drew lines (then blurred them) between writers and their publications. Now we read based on the recommendation of twitterers and “friends” rather than sitting down to our morning paper. Our sources might be chosen for a variety of reasons, not just the veneration of the package they came in. Apps like Flipboard, will further challenge our old reading habits. Interestingly, Instapaper – the online application that allows you to save articles to read later on your own device instead of its published source – gives publishers guidelines if they want their content to look its best through their service.
Contexts Can Change
The point is that content takes on meaning depending on how it is packaged and consumed, and no one publication will have a monopoly on either. In the same way that I know people because of common interest rather than physical proximity (primarily because of my online activities), I read not – necessarily – based on publication, but on interest. I may sit one night and read articles and blog posts on publishing, then read about technology, or literature from other sets of sources.
Crowd-Curation
With the growing popularity of microblogs like Tumblr and Posterous, we all become curators as well as consumers. While a microblog may be an on-the-fly mechanism, we’re also seeing an interest in long-form writing (crowd-curated by sites like Instapaper and Longreads). There’s no reason why that won’t turn into something more thoughtful where a body of essays or stories (perhaps collected from a site like Fictionaut) are curated and shared by anyone with the knowledge or time to assemble them. There will be issues, to be sure. Rights and the potential to manipulate content are just a couple to reckon with.
I’ve been fooling around with this idea in my head a bit. Books (or, broadly, publications) in any form are a vessel to focus our attention and to have some semblance of permanence, even if, as in the above examples, that is merely a matter of convenience or editorial choice. That much won’t change. What will change is the necessity for content to be emitted straight from a publisher’s hand to its final destination.
One Example
To the end of thinking about this in practical, if somewhat crude, terms, I created an ebook of related articles. I use Instapaper to collect articles and it’s become my preferred environment for reading on the iPad, even though what I really enjoy is the book-like environment of reading in an ereader, like iBooks. Instapaper has a feature on its website that allows you to create an EPUB (among other formats) of your content. By putting articles into a folder you can create a specific theme or whatever grouping you like of articles. Instapaper isn’t meant to create books, necessarily, so this is a bit rough, and just for fun anyway; it’s a bit wanting for formatting. Naturally, I didn’t secure any reprint rights for the content, though everything is sourced and linked to from the book. It’s not for sale and for private use only and will be linked to from here unless someone gets angry and wants me to take it down.
A Good Subject
I chose Paul Muldoon because while reading his latest collection Maggot, I also wanted to read The Paris Review interview of him, thinking that I’d like to read it on my iPad so I can get to it on the train. So, despite having the original print version, I went to The Paris Review website, saved it to Instapaper, then thought I’d put together some other pieces to draw a more complete picture.
The articles in this collection begin with Muldoon’s Wikipedia entry, several biographical articles, reviews and interviews, culminating in The Paris Review interview from 2004. There’s no poetry in the book because I fear formatting could easily be screwed up (see my previous post on poetry formatting in EPUB).
So here it is, [An Introduction to Paul Muldoon].
Wholly Communion, 1965
by Bud Parr on October 13, 2010
I just saw this video posted by City Lights on Facebook of a 1965 reading at Royal Albert Hall with 19 poets including Allen Ginsberg, who I think organized the event, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Andrei Voznesenski, Harry Fainlight, Ernst Jandl, William Burroughs, and Christopher Logue. It’s such a fantastic video if for nothing else the energy in the room. I’ve been to poetry readings in large halls with at least a couple thousand people, but this is more like a rock concert of poetry – there were reportedly 7,000 people there with the audience an active participant. Aside from some of the antics, my favorite reading is from Christopher Logue. Here’s an excerpt on Youtube and somebody posted a longer one on MySpace (but I can’t seem to embed that, but you should definitely click through and watch it all).
What Makes a New Yorker?
by Bud Parr on October 12, 2010
The Literary Walk in Central Park
Hard to believe it’s October, and funny to think that it was 16 years ago on Columbus Day that I moved to NYC.
I’ve lived on the Upper West Side, Upper East Side, Gramercy, Ft. Green and Carroll Gardens Brooklyn, and have spent an enormous amount of time in the West Village, where I also went to school at NYU, both undergraduate and graduate.
I’ve walked so many stretches of this city to see it as closely as possible. I buy my pickles on the Lower East Side. I shopped avidly at the old Gotham Book Mart before that was more than a memory. I’ve been to the Nuyorican Poets Café, read on stage at the Bowery Poetry Club, read a piece of my own at the KGB Bar, been to readings, lectures of all stripes, and held my own little debates in bars all over the city.
I met my wife at The Gingerman on 36th St. Took her to Chumleys (the former speakeasy with the hidden entrance and signed photos of the literary who’s who of time past, that is sadly no longer) on our first date and to the storied Algonquin on our second. We got engaged in Central Park (see photo), had our wedding rehearsal dinner at the restaurant in Bryant Park, and were married at the National Arts Club in Gramercy Park. We had three kids at NY Presbyterian Hospital.
I’ve worked in the World Financial Center for Merill Lynch, spent much time at the World Trade Center, commuted to New Jersey, and after a major career change from Wall Street to technology, became part of the laptop in coffee shop revolution. I’ve had drinks or posh meals at the St. Regis and Cipriani’s; the top of the Chrysler building; stayed at The Plaza Hotel, when it was The Plaza Hotel. I’ve met or seen movie stars, royalty, diplomats and politicians. I’ve talked politics or books with some of the most incredibly bright minds one can imagine.
I’ve made money, gone broke, been unhappy then ecstatic. I’ve seen a lot, but nothing close to it all. Pretty much everything I am today is a result of being in NYC, yet to those who were born here, I’m not really a New Yorker. At least my three sons will be.
Can We Trust (Poetry) Ebooks? – The Case of Allen Ginsberg’s Collected Poems
by Bud Parr on October 5, 2010
As much as I love e-books, I wish publishers put more thought and effort into the design issues specific to them. From what I understand, most e-books published today come out of the same process as the print edition (something like, perhaps, Adobe InDesign) then exported into EPUB or MOBI (happy to hear from anyone who can clarify this).
As a web designer/developer (there are many similarities between front-end web code and e-books), I’ve never trusted the export function of any application. They tend to spit out extraneous code and open up vast possibilities for errors.
Notably, when the Virginia Quarterly Review published an EPUB version of their book-like journal earlier this year, they took pains on the journal’s EPUB design, going so far as to “optimize” it for Apple’s iBook application. The results showed.
It’s time publishers took a hard look at their workflow. Below are some examples. The first is a scan of a poem in Allen Ginsberg’s Collected Poems 1947 – 1997. The e-book version was released today. I downloaded samples from three vendors/apps for the iPad: Apple’s iBook, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, and Amazon’s Kindle. I looked on Kobo but the book didn’t appear in their store.
This is the print edition, scanned. Note the structure of the lines.
Scan of the print version
Below is the Amazon Kindle edition. Text-size, color and pagination on all of these examples are variable, so should not be a final criteria. Note that the first line of every stanza is indented (this is on every poem, none of which are indented in the print edition). Also note that the line beginnings are completely different than the print edition.
Amazon Kindle
Here is the Nook edition with the same problem with line beginnings:
Barnes & Noble Nook
And again with Apple’s iBook version:
Apple iBook
Though the poem is readable, nothing can be taken for granted in a poet’s intent. Poetry e-books also suffer from the problem of variability of font sizes. I did a similar exercise with Jorie Graham’s Sea Change, which has long lines. Generally speaking, I’ve found line breaks to be okay, but making the font larger creates artificial line breaks and the degree of indentation is all over the board.
In an inteview with American Public Media, former U.S. poet Laureate Billy Collins maintains that electronic reading devices (by which I think he means EPUB readers, generally) aren’t well suited to poetry*:
Radke: How did you find the meaning of your poetry changed on the screen?
Collins: Well it wasn’t so much the meaning, it was just that poetry comes in lines, like gaslone comes in gallons. If you wanted the name of the creature that is the poet, they are like homolinearium — they’re like line-making creatures.
Radke: Haha, yes.
Collins:And that’s what we do, we make lines. Charles Olson, the poet, said no line must sleep, every line in a poem should be wakeful to the lines around it. And when you put a poem on a Kindle, the lines are broken in order to fit on the screen. And so instead of being the poet’s decision, it becomes the device’s decision.
I’m not sure if there’s a solution to font-size problem, and I hope that we don’t come to accept lower standards for the sake of e-books. Will we be stuck with PDFs for poetry, or apps only?
*thanks to Alizah at the Poetry Foundation for the heads up on the Collins interview.
A Note on Howl, the Movie
by Bud Parr on October 4, 2010
A movie about a poem? Really? How does that work?
Well, it helps if the poem was famous, and great, and had its own obscenity trial. It’s a nice reminder of how great the poem is, particularly when read aloud, and particularly in the face of the fact that there are still lots of places in this country where books are banned.
But is it good?
I went during the day to spare my wife having to sit through a movie about a poem. I was on my own and nearly walked out of the theater several times.
So it’s bad?
Not exactly. Time Out New York panned it. That’s too bad. They panned James Franco’s reading too, saying he “did little more than mimic Ginsberg’s squeaky tenor cadences,” calling him “too hipster-primped by half.”
I thought Franco’s reading was very good, the highlight of the film, along with the interview scenes (based on actual records). Maybe the Time Out reviewer is an expert, I don’t know, but I’ve read the poem myself, aloud, and I’ve listened to it read by Ginsberg what seems like a million times. The early recording [link] of Ginsberg reading it isn’t great, but he does build momentum (and, seemingly, confidence) as he goes on, just as Franco did. A later recording, which is set to Lee Hyla’s string quartet, “Howl,” and recorded in, I think, 1994, is a more mature Ginsberg when he really had come into himself as a reader. It’s a great great reading. There’s a stark difference between the two. Franco’s reading is set when Ginsberg had just recently written it. His performance seems not only accurate, but to some degree transporting and enjoyable.
The trial segment was “good” (Don Draper playing John Hamm, playing Ferlinghetti’s attorney, Jake Ehrlich) and the flashback scenes were ”okay” (I’m assuming that if you’re reading this, you’ve at least seen summaries or the film itself). The weaving of these elements I think was, nonetheless, a brilliant way to present the poem in film, largely letting it (and the record) speak for itself.
So, what’s bad enough that you’d want to walk out?
The Allen Ginsberg Project calls the animation scenes “underappreciated.” I think they’re just an abomination. Granted, in any other context they’d be considered artful and accomplished, but I agree with A.O. Scott in the NY Times, who said…
It is as if an earnest, literal-minded undergraduate had set out to illustrate “Howl” without understanding the essential difference between poetic and pictorial imagery, a distinction that was hardly lost on Ginsberg, a gifted photographer who counted William Blake among his crucial influences.
They were utterly distracting, so much so I wanted to hide my eyes, or worse, just leave the theater. They were jolting as though an ad or different movie had come on suddenly, and of course, they were insulting to the poem.
Watch the trailer below. There’s probably a reason you don’t see the animations much. Maybe one day there will be a people’s cut with a blank screen over those scenes.
Also see the “Allen Ginsberg Project” blog for links to a host of other opinions. Levi likes the animations.
Will Magazine iPad Apps Go the Way of the 8-track?
by Bud Parr on September 30, 2010
Love the new New Yorker iPad app. If I could have it as a subscription like I have for the print version (which I think I pay $25/yr for), I would certainly buy it, knowing that I’d never have to rip out another article to stick in my pocket as I run out of the house, and confident that I’d never wonder where ‘that’ article was I started a week ago and couldn’t find. Digital trumps print hands down for periodicals.
The New Yorker app, like most all the magazine apps available now, is visually appealing. The ads are attractive yet not terribly distracting. The navigation is infinitely better than print, as well as the integrated video or audio content.
Yet, stepping back, magazine publishers are falling well short of the promise of the magical device they’re publishing on.
National Geographic iPad app image broken up
Something’s missing. Dynamism, to start. A replica of a printed magazine doesn’t feel very dynamic because it’s not. In fact, it appears to be only a step above Zinio magazines (whom, I assure you, if they don’t innovate, will be in the graveyard soon because they really are nothing more than a replica of a print magazine and no better than a pdf file).
That ain’t going to cut it.
I don’t want to be a complainer. Really. If there were a good subscription model for The New Yorker iPad app, I would subscribe and bide time until it got better. I’d much rather read digital than print (on a dedicated device, that is, not a laptop) and I think everyone will in fairly short order as tablets and e-readers continue their march into the mainstream.
Yet, the fanfare of the common magazine app signals a march into digital with little more than lip service to the great potential for magazines. Here are a few observations:
The New Yorker app full page navigation
1) Navigation is all over the place right now. Some apps swipe right to left to go to a new page in an article – like a print magazine – and some scroll down – like a Website. Navigation from article to article is either a swipe or a tap or a scroll to find other articles. The full page navigation is marginally helpful.
Here’s where apps can learn from print. All print magazines I know of are consistent in the way one turns a page: a ‘swipe’. It’s nice not to confound expectations.
MacLife app (with navigation drawer open) has small print that's not zoomable.
2) What e-pub (my favorite format for magazines) does so nicely is to let readers determine their own optimal text size. Images of magazines in an app are static and you can’t even zoom in on them like you can with a web page on an iPad. Some are not bad. The New Yorker is readable despite choosing an unfriendly typeface in hopes – I suppose – of making long-time subscribers feel comfortable. But, the MacLife app (which also forgets your place when you leave the app, grrr) has small type.
The National Geographic app (powered by Zinio) is a hybrid in this regard. While flipping through the replica of the magazine, you are instructed to tap on a button to read the text. Doing so, you are given a text only version of the article (tada! flexible font-sizes). I’ve been reading National Geographic off and on since I was a kid. I would never. I mean NEVER have read text-only versions of their articles. Photographs are the heart of the magazine, and to separate the two because you know your replica of a magazine is unreadable otherwise is an inexcusable failure.
Gourmet Magazine’s app, Gourmet Live, which I think is a hybrid, web-based app, does allow for font-size changes, though it’s overall article design is linear, blog post-like and generally poor.
3) Magazines in the digital age should publish on a continuum. Like the feeds of blogs (and magazines) I read in my feed-reader, I want new articles to magically appear in my reading device (in real-time). In fact, I don’t think magazines should publish issues at all. While some magazines, like Current History, publish thematically, many are merely time-based, like The New Yorker, and must realize that an “issue” is a term that should be filed away with “print.”
I won! A related article I get for completing (scrolling through, at least) the last article.
Streams of articles can be published when they are ready. The New Yorker already has follow up blog posts to articles on their website. In the app, those posts should be part of the article, as well as pertinent metadata.
I want to see magazines pull in related concepts or articles. The Gourmet Live app does this, though I don’t care for the “game” aspect, or the fact that I can’t do anything with it until I’ve registered (the social-media centric kids who must have designed the app assume that everyone using it must surely have a Facebook or Twitter account to log in with, creating yet one more barrier to using their product). However, I really admire the concept of actively involving users, though I think – as unsexy as it sounds – a table of related articles or a way to save articles in an iTunes-like format might be more helpful. I do think the Gourmet Live app is the smartest I’ve seen and one to watch for how it improves over time.
So yeah, this is a bit of a rant – constructive, hopefully – but I think it’s worth questioning if “apps” are even the right medium for magazines. Apps can be ported from device to device, but without a standard format your magazine is that much more likely to disappear as devices come and go. Epub is a standard, it’s flexible and accessible on a wide variety of devices. I think more energy should be put into making good magazines in a format that allows for dynamism and fluidity, and can fit into a library or some file system, and skip the sexy features. Publishers should think in terms of all the ways each and every piece of content can be distributed instead shoehorning old concepts into hot new devices. Don’t let the tail (devices) wag the dog, as they say.
Obama, Dylan
by Bud Parr on September 28, 2010
I just love this, particularly since I remember hearing that Dylan was playing at the White House and thinking to myself, what the hell is Bob Dylan doing at the White House? This is President Obama talking about that event with The Rolling Stone:
Here’s what I love about Dylan: He was exactly as you’d expect he would be. He wouldn’t come to the rehearsal; usually, all these guys are practicing before the set in the evening. He didn’t want to take a picture with me; usually all the talent is dying to take a picture with me and Michelle before the show, but he didn’t show up to that. He came in and played “The Times They Are A-Changin’.” A beautiful rendition. The guy is so steeped in this stuff that he can just come up with some new arrangement, and the song sounds completely different. Finishes the song, steps off the stage — I’m sitting right in the front row — comes up, shakes my hand, sort of tips his head, gives me just a little grin, and then leaves. And that was it — then he left. That was our only interaction with him. And I thought: That’s how you want Bob Dylan, right? You don’t want him to be all cheesin’ and grinnin’ with you. You want him to be a little skeptical about the whole enterprise. So that was a real treat.
Read the entire article at The Rolling Stone. Obama fans will love every word, I did.
Craftsmanship
by Bud Parr on September 22, 2010
We recently watched the documentary “Note by Note: The Making of Steinway L1037” and the whole family enjoyed it. I only wanted to see it because I love music and the mystique that instruments hold, but I wasn’t really expecting what the story was really about: Craftsmanship, painstaking, minute, detailed craftsmanship.
The film follows a Steinway concert grand over the course of the year it takes to make it, from the forest trees where its wood comes from, to the factory in Queens where its created, to its place on the Steinway showroom where pianists will first develop their relationship with it. Over the course of the journey the film is dominated by interviews with the piano’s makers as well as some well known musicians who use Steinways. This juxtaposition of the makers and users is really the crux of the film. Both are lovingly dedicated to their art to a rarified degree, but aside from their passion what’s remarkable is the cause and effect the filmmakers draw out. The sixteenth of an inch cut or quality of a particular sheet of wood, the tolerances and exactitude of the placement of each key, these factors emerge as a piano’s personality through its creation. The musicians respond with great affection to one piano or another, as in one scene followed Pierre-Laurent Aimard looking for a “monster.”
A subtext of the film is that this sort of craftsmanship is dying. Where once their were hundreds of piano makers, now there are few, and there seemed to be some question of finding people in the future who might be willing to do this sort of work. Fortunately the film didn’t dwell there at all and instead celebrated the magnificence of these instruments.
Coincidentally, we just bought an electric piano for our family. It’s a very nice piano (not a keyboard, but a full-fledged piano) and it probably sounds as good as any spinet we could afford (seriously, it sounds great). What it might lack in elegance and beauty it makes up for in utility in a family of five where three boys will be going through piano lessons, banging away at the keyboard for years to come. We can play it as though it’s an organ or piano, and if we wished any number of other configurations. My wife is an avid pianist and she loves that she can turn the volume down and play at night, or put on headphones, which make it sound even better.
Yeah, there’s a sense of technology trumping craftsmanship. The ambivalence I feel about such matters – the fear of loss of things made with love, while at the same time enjoying the enabling affect of technology, is something that I hope never goes away.
Here’s a clip from the film: