Craig Mod - Considering the future of books, publishing and storytelling

A pointable we [3/3] - Satellite - Craig Mod

2012-04-25T05:38:32+00:00

A pointable we [3/3]

Other entries in this series:

Land Locked

Monkey Business is here in my hands, printed. Solid. A brick. I understand it. It's real. But from our corpus perspective, it's deflated. It doesn't have legs. The author's words start and end on the page. I can't point. It's not "close" like digital text. It isn't adjacent to anything. All I can do is create a simulacrum here, on my website. And legally I'm only allowed to simulacrumize a few things.

So this — those blockquotes floating over in part one — is me adding Murakami's conversation to the corpus. Our corpus. Putting it in a public space. Making it searchable. Pointable. Taking it out of my underlined, dog-eared pages, dumping it into Simple Note / Notational Velocity,^[1] and embedding a slice of that here on my public home.

Platforming

Which brings us to The Really Controversial Question a lot of print focused publishers grapple with: how much should be put online for free? And when? But I don't think those are the right questions. It's not about content being free or not, it's about content existing or not. Can I point? No? Then it's kinda not really there. At least not in the way we now expect. Undeniably, it's certainly not doing the work it could be doing.

All this ties back into the importance of platforms in digital publishing. The web, of course, is the largest, most open, device agnostic, and most pervasive (and thereby a great place to start). But this doesn't preclude others from emerging.^[2]

This lack of platforminess is what makes many iPad magazine apps impotent. They end up in no better a position than a printed magazine. There are no routes by which you can directly get to their content. You can't point in. You're forced to go through the "front door" to get anywhere. And it's a door usually weighing several hundred megabytes and infuriatingly difficult to unlock.

The reality is — because of the way in which we share content — we almost never even see the "front door" anymore. (Which indicates that the long-term value of an 'issue' drops precipitously with time.) If you find a piece of great content inside one of these apps, at most you can say: Hey! There's something interesting in there! Just download the app, swipe right ten times, up three, then tap to remove the text, rotate to landscape mode and I swear there's a great article in there! You gotta trust me. Which, of course, almost no one follows all the way to the interesting thing.

In a best case scenario the article you want to point at also exists on a website somewhere. But there's often no obvious connection between the closed (unpointable) article in the app, and the open (pointable) article on the web.

Close Your Loops!

Which is to say: the loops are left open. The reading-enjoying-sharing-engaging-reading loop can't be closed when your platform doesn't have universally, publicly accessible points.^[3] And right now, those points — to be truly universally accessible and pointable — need to be web based. It's our lowest common denominator of pointability.

So that feeling: if a text isn't online, then it doesn't exist. This needs a little amendment: If a text isn't online and publicly pointable, then it doesn't exist.

Commercially, it gets sticky. But Amazon and their Kindle-as-platform solves a bit of that.^[4] The New York Time's pay-fence is another alternative.

Just as I was about to publish this satellite entry, apropos this discussion, Harvard announced their massive meta-data injection into the corpus:

Harvard is making public the information on more than 12 million books, videos, audio recordings, images, manuscripts, maps, and more things inside its 73 libraries ... “This is Big Data for books,” said David Weinberger, co-director of Harvard’s Library Lab. “There might be 100 different attributes for a single object.” At a one-day test run with 15 hackers working with information on 600,000 items, he said, people created things like visual timelines of when ideas became broadly published, maps showing locations of different items, and a “virtual stack” of related volumes garnered from various locations.^[5]

It seemed remiss of me not to point at that.

All I know is the more I read digitally, the more this feeling — the strange joy of adding to the corpus^[6] and seeing where it takes us — grows inside me, and I can't be the only one to feel this. Adding to the corpus — making things pointable — has become habitual, and aspects of it are becoming more and more passive. These habits and expectations aren't going anywhere.

As a publisher your text is either in the corpus or it's not. And so there is no better time for great, print-locked publications like Monkey Business or countless other app-locked publications to show others what happens when their texts "exist," when they're made open and pointable.

Other entries in this series:

Noted:

Simplenote/Notational Velocity has become my de facto external brain. Everything gets dumped into it. If we're having dinner together and I take out my iPhone, I'm not checking my mail, I'm dumping part of our conversation into my external corpus to reference later. ↩
Although it seems like it would be very difficult to build a platform that doesn't touch the open web in one way or another. This is perhaps the fundamental difference between Kindle and iBooks — Kindle has thus far achieved much more platforminess than iBooks. That achievement has come largely due to (among many other things) Amazon's embracing of the open web as a public anchor for book highlights and notes. When you "share" a highlight, that highlight receives its own landing page on the web. Combine this with web based Kindle reading software and you'll begin to see Amazon's holistic understanding of balancing a closed, 'sale' (which can be an Amazon Prime checkout) oriented platform within the context of social media sharing. With links to purchase the books on all the landing pages, they fully understand how to close their loops. ↩
When's the last time you saw someone link to or talk about The Daily? ↩
The books live within the walled, paid Kindle garden but pieces can sneak out through public links to notes / highlights / samples — Amazon doesn't make people go in through the front door. ↩
Harvard Released Big Data for Books, The New York Times, April 24, 2012 ↩
And as I mention in part one, this also goes for location checkins, photos, hangouts and any other physical action with a digital hook upon which it can be hung. I've gone from abhorring checkins to feeling like they ground activities. Regardless — it's now our duty to feed the anonymous algorithms invariably watching over all of this. You don't want them to get hungry. You wouldn't like them when they're hungry. ↩

A pointable we [2/3] - Satellite - Craig Mod

2012-04-23T20:25:57+00:00

A pointable we [2/3]

Other entries in this series:

Links

We've built up a habit of pointing — effortlessly — through links, tweets, reblogs, and likes. And this is really efficient. Super easy. We all do it all the time. Pointing is embedded all over our digital surfaces. It's an incredible vector for spreading ideas and pushing or pulling attention towards or away from things.

Most importantly though, is that digital pointing is nearly frictionless. Not only is the energy between seeing a pointer and clicking it almost zero, but so too is the energy required to create that pointer.^[1] The less friction, the easier it is to form a habit.

Public Highlights

Connected to this, and more explicitly to do with reading, is the now exhaustively discussed idea of the digital public commonplace book.^[2]

Findings provides tools for commonplace capturing across all of the web. Amazon has created an actual commonplace-book-social-network (although still a minimum viable product). They both give public addresses to our little nut collections.^[3]

Traditional links allow us to point at whole documents or collections of documents.
These services let us point into documents.

Our notes and highlights get special powers as data in the public corpus. Search, of course. And increased accessibility. But also, they're votes. You're voting on interestingness within a particular text. There's a feeling that this is valuable data.^[4]

Because of this, as you're highlighting your book, there's an unmistakable and growing sense of social usefulness to the act. The highlight is doing some work (or will be doing some work), not just sitting there to (hopefully) help you remember something later.^[5]

In a recent interview, Clive Thompson, writer for Wired, mentions one tangible digital→physical example of leveraging his corpus of digital annotations:

I annotate aggressively. If I’m reading a piece of really long fiction, I often find that there are these fabulous things I want to remember. I want to take notes on it, so I highlight it, and if I have a thought about it, I’ll type it out quickly. Then I dump all these clippings into a format that I can look at later. In the case of War and Peace, I actually had 16,000 words worth of notes and clippings at the end of it. So I printed it out as a print-on-demand book. In short, I have a physical copy of all of my favorite parts of War and Peace that I can flip through, with my notes, but I don’t actually own a physical copy of War and Peace. ^[6]

The generalized takeaway is that we're evolving a set of habits and language (once active and now increasingly ambient and passive)^[7] around capturing "real world" stuff — not just book or reading related — in digital space.

Some core differences between a captured or uncaptured — networked (in the context of open platforms) or unnetworked — action is:

A networked action is sticky (Google never forgets)
Being networked undoes the Galapagos nature of an unnetworked something (everyone can see and search)
The action is codified and aligned with similar data (in a database)

The culmination of these qualities is a networked action ("I read", "I visited", "I saw", etc) on an open platform is persistent in a way totally different from its physical or closed or unnetworked counterpart. Each time we add an action to our public corpus, we perform a little act of faith ...

In part 3, we'll tie this back into Monkey Business and publishing platforms.

Other entries in this series:

Noted:

Google constructed a business and illuminated a zeitgeist around our excessive pointing. We've entered an age of terminal information velocity (baring perfect search) — where the discovery > production > sharing loops are the tightest they've ever been in human history. If you want perspective on how these sharing loops have evolved — how information transmission and consumption has sped from a trickle to the current torrential fire hose of today — check out James Gelik's The Information (or at least the first half of it). And to get a sense of how that firehose is affecting the very topology of our minds, push on through Nicholas Carr's The Shallows. ↩
Wikipedia on Commonplace books ↩
Here's my Kindle collection: kindle.amazon.com/profile/Craig-Mod/, and here's my Findings collection: findings.com/craigmod ↩
This applies not only to text but with all the data we're adding to the corpus. The checkins, food photos, tweets — we're assembling a granular, meta-data filled set of human mundanity (and by extension, extraordinarity). ↩
What, precisely, that "work" is is still to be seen. Like much of the varied data we add to the public corpus, the value of this information has yet to be fully realized. Our collective acts of creation have embedded within them a certain faith in a future usefulness. Perhaps it's naieve to believe our checkins at Starbucks will have any future value to us (... they most certainly will and already do have value to advertisers). But consciously or not, there's over a billion of us wholeheartedly subscribed to the church of data capture. ↩
How We Will Read: Clive Thompson ↩
Active: linking, liking, checking in; Passive: auto-checkins, who I passed nearby during the day (Highlight), % of book read, number of pages read, amount of time spent on an article, and so on. ↩

A pointable we [1/3] - Satellite - Craig Mod

2012-04-23T00:16:16+00:00

A pointable we [1/3]

Other entries in this series:

Where we've been.
What we're thinking about.
What we're reading.

We're networking, digitizing, and indexing all of this. Building a corpus. And the growing bizarro emotional quandary is: if an act — a checkin, a highlight, a note, a meal — isn't in the corpus, then is it real? If a tree falls in the forest …

Adjacency and Publishing

I'm sitting here in a little cafe reading the first issue of Monkey Business.^[1] Edited by Motoyuki Shibata and Ted Goossen, and published by A Public Space,^[2] Monkey Business "is a newly founded journal of new writing from Japan and abroad with a few not-so-new works strategically slipped in."

In this inaugural English issue there's a conversation between Hideko Furukawa and Murakami Haruki. It's long. It's intimate. In fact, I can't ever remember reading such a raw conversation with Murakami in English. Here's some of my favorite passages.

On after the quake and Murakami's systematic easing into third-person narrative:

Before I began I decided I'd write one story every one or two weeks, that each would feature characters that would be named, that I would write in the third person, and that the earthquake would link them all together.

On discipline and pace:

The lady who used to work at the club was amazed by how hard I worked — no other writer could match me, she said. For me, though, it was par for the course.

And then Furukawa on that pace:

I can see the athlete in you at work. It's as if the act of running and writing had merged together.

When Murakami finished work on his book, Sydney! about the Sydney Olympics, he had a writing epiphany:

I came away from that process finally convinced I really knew how to write: in concrete terms, I no longer had to stop and question whether I was capable of handling a particular scene — I could go on and write whatever came into my head, even if I had no familiarity with the subject matter.

And the interview goes on and on. They discuss the alternate Muakami-esque un-real reality of post-9/11 America, and Murakami's sense of looming mortality:

… at sixty, I pretty much know how many [novels] are left. All I have to do is count backwards.

And on and on and on some more. It's a wonderful text that was part of a print publication released last year. And I want to point point point at it for you. But I can't. At least not in the way we've become accustomed — digitally; into the publication. And I realize how entitled this may sound — but not being able to point means it feels like the text is not really out there. Like it doesn't exist.

To not exist means in part to be offline. Which is why it's so easy to understand this by using a print publication as an example. But the offline metaphor also extends into the digital world.

To not exist digitally means to be walled off. Silo'd. Unpointable. It means a text feels flat or lifeless or limp. Unnetworked (even if it's on the network). It's means to not be part of that growing corpus. Which, today, feels more damning than ever.

Other entries in this series:

Noted:

The Digital↔Physical - Craig Mod - Journal

2012-03-29T06:55:39+00:00

The Digital↔Physical

On Building Flipboard for iPhone and Finding the Edges of Our Digital Narratives.

The momentum of Steve Jobs - Satellite - Craig Mod

2011-12-25T07:04:13+00:00

The momentum of Steve Jobs

Note: I wrote this a few days after Steve’s death, but due to an intense work schedule, and being generally overwhelmed and wanting respectful distance from his death, I’ve finally now, as a cap to this long, winding year, properly edited and published this.

The sound is always explosive.

Shortly after one a.m. each night, the last southbound Caltrain passes between the Palo Alto and California Ave stations. Sometimes it whistles, but more often than not, it simply rushes down the tracks. Its clacking cacophonous. A signal to finally end my day.

I’m usually in my room when the violent clacking floods our house, filling the otherwise silent night of Old Palo Alto. And each time that train passes, I find myself wondering if Steve, too, is still awake. If he also heard that train.

Through matters of coincidence, when I moved to California last year, I landed just two blocks from Steve Jobs.

Despite being so close, I never met the man. Occasionally I saw him walk through the neighborhood, or eat at local restaurants, but we never interacted. I always assumed that at some point there’d be a natural, professional introduction. There was no need to invade or disrupt his privacy in public.

And so this train was, in my mind, our one constant connection. Every night it would pass. And if he was awake, surely, he too could hear the clacking or whistling, the rush of energy down the tracks.

I found myself wondering what he thought as it passed. If he even noticed it anymore, having lived here for so many years. Regardless, this shared train sound — however tenuous and grasping might such a connection be — helped humanize for me a man who was often painted nothing of the sort.

As I’ve written previously, Silicon Valley is where the gods very much eat yogurt with mortals.^[1] And Steve was no exception. His house has no visible security, no gate. It is modest. Nestled in a very tony neighborhood. But not so tony as to exclude three enterprising rag-tag entrepreneurs from also living here. The blinds are almost always open (as most tend to be in Old Palo Alto). TVs flicker at night. Lights go on and off. There is no mystery. Humans live there, certainly.

Time and time again, I found myself biking past Steve’s house — simply by the nature of it being on my path home. And time and time again I found myself drawing tremendous inspiration from the hyper-reality of his presence.

I’ve always felt — the quicker you can kill a dream by making it real, the quicker you see bigger, more important dreams once blocked by the first. The same goes for celebrity: the deconstruction of celebrity removes excuses. With mystery, and thereby celebrity gone, so also goes the pedestal. Their achievements can be more easily assessed at human scale.

The hagiographic accounts after the passing of Steve this year understandably cast his accomplishments in an otherworldly light. But in my mind, he will be, as he became to me in this past year, that guy over there also eating brunch at Calafia. The neighbor in a comfortable neighborhood who happened to posses a beautiful, driven mind. Not a saint or a god but simply a someone who had a vision and executed, methodically and consistently and unrelentingly.

After his cancer diagnosis, I can’t help but wonder if the sound of that train took on a new meaning for Steve. The gravity of his work yet done — and now with so little time in which to do it — must have washed over him. A set of visions to be made real, for which he had only to build a clear, unwavering path before his passing. I wonder if he heard that train rushing, its steel and iron hurtling through the dead of night, and felt a kinship. Knew that that was what he had to be. Focused, moving forward as fast as he possibly could. On the edge of a certain chaos. Alone in his journey. Pulling those ideas forward. Crassly devoid of nostalgia.

Now, for the first time since moving here, I am certain he doesn’t hear it.

Steve may no longer be here, but that train is. And each night it passes I’ll remember how much he accomplished in so little time, carrying so much weight. I’ll remember how he chose to pursue ideas that inspired a man staring down death. A man who absolutely would not and did not give up. Driven by vision, exploding ever forward down his path.

Noted:

Nurture the Difference — New York Times, August 2011 ↩

The shape of our future book - Satellite - Craig Mod

2011-09-06T07:02:28+00:00

The shape of our future book

“... the more one was lost in unfamiliar quarters of distant cities, the more one understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there.”
Marco Polo, talking to Genghis Khan
Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities

Note: This essay is the extended version of the talk I gave at the dConstruct conference in Brighton, UK, September 2011.

Over the last ten months of working at a startup, I’ve noticed that it’s very easy to lose perspective. That is, it's easy to forget to stick your head up and get context for the work at which your're cranking away. This is especially true while working on front-line digital content design problems.

The notion of a “new,” digital kind of book scares a lot of folks because there is such a rich fabric of romanticism, nostalgia and myth built up around the physical book. These qualities — romantic, nostalgic, mythical — are really indicative of emotion. And we don't want to lose that emotion. It's easy to forget this; I know I do. I forget how the weight of those myths (some real, some imagined) can and should be informing the work I’m doing now.

As designers working with ebooks, we are at a point of special convergence: many of the promises of digital books (promises that have been spoken for decades) are coming to fruition. Not the least of which being almost everyone carries with them a digital device capable of smartly displaying ebooks. But even more powerful is that all books in the world are being smooshed into a single point, and we finally have enough of a semblance of standards and distribution of devices to seriously consider interesting things to do with that point.

So I asked myself — how does one view the emotional weight of books in the context of our current excitement? And in asking myself this I found an image growing in my mind over the last few months. As I was doing the work of “now,” this image of the “past” grew stronger. That image manifested as a story — an imagined myth of the history of the book, converging with reality around the turn of the 20th century.

I'll be the first to admit that this is odd. But I found it to be tremendously useful as a framing device for the work I’m doing now. And my intent is to share this story as a model for creatively thinking about our kind of work — work that is so new, as to be shaping unseen experiences, but simultaneously connected directly with a weighty past.

Before the story, however, there are some ideas to keep in mind.

OUR NOW

Our basic truths:

Many people (beyond just a tech / first-adopter subset) are regularly touching digital books via iPads, iPhones, Kindles, Nooks, etc. (Clap, as it were, if you have one of those devices. *clap*)
From a user interface and experience perspective, the generalized notion of “content” and our older notion of “books” is merging. ^[1]

The current surface forms for digital books are far from perfect, but they work and are getting better with each device and software iteration. So, in my opinion, many of the critical future questions digital books designers will have to address don’t directly involve pure content layout. Future-book design is not merely about font sizes and leading. Instead, our hardest (and possibly most rewarding) problems will involve the intermingling of content and data.

Over the past ten months of working on digital content containers, I find myself keeping in mind — from a design perspective — three overlapping precepts:

Tame unfiltered data streams
Produce quiet data
Corral data

There are already any number of startups working to tame unfiltered data streams.^[2] The easiest way to think about this is to consider the current Twitter timeline view — if you follow even a reasonably small number of people, it’s nearly impossible to regularly consume the entire stream. The net result is obvious: information overload. We are left with a constant sense of maybe having missed something. Hence, one of the primary roles for an iPad application like Flipboard becomes to evoke a feeling of having made tame, the unfiltered. In concrete terms: we must smartly curate raw streams. And raw streams of data are starting to grow wider and deeper just beneath the surface of almost all digital reading experiences.

Tom Armitage wrote a great post while he was working at BERG in London about the “quiet confidence” of the Kindle compared to the iPad.^[3]

Attention-seeking is something we often do when we’re uncomfortable, though – when we need to remind the world we’re still there. And the strongest feeling I get from my recently-acquired Kindle is that it’s comfortable in the world.

And then:

If this device is to replace, for many people, a book, it needs to manifest some of those qualities: safe, nonthreatening, no more distracting than a few hundred of pages of text intend to be. It needs a quiet confidence to make you trust it more.

I think the same concept of “quiet confidence” can be applied to data. Namely — in designing user experiences we need to produce data that doesn’t draw attention to itself explicitly as data.

These first two precepts are wrapped in the third — to corral data. Which is to say, the results of taming unfiltered streams and quiet data shouldn’t detract with the content experience.

As an example, Kindle public highlights straddle the edge of quiet — they’re there but can be turned off. And they’re also corralled — unlike hyperlinks leading away from the text, they don’t really lead you anywhere; they’re just a “Hey! Lotsa folks find this interesting.” sorta reminder.

The obvious followup question to all of this is: what do these data precepts have to do with digital books? Well, as it turns out, our reading applications are growing more data sophisticated with each release. They are collecting more information about what we do inside of a book. How long we read. What we read. Put simply: large, passive sets of metrics around our reading activities are being produced.

Peter Collingridge gave a wonderful talk^[4] at the O’Reilly Tools of Change conference in early 2010 about how his company collects and uses metrics around reading experience:

From the moment the very first printed book was sold, there has always been a relationship between publishers, readers, and marketing activity. It’s just been invisible. Short of breaking into people’s houses there is very little a publisher knows about a book after it is sold.

Now they (publishers, digital reading devices) know significantly more.

One result of the collection or sharing of reading metrics (both passive and active data) is the development of communities. Amazon's Kindle site is evidence that Amazon is clearly moving in this direction. Readmill is another startup looking to capture and surface the same sorts of community reading data.^[5] There are many others, of course.

Data aware

Designers working on the future form of the book need to be aware of these emerging datasets. It’s only through an awareness that we can surface them without harming the reading experience. And data, in my opinion, “harms” the reading experience whenever it pulls the reader away from the text, or forces them to concentrate harder than they would with a physical book.

But, still, with all of this in mind, it's critical not to forget we’re working at the tip of the edge of a field with a tremendously rich past. Working on these startup-like problems can lead to lack of perspective. And lack of perspective makes us forget about the evocative experiences the physicality of printed books brought to reading. Matt Might has a wonderful illustration of what it means to get a Ph.D.^[6]

Working in a startup context is pretty similar to working on a Ph.D. Startups are startups because they're pushing on the edge of some field. And if you're working with digital books, by default you're doing startup work. We have to make sure we don’t get stuck in that “knowledge nipple” in Matt's illustration — we need tools to zoom back out and remember the greater whole.

Distance

And so — the story. The myth. A framing, imagined, yes, but still a framing. There are many myths around books, but this is mine. And for me, this sort of exercise becomes a tool for grounding; stepping back; and if not seeing, hopefully feeling the whole.

In the opening quote — "... the more one was lost in unfamiliar quarters of distant cities, the more one understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there." — Marco Polo was responding to Khan's question of “Why do you travel?” Khan criticized Polo of failing to bring back riches, just stories. And Polo's response is about perspective. Perspective was riches enough for him. As it turns out, Polo was never traveling anyway — his stories, too, were imagined.

Really, in presenting this, I’m asking you to consider your myth around the book. What emotion does the book of the past evoke for you? What does it mean for you as a designer? Is there a way to carry some of that feeling forward into the work we're doing today? There's a plethora of wonderful things digital brings to books, but they shouldn't come at the expense of the confident experiences already embedded within the idea of books.

AN ETHEREALITY

Thousands of years ago and thousands of miles outside of the port village of Shanghai, in the strange hot cold deserts of the Gobi — the endless sea — deep in the heart of Mongolia, it was discovered.

At first, nobody knew what it was. It was too large to be immediately understood. The precise dimensions, while at the time unknown, ended up measuring roughly five kilometers long (north-south) by two kilometers wide (east-west), with a depth into the sands of nearly half a kilometer. The speculation is that it had been buried much, much deeper but with time the sand had shifted and the world had, slowly, lifted the object up from the desert floor.

SEED OF MYTH

Nobody knows who, exactly, was the first person to stumble upon a piece of it. But each village has their own theories and their own mythologies have evolved around the discovery. For some it was a child, others an old woman. There are tales of wanderers with visions and conquerors with nightmares.

Regardless, who found it or how it was found is of no concern. There is only now, the result of the finding, and how we arrived here into which we need to look.

THE PROMISE OF FORM

From the point of first discovery to understanding the enormity of the object took nearly two hundred years.

Word spread slowly through sub-mythologies about this object — coarse and dark, sometimes poking through the sands of the valleys of the desert. Unnaturally straight, level. Over time, it became the focus of countless speculations.

For many generations it simply loomed in the contradictions of evolving mythology — a thing, a nothing, an everything. Something worth investigating or ignoring. Dismissed, considered.

Still, slowly the people found the edges. Mapping technology improved and information was shared. Lines triangulated. Expeditions sent to measure. To look for other instances. It was large enough to confuse generations but not large enough to be entirely impenetrable.

Once a general sense of the size was achieved, primitive technologies — but technologies none the less — were invented to move sand and earth more efficiently for the purpose of excavation. Thousands worked in concert over generations to displace what was covering this thing.

MYTH MADE TANGIBLE

Finally, the earth alongside and above the thing was moved. The totality of the size of the object could be fully understood. From the crest of the Alashan Plateau on the outer edges of the Gobi, it was visible — stark, the contrast of its deep brown surface beautiful against the golden and light brown sands. Something demanding absolute consideration.

It was tremendous in volume, and looked to be covered entirely in a seamless layer of animal skin. The scientists of the time worked out that there was a hinge along the western long edge. And that maybe, just maybe if they could work out a system by which to apply force, the top layer could be moved about that hinge.

Again — calculations. A generation. It had now been hundreds of years since the first discovery of this thing. Its existence had embedded itself into the very fabric of the desert societies living near and around it. Stories of the object had spread as travelers moved along the silk road. Traders described the rough surface, it’s impossibility of form to family back home. You could find it in the ghost stories of children. In the bedtime chatter between parents. In the whimsical remembrances of the elderly. Songs were sung about it, to it and for it.

EMBEDDED CULTURE

The great push to move about the hinge began. Consider the mere size of the object! How could this ever be moved?, many said. But still, the scientists understood the simple mechanics of a simple machine to multiply force. They understood leverage and pulley systems. Certainly, they thought, through mechanical advantage this could be done.

The calculation was that it would take 20,000 men of peak physical strength^[7] to move the top layer. It would take them a coordinated effort over a period of years. But these villages, these societies were now accustomed to these efforts, these sacrifices. They remembered the years of mapping. The expeditions to understand the breath of the thing. The generations of digging and displacement. Their cities were surrounded by the walls of excavated sand and earth that had once encased the object.

They had heard from their parents, and parent’s parents. From great gandparents and beggars of the desert. From mystics and scientists alike. From all of these people they had heard of the object. It had been a part of their lives, always present, always demanding attention, evoking questions. Providing no answers. Nourishing only a mythology of speculation. Else, nothing. And so this had become a society comforted by and habituated into sacrifice. With this in mind, the training began.

MYTH DISSEMINATION

Boys were taken from families and sent to camps. These desert nations were building armies of pushers and pullers. A massive human can opener. At these camps, technologies of leverage were iterated on, tested. Systems by which to announce the PUSH and PULL across kilometers and kilometers of desert were devised. Everything had to move in perfect synchronicity.

Finally, they were ready.

Thousands of camps were setup around the object. Food supply chains established. Endless streams of water diverted to fuel the efforts. It was determined that the pushing and pulling would take weeks, if not months, to get the lid of the object to a state of total verticality. Because of the volatility of the desert — the hot and cold, the night frost, the unbearable afternoon heat — the movements would take place only at dusk and dawn, timed precisely to intervals of the moon rising or setting, during the hour in which the sky cycles into or out of nothingness.

Thousands of ropes were attached to the outer lip of the top of the object, ropes kilometers and kilometers in length. Each the diameter of a man’s thigh. They were draped across the burning animals skins, now beginning to fade from a dark to light brown as they had been exposed to the harsh desert sun for nearly a hundred years. Skins that screamed and screeched to the undulating temperatures of the Gobi.

Ten thousand men lined up on one side of the object. Two kilometers away, another ten thousand other men lined up with ropes. Wedges ground out from the bones of massive animals, now extinct — had been made extinct in the process of tool production — were in hand. Scholars draped in saffron robes waited anxiously, notepads held closely. Everyone was ready.

The signals were sent — combinations of fugue-like iterations of song, with specially understood points of phase overlap on which the pushing and pulling would happen. Under the first full-moon of the 6th month of this year — the year of the opening — beneath billions of bits of cosmic information, the song rippled out across the deep blue of the night that is so characteristic of an open, endless desert.

The men on the side of the hinge pulled, the men on the side of the flap, pushed. Wedges were inserted, a creaking that was said to be heard as far as the plateaus of Tibet was released from the object. A painful groan.

That first night they managed to move the top of the object almost a meter into the air before men were passing out, hands bleeding. They rested for a day and then again, the songs rippled out. Children remember those nights — the haunting music coming from far off in the desert. For months they moved the object centimeter by centimeter higher. A few times they lost their grip, men were crushed under the weight. Limbs were severed as the song would sometimes fall off rhythm and the efforts become uncoordinated. But they had trained precisely for this pain. For this exertion. For the sacrifice of opening this thing that had haunted them for generations.

After months the top of the object reached peak verticality and with one last heave, one last ho, the hinge let out of massive sigh — this time, of total relief — as the lid, the cover, if you can imagine, this vertical tower two kilometers high and five kilometers long, teetered for a moment as the first morning light exploded from the east, casting a shadow hundreds of kilometers long, as this object then came crashing down the other side of the desert.

Nobody had anticipated the force with which that object would attack the desert floor. Millions of pounds of animal skin, dried and smoothed smashed the sands with such impact, that all of the men on the side of the hinge who didn’t make it into shelter were killed. The sand ripped through the air like a trillion needles — evaporating nearly everything in its path.

Still — it was open. And this wasn't the first sacrifice to have been made.

CULTURE OF TANGIBLE MYTH

Once opened, once the dust had settled, as it were — the scholars poured in en mass. Revealed beneath that top skin were perfectly smooth sheets of pulp with huge, thick marks of deep, black ink. The marks were multitudinous — billions upon billions of them. It wasn’t until months later, when someone looked upon the object from the Altai Mountains, that they realized just what had been unearthed — a fractal of information. The billions of tiny marks on each page, when viewed from afar, formed larger, individual marks. Stories embedded within stories. Each layer of pulp a page in a greater story, and each character on each page composed of a thousand sub-stories.

It took hundreds more years to get through the first few layers. Despite the best attempts at protecting the object, there were countless problems. Theft was rampant — large swarths of pulp were cut off in the dead of the night. Some folks revered the object, other loathed it. There were any number of attempts to destroy the entire thing with fire.

It wasn’t long before the nearby governments realized the pulp was useful for a number of things and so they began to harvest it. The excess of pages, once categorized and filed away to the best of the ability of the scholars were sliced into millions of pieces.

TOTAL DEMYSTIFICATION

The stories became currencies, peopled used it for barter, you could buy a basket of rice for a pound of story. The more black ink the more valuable. At first it was trade through nostalgia — the value of simply owning a piece of the core of now nearly a thousand years of their own culture. The ethereality of their myth made tangible. Culture folding into culture. As uses for it grew, so did the value.

Clothes were fashioned from the stories. They wore the promise of the myths of their great-grandparents to the market, the temples. Ground in water and boiled, the stories made a fine, earthy stew. Little children slept between sheets of the stories. Above and below a piece of a piece of a story. Their new dreams mixed with the old dreams, sleeping between both the myth of the object — something about which now dozens of generations had dreamt — and atop the myths contained within the object, still unknown, still under scrutiny.

New traditions sprung up. New romanticisms. When babies were born they were given a piece of the story. As the children grew older they would carry the piece with them, and upon making a new friend, a new lover, an enemy they would compare pieces, see if they were adjacent. An infinitesimally small chance of rebuilding an impossible puzzle.

Time passed. Large pieces of the object were lost in wars. It took hundreds more years to understand the languages. The symbols in artists’ renditions of the larger pages — the macro story — were used to decipher the micro languages. Slowly the mythologies of the stories were united with the actual stories themselves.

ZEROED OUT

They were reproduced. Commoditized. Through the age of mechanical reproduction all nostalgic quality of the stories was lost. The myths of the myths were produced alongside the actual myths. People forgot which were the originals, which were invented.

They became further atomized. The objects were called books. The age of mechanical reproduction gave way to the age of photographic reproduction and the books were reproduced once more. Made small, nearly invisible. Such so that almost all of them would fit atop a reasonably sized desk.

They were getting closer to nothing.

At first glance these microscopic books photographed and atop a table were more similar than ever to their idea of that object embedded in the desert so long ago. But the atomization process, while making them untouchable — the physicality of the content directly inaccessible to human senses — had compressed them into a single dimensional point in the eyes of our tools.

In this the book is no longer a package
— it’s information service.

Said of course in 1967, by, of course, Marshall McLuhan.^[8]

ETHEREAL AGAIN

What happened in the forty years following has been a mere formalization of this atomization. An attempt to agree upon and codify that single point into which all books — and content — have been compressed.

It seems as if we are now, once again, on the edge of something buried in a desert. There is the myth of what that object might be. There is a dissemination within our culture through devices and distribution channels of varying iterations on that myth. We see it everyday, all around us. And are presently building tools to excavate that object, but we’ve yet to find the right ones.

While similar in idea to that imagined desert book, the difference now is that the object or objects we’re pulling out are no longer just the stories themselves — they’re also our interactions with the stories. Each time we turn the page, a machine knows. Records. Triangulates.

New mappings are being constructed — for an object of which we don’t yet know the size. Of which doesn’t have a determinate size.

For these mappings, as designers and engineers, we’re building a container. We’re looking for a new form. And it’s frustrating and scary at times, but I think for everyone working in this space, there is an overwhelming sense of gratitude to be here now, at this particular moment in time, working on this problem. Searching out the future book.

Noted:

"Content" is such a horrid word, but it's what we've got. Regarding the convergence of generalized content and digital books — from an interface / user experience point of view — consider Instapaper, which looks and feels in many ways like the Kindle app or iBooks. ↩
Perhaps the most obvious yet also most overlooked is Facebook. Not a startup anymore, but a tremendous amount of energy in that company goes into making your Top News newsfeed a consumable number of interesting items, changing based on your Facebook browsing habits. The raw newsfeed for an average user has something like 2,500 daily items in it. ↩
Asleep and Awake, Jan 2011 — http://berglondon.com/blog/2011/01/14/asleep-and-awake/ ↩
Tools of Change: Analytics Wake Up Call, Jan 2010 — http://www.enhanced-editions.com/blog/2010/02/tools-of-change-analytics-wake-up-call/ ↩
Readmill: http://readmill.com/ (Email me if you want an invite!) ↩
The Illustrated Guide to a Ph.D: http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/ ↩
Louis CK Show, Season 1, Ep: "God" ↩
Marshall McLuhan Interview, 1967 — http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMEC_HqWlBY ↩

Post-Artifact Books and Publishing - Craig Mod - Journal

2011-06-14T08:28:33+00:00

Post-Artifact Books and Publishing

Thinking about books after Books. Publishing after Publishers.

There is the making of content. The content container. Then, our playful dance around the container.

How does digital affect these spaces? How do we talk about these spaces?

Twitter archives and the sendai quake - Satellite - Craig Mod

2011-06-02T08:44:50+00:00

Twitter archives and the sendai quake

In April of this year, I had the privilege of speaking at CreativeMornings’ San Francisco^[1] chapter. This was a honor for me on a number of levels, not the least of which being I had attended the very first Creative Mornings in New York City some three years prior. It was there I first met Swiss Miss.^[2] I have a lifelong hobby of closing loops, and so being able to speak at the San Francisco Typekit office, looking out over the city on that bright and sunny April morning, allowed me to close yet another.

The talk was called A Strange Flight. And it grew from a recent trip I had taken to Japan. A trip in which I arrived in Tokyo just hours after the 9.0 Sendai Quake. You can watch the talk here:

2011/04 Craig Mod | A Strange Flight from SanFrancisco/CreativeMornings on Vimeo.

The more we’re involved with the creation of systems — be them iOS, HTML, EPUB, literary or photographic based — and the greater the reach of these systems, the stronger I feel shift the definition of our role as “designers.” There’s a growing obviousness that a designer must be holistic. That a designer must be someone who understands the output from the perspective of user, engineer and audience within the context of entertainment or business or social change. As someone who attempts to empathize fully with all perspectives (or at least those currently perceivable) and desires with an eye towards the functionality of the system. And synthesizes those desires organically, quietly and genuinely into the interface and user experience.

So, considering this, I’ve begun to operate under the ethos of:
Great design is born from nourishing habits

And, perhaps, as an addendum:
Great design is born from constant application of nourishing habits across all life experience.

While my intent for 2011 was one of placidity and predictability, it’s been anything but. Arriving in Tokyo on the day of the earthquake has been one of several aberrations this year. And it has been because of these aberrations that I’ve started to recognize this underlying philosophy in my work.

The three core habits informing the ethos are:

A constant effort towards empathy
A non dismissive stance
A shifting between micro (local) and macro (global) perspectives

By constantly working towards empathy in any situation, you are inherently being non-dismissive. And if the goal is to achieve a holistic empathetic stance, then you need to understand a problem on both micro and macro levels. How does this problem affect components closely tied to the system? And how does it affect the greater macro ecosystems of which it’s a part?

Arriving in Tokyo on the day of the quake placed Twitter and Facebook into interesting and well defined use cases. Twitter was overwhelmingly the go-to service for first-person reportage on what was happening during the quake. In fact, I used Twitter to go back in time and “relive” the moment the quake hit for a number of my friends. I was able to experience the quake through their eyes and immediately perceive — on a tremendously intimate micro-scale — the gravity of the events.

The more I used Twitter to understand and check on the safety of friends, the more I realized there was — dare I say — a moral obligation on the part of Twitter to provide easier access to this archival data. In fact, weeks later, when I was first gathering data for my talk, I found it nearly impossible to scrobble back in time and capture — with granularity — these first-person narratives that so uniquely and spectacularly defined the experience of being in Tokyo during the quake. That I had to work hard for this data seemed to be a sad shortcoming of the Twitter interface. And it made me wonder how many other folks would benefit (emotionally, psychically, educationally) from access to well mapped contingencies of Twitter data.

Being there on the ground during this event, and having that hyper-local perspective allowed me to see precise changes in the way social media was used. After the intense initial reportage period passed (by Saturday), Twitter devolved into a sort of Kaczynskian-esque chamber of conspiracy. The government was lying! (Turns out, they were.) and we were all on the verge of death! and acid rain was coming! and take your iodine tablets! now! to save yourself before it’s too late! and! and! and! Which did nothing to quell or calm fears. And none of which were based on verifiable facts. (“A friend in the government told me ... !”)

On the flipside, Facebook, largely ignored during the first-person reportage period of the quake, shined as the place for communicating with family. I witnessed friends in Japan posting constant updates and photos as to their whereabouts. And saw family members from around the world react with happiness and relief.

This clear bifurcation^[3] of use made me wonder why we turned to these services in these ways. It’s hard to see it boil down to anything but design choices.

There are four design reasons why I think we all run to Twitter to perform first-person reportage:

It’s focused. You can only do one thing (really) in Twitter: say what’s in front of you.
It’s lightweight. Both in terms of data (mainly just text packets) but also in terms of interface. (Although the growing interface complexity of recent releases worries me.)
It’s efficient. You open it, you post, you leave. Quick.
It has a near perfect delivery mechanism. The open model of one to many and the publicly linkable nature of most tweets combine to form a very strong platform for quickly disseminating front-line reports.

It’s also interesting to note that there are now effectively two Twitters:

Twitter as micro-curation tool
Twitter as reportage tool

Application such as Flipboard leverage Twitter’s micro-curatorial tendencies and output beautifully formatted consolidations.

Hashtags help consolidate reportage happening within Twitter. But we’re still lacking a more efficient interface.

In both cases, the notion of an archive plays different but important roles. Particularly, in the case of reportage, Twitter could provide smart meta-data groupings (geo, for example) to aid in surfacing and consolidating historically resonant narratives from the muck.

Facebook, on the other hand, has been guided by a very different set of design decisions. In contrast to Twitter:

It’s not particularly focused. There are countless activities from posting updates to commenting on photos to creating groups to playing games.
It’s heavy. It pulls a lot of data every time you open it.
It’s inefficient. To jump in and just post an update is to ignore a plethora of multimedia and notifications vying for your attention. (But it's hyper efficient at other sub-activities such as tagging photos.)
The closed system of reciprocity in followship limits its mass broadcast capabilities.

I don't mean to imply one is better than the other, simply that the differences in use cases stem from core design decisions. The fact that the mobile Twitter app is so simple, and its purpose so well defined means most people thoughtlessly and immediately turn to it in times of crisis reporting. The same simplicity comes back to bite it when the reportage ends and the conspiracy begins — echoing sentiment through retweeting is a totally effortless, mindless task. Sound-bite like comments, without any basis in reality, spread like wildfire.

That said, once the dramatic first-person reportage ends, the mundane reportage (all clear over here, no dead animals from radiation poisoning, ramen shops still open!) becomes eminently useful. For the first time ever I want to know you're eating a sandwich. And certain folks become powerful resources as news curators — filtering the chaos to provide a stream of links to rational articles and sources.

It’s through building the habits of a constant effort towards empathy, non-dismissal and perspective shifting that we designers become more aware of motivations behind use cases in products we create or use. Without understanding the psychology and motivations of use, it’s nearly impossible to create genuine interfaces. And without real empathy, you’re often left with surface design and no substance.

This video speaks mainly my experience during the events in Tokyo. But each piece of the talk is meant to emphasize embracing the three tenets of the above ethos — even in the most stressful situations. Of making them a habit that is defining and informative not just for ones work as a designer, but also in ones life as a creator.

As for Twitter archives — it's a hard problem. And I can see how it might not be a top priority within the company. But I hope that there is a sense of how important the right interface to those archives can be. And how surfacing the stories captured within Twitter's efficient reportage ecosystem could be one of the company's strongest, most beautiful assets.

Noted:

http://www.creativemornings.com/ ↩
She approached me and commented on my Mondaine watch — the things designers remember! ↩
To be fair, it isn't entirely clear cut. Facebook was used to rally up volunteer supporters through Facebook group functionality, and certain Twitter users became the go-to place for calm, metered curation of emerging news on the nuclear situation. ↩

The nourishing wake - Satellite - Craig Mod

2011-03-20T01:30:01+00:00

The nourishing wake

A music video about America plays on the monitors hanging above immigration. I finally sigh — I had been holding my breath for a week — as I pass under the unintentional parody and hand my passport to the immigration officer. He glances, stamps, and sends me through.

Ten hours earlier, a quarter of a world away, I was sitting in Ebisu having beers, eating udon and tempura and discussing a Japanese friend’s upcoming book of poetry. It was exceedingly normal — the situation (not the poetry). Particularly normal relative to the chaotic light under which foreign media had been portraying Tokyo. Folks around us chatted. Nobody talked about the nuclear power plant. It certainly didn’t feel like a panicked city.

Now, standing in the airport, waiting for my bags in front of the conveyer belt, that all felt unsettlingly distant. A man next to me coughs without covering his mouth and I laugh to myself. This. This is my worry now. The coughing man.

Finally, my bags arrive. I grab them and walk to customs. The tiny customs guard makes a special mark on my form and I am sent to be inspected. My inspectress is a young latin woman, late twenties perhaps. Chatty, chubby, quintessentially American. Unprovoked, she remarks that this is her favorite arriving flight — JL002 — because the Japanese are just so gosh darned polite and orderly.

I flirt with her and ask, “What do you think tipped ‘em off about me?” nodding to the customs guard. She smiles and says, “Well, I’m not allowed to say.” And then, whispering, “But it was probably the backpack.”

Suddenly, as if by cue, she straightens up, puts on her serious face and asks, “Do you wish to change your declaration, Sir? Is there anything in your bags you wish me to know about now before I open them?”

Yes, I want to tell her. Yes, I change my declaration. I brought everything with me. Everything. I flew to the plants and scooped up all the waste. It’s in the back pocket. In the TSA regulation one quart ziplock plastic baggie. I pulled all of the poison out of the air — I drew it deep into my lungs and exhaled into my socks. My socks are full of the radiation, don’t touch the socks. I pulled the tsunami back. I drew the inland water back into the ocean. I pulled it over the rice paddies, unflattening them; the trees, straightening them — a billion billion leaves fluttering back into position. I drew the water back, back, back. It was easy because it was what I had to do, I tell her looking her straight in the eyes. Perhaps you don’t understand, but I had to. As the water washed backwards over the towns, homes were placed firmly onto the soil. The elderly were swept the opposite of away, they were swept into. Into their lives: onto tatami, sipping tea, listening to the radio, getting their hair done, strolling in the beautiful early spring light, thinking about their grandchildren who were going to visit in a week over the long holiday. Old buildings were suddenly rebuilt, emerging from the wake plank by plank. You should have seen it. It was fantastical. Busses full of people rushing to escape drove skillfully backwards into parking lots and everyone got out in a hurry to return to the mundane. The wake washed over their memories. They forgot the wall of water. They forgot the resignation of simply not being fast enough, or young enough (or old enough — the children) to escape. Other walls, those of the towns, of concrete and stone, grew from the wake of the reversed wave. A wake of pure nourishment and creation. Folks on high-ground cheered as they watched the wave place back their history. The wave washed over the power plants last, cooling them down. Putting the workers in their blue jump suits back into their chairs, in front of their buzzing and beeping consoles that surely every power plant must have. Consoles reading, “Reactors 1, 2, 3 and 4 — A OK!” in big roman letters. As panic rushed out, daydreams about after hours beers and mistresses and playing with their children over the weekend all flooded back. Back into the worker's heads. Hundreds of kilometers away, I tell her, in Tokyo, residents returned in hordes. They came from Osaka and Kyoto, Nagoya, Fukuoka and Shizuoka. Foreigners flew back with their families from Australia and Italy. England. Hong Kong. China. From far away, looking through a telescope, I saw the microscopic faces of ex-pat French embassy workers subtly shift from mortal fear to resigned ennui. Japanese galloped backwards to shops and dramatically placed onigiri on the shelves. Loaves of bread were overflowing into the isles. Convenience stores were buying up bags of rice from every man, woman and child. The whole orchestration was quite the sight. An entire populace transformed into anti-thespians of recovery. Everyone sucking drama out of the city air. Exhaling normalcy. Houses shed their piles of batteries, their teepees of toilet paper, candles and flashlights. Millions were vacuumed from the streets up into their office buildings. Removing their silly white protective helmets. Hundreds of thousands crawled out from under their desks. File cabinets righted themselves. Blinds ceased smacking windows. Shards of broken glass flew up and landed as whole bottles atop desks. Swaying buildings came to a standstill. The tip of Tokyo Tower straightened itself. Back in the small villages, the violent rivers of crushing water were reduced to streams, trickles. And then to nothing as I pulled with all my might. Dragging that wave back deep, down into the blackness of the ocean. Past a whale. Schools of curious fish. Into the ocean floor. I followed it down. I chased that fucker into the ground. I bottled it up, it’s in my shampoo. Don’t touch the shampoo. I went deeper into the earth and I took the plates that were antsy and I let them move but I dampened their guttural yell. I soaked up their vibrations with my chest, the thick wool of my sweater ate up 9.0 worth of quake. I soaked it up but let the aftershocks through. They were OK. I knew they wouldn’t cause harm. All of the death and destruction. The fear. The ambiguity of the politicians and the power company. Those ridiculous helicopters. The anxiety over not hearing from loved ones. The scarred hearts, the lost photos and kimonos and crushing worry. I took it all, I grabbed it all. It’s right here in that bag. Sandwiched between my underwear. He was right. The inspector. He was right to mark my ticket. To single me out. This is the most dangerous bag here. But you can open it if you want. It doesn’t matter any more because it’s over.

She fumbled trying to close a zipper — here let me help you. “You’re good to go,” she said cheerfully. Then, adding, “Thanks for the chat.”

Had I been talking to her? I couldn’t remember. Most of the past week came at best in fits and starts. I looked down. My hands were shaking but the ground wasn’t. It was a reversal I could live with.

I tried my best to smile back at her but it was then I realized how tired I was. We all were. Exhausted. Holding our breath. We had known what was, and seen what is — and that knowledge was propelling us forward. Knowledge that informed a common, shifting perspective. An entire country carrying a backpack heavy with experience, ready for one night of deep, uninterrupted sleep. It would come soon enough. And we’d wake changed. Stronger. I felt certain. Ready to pull back on whatever came next.

Context — me and Japan:
I've lived the majority of my adult life in Tokyo and maintain a residence there. As of October 2010 I've been living and working full-time in California. When the quake hit on March 11th, I happened to be somewhere over the Pacific on a Haneda, Tokyo bound plane. They didn't announce the quake (why would they?). Nor did they announce it once we landed. I was heading to Tokyo to give a talk about publishing and startups, and pay my taxes (death or taxes!). It was a week long trip and I returned to California when it was complete. I wrote this the following afternoon upon returning.

In praise of shadows - Satellite - Craig Mod

2011-02-05T21:00:48+00:00

In praise of shadows

A reader writes:

I don't feel that print will ever truly die, but it's inevitable that e-books will become the norm. And I'm excited for what the digital book can eventually be, because as you've made very clear, it is very flawed at the moment.

I'm sending this e-mail asking to see if you had any advice on what I could do as a student to help improve the state of e-books? The only thing I can really think of is to possibly aim for internships with Apple, Amazon, or some other e-book publishers (like Inkling) to be involved. But there must be other ways I can help. Any ideas?

I get variants on this question frequently, so I thought I'd summarize some thoughts publicly.

First, as has been said before: print is not dead, it's only getting better. So let's brush that concern aside!

How can you improve the state of eBooks? This and more:

Read voraciously and on every device within reach.
Take copious notes on the device.
Take copious notes about the device.
Take your eBooks on adventures.
Read while traveling.
On trains, in planes, on the backs of elephants, by the beach.
What about the experience delights?
And, to a lesser degree, what annoys? (But try to focus on delight.)
Do not feel compelled to scale your map 1:1 with print.
Write.
Consider how you write.
Get a typewriter and write on that. ^[1]
Now try writing the same thing on a computer.
Now get a wonderful pen and write longhand.
Wax on. Wax off. As it were.
Try to publish something, anything with a traditional publisher.
Publish on a blog for a while.
Think about those processes.

The honeypot around eBooks is to think only in terms of artifact. When, in fact, artifact is the just a thin (and thinner still) surface layer built atop a cacophony of systems and scaffolding. ^[2] Those systems are where the real change is happening. Affecting the future of the book is one part understanding the processes of reading, one part understanding writing, and one part understanding publishing.

It's an intimacy with these systems for which you should aim. And have fun — you're spelunking into the cobwebbed caves of the minds of your beloved authors. Into the shadowy recesses behind the words. To tread the same paths, use the same tools as did they. It should give you greater insight into the works produced with those certain tools, within the constraints of those certain publishing mechanisms.

The point being that digital changes all of these systems and tools once again. To see those gaps of past and understand the emergent gaps of present, is to gain insight into future form of the book.

Noted:

In the winter of 2009 I borrowed a friend’s Olivetti and set about a goal of several thousand words per day over the course of two weeks. I hunted down beautiful, thick, soft cottony paper. I set it up on a wooden table in my well lit Tokyo room. And I started writing. It had been years since I used a typewriter. Decades, perhaps. And the effect was shocking! I found my thoughts conforming to the media — ideas wrapping up as the end of the page drew near; the edges of the page affecting the words I’d use. And when a day of writing came to an end, there was the stack of violently pockmarked paper. Periods driven deep within the cotton. The backs of the pages like braille. It was viscerally satisfying. And very concrete. And like utter magic to have physical output — not just bits — at the end of a long day of writing. ↩
Well, it’s actually a thin layer between systems as I've been talking about in recent lectures ... ↩

The long road back to 2000 - Satellite - Craig Mod

2011-01-05T18:19:12+00:00

The long road back to 2000

Why?

Because books are now built with HTML.
Because us designers always need a solid grounding.
Because before the giant leap, we need one last big damned deep breath.

And, because this is fun.

Ten years ago this past summer it was the grand ‘ole days of ~~1999~~ 2000. I was 19. The first Web 1.0 bubble had yet to burst, it took four million dollars to launch a website with a database, there was no Wikipedia, Joshua Davis was a web god, most of us searched via Altavista, Kioken was down with Puff Daddy, Apple had just released their drop-dead-sex-on-a-logic-board designed Titanium Powerbook and Kmart — Kmart! — was trying to become an internet provider. It was the Studio 57 days of the internet.

That very summer, sitting in my sublet apartment near the Opera House in San Francisco playing Dreamcast, an email arrived. It was an email from Jeffrey Zeldman. The Jeffrey Zeldman. Grand web warlock. He politely informed me that my submission to A List Apart was, sadly, not the sort of article for which they were looking. (Apparently poorly written nonsense wasn’t part of their editorial strategy.) Overshadowing any sadness of rejection was the fact that I had gotten a mail from Jeffrey Zeldman. A digital brushing of the sleeve, as it were, by the hand of a web zeus.

There are few things online that have survived the past decade, but A List Apart is one of them. Originally registered on May 7th, 1998, it’s the stalwart voice for anyone involved with the guts and goo of making web stuff. Countless other nodes of web knowledge have come and gone from public consciousness — places like hi5, webmonkey (hotwired?) and some guy named Lance — but ALA not only refuses to go away, it continues to grow. It first mutated organically and smartly into a conference. And now there’s a whole honest-to-goodness book publishing arm. And my God, are they kicking ass. Brilliant.

So when Carolyn Wood of A List Apart fame mailed me last summer — precisely ten years after my rejection — asking me to submit an article to ALA, I was smitten. Giddy — I love experiential symmetry. And I’ve long since respected the work of ALA and all those involved, so of course I was game.

After much prodding and ego-massaging by the unflappable Carolyn, and equal parts editorial knife and guidance of Mandy Brown, the piece is complete. The loop is closed. The article is online. And — no — I’m not crying, it’s just dusty in here. And I was making onion soup.

It’s called A Simpler Page. It’s about book typography, tablets and HTML. Because the core of the future of books is good typography, tablets and HTML.

The article also dovetails with a library I’m releasing called Bibliotype. Bibliotype is a base layer for long-form reading in HTML on tablets. It’s pretty simple. But what we need now more than anything else is simplicity.

So I hope you enjoy it. It took a long time for this to happen. And it’s an awesome way to kick off 2011 — publishing with an unbeatable rag-tag group of inspiring smarties.

Here's to a better book — in all its myriad forms — in 2011.

So long 2010, and thanks for all the pageviews - Satellite - Craig Mod

2011-01-01T00:10:42+00:00

So long 2010, and thanks for all the pageviews

Warning! If introspection, attempts at defining or articulating the creative process, self tooting of horns, or year end reflections offends you in any way, Turn. Back. Now. Otherwise, please keep hands and feet, small children, pets, the elderly and Barack Obama inside the stationary cardboard box at all times.

A little over a year ago I descended from a mountain in Nepal and began to write down the experience. Simple. So I thought.

The Nepal trip came about because I was stuck.

Over the years, I had refused a lot of high paying jobs in the name of trying to satiate some undefinable, diffuse energy anchored in my chest. An energy I tried many times to describe but failed to find the right words. It’s an energy that was sometimes very hard to believe in, but one that demanded recognition. It’s the energy felt by anyone compelled to create. Do you know this energy? To embrace it is a nourishment. And my embrace of it had led me, seemingly, to a dead end.

Stuck, I embarked on my trip. And when I returned, I knew there was a story to tell — a story both about the trip itself, and, because I’m a big geek at heart, about the great new camera that saw it all.

The GF1 Fieldtest

I had no plan, no outline, no agenda when I wrote the GF1 Fieldtest. And I certainly knew nothing of the journey on which that article would send me.^[1]

I had dinner with some professional writer friends the night I published the Fieldtest. They all chided me for not selling it to a magazine. I could have gotten x amount of money, or y amount of prestige, they said. But I told them to wait — wait and see where this goes. I thought there might have been a special momentum behind it.

I was right. It was quickly obvious that this piece had struck a nerve in the photography community.

In a few days I had made more off Amazon referral kickbacks than any magazine could have paid me for the piece. And more people had seen the piece than the circulation of many magazines. I don't say this to boast, I say this because I had no idea this was possible.^[2] Furthermore, what magazine would have published a 4,000+ word essay by a noname nobody about traveling while pontificating on a geeky, niche camera?!

Here I had taken something very personal and private — travel — and wrapped it in a container that inspired a very non-trivial number of people to embark on their own adventure. Or consider an entirely new type of camera system. ^[3]

This was my first macro-scale lesson in learning just how powerful selflessness in experience could be. The best way to describe that lesson? Holy shit.

Don't hold your experiences too closely to your chest.
They aren't as precious as you think.
And they certainly aren't valuable when only you can see them.

You can replace 'experiences' with 'ideas' there, too.

Fieldtest also showed me that if you approach a subject from a genuine, constructive and open perspective, the nature of the conversation that will unfold (in the comments) will also be genuine and largely constructive. Despite a general trend towards the admonishing to remove comments, I've found the communities emerging in comment threads on this site to be as useful, if not more so, than the articles themselves.

This experience relit a belief in that diffuse creative energy I spoke about; the energy that led me, indirectly to Nepal. The energy of pure compulsion to create.

Fieldtest was then followed up with a quick video supplement, and then they were both promptly translated into Japanese. In February, the energy demanded I write more candidly about the experience in the mountains in Annapurna Moonrise. I suspect this is the essay I originally wanted to write but didn’t yet know how.

Did somebody say, iPad?

Books in the Age of the iPad began in September 2009. It was called “Books We Make” — and it was a short manifesto for the types of books I thought we should be printing. It was a distillation of the ethos that informed all the book work I had done over the previous six years.

It went through over seven revisions. It began with:

There are rare instances where something special happens between the printed page and the word. Instances where the topography of the page and ideas within merge, where a book is transformed from a shell for ideas into — as Bringhurst puts it — a sculpture of language. It’s on these rare cases that we, as bookmakers, need to focus.

I shared it with a few people but never released it publicly.

But in January, when Jobs announced the iPad, I dug it up. The diffuse chest energy demanded so. I reworked it — it wasn’t very hard. I was pissed off at the publishing world on a number of levels. Pissed off because they were eschewing — and lambasting — digital as a viable publishing medium, and pissed off because so many of them had their hands over their ears going lalalalala. Brick and mortar book chains crumbled, distributors dropped like flies, and they largely choose to look the other way.

Well, I was going to write something that would take their hands off their ears and make them listen. That was the energy with which I attacked that piece — not an energy born out of a poisonous anger, but an energy born out of the anger of watching a loved one fuck up. Energy culled from a deep belief in fundamental precepts for which publishing stood, and from a perspective that there were more effective and sustainable ways to go at it.

Books in the Age of the iPad was published on a Thursday night, Japan Standard Time. I got on a plane the next morning for JFK. By the time I landed on Friday it had been picked up by the New York Times, I had several offers from editors to write books, and my mailbox was overflowing with comments. It was by far and away the most popular thing I’ve ever produced (and continues to be so to this day).^[4]

This momentum led to Embracing the Digital Book in April. And then, of course, to the launch of the Art Space Tokyo Kickstarter campaign in May.

That campaign, punctuated by diving head first into a five-times a week Mysore Ashtanga routine, dominated May. We raised more than $23,000 on a goal of $15,000. Production of Art Space Tokyo filled June, and July was spent re-launching the book and writing up the whole process in Kickstartup. Running the Art Space Tokyo Kickstarter campaign was great, but what if I could inspire 1000 other people to do the same? And what if all that was required to do so was to clearly articulate the experience? I knew it would work — by now I had seen it work several times over.

All of these essays — GF1 Field Test, Annapurna Moonrise, Books in the Age of the iPad, Embracing the Digital Book and Kickstarter — were the result of listening to and believing in that diffuse creative energy. The lonely creative process was fueled by that energy, but a genuine desire to share, extend and magnify experience gave legs to the essays once completed.

Words! So many words!

2010 was the year of writing. A napkin calculation clocks in the number of words published on this site at around 33,000. This is a lot for me. There's easily double that number unpublished. If I've tried to do one thing with my writing this year, it's respect that 'publish' button in the backend. I tried (perhaps unsuccessfully at times) to ensure everything that got pushed to this site was relevant and connected to the bigger topics at hand.

Those 33,000 words include not only the big essays I've outlined above, but the smaller Satellite articles (like this one), too. Some of the highlights include:

Thoughts on gifting digital books
Why the iPad screen is not like the desktop screen
How a simple cover changes the iPad
The importance of openness in digital books
And why many of our current eReaders are assholes

I also had the honor of contributing to The New York Times and New Scientist in 2010.

Each one of these essays was excruciatingly hard work. Make no mistake, there is nothing easy about writing. It requires a tremendous amount of time and, often, blind belief in the output. The larger essays can take upwards of 50-100 hours to complete — write, edit, design, rewrite, whiskey, redesign, self-doubt, layout, cry, publish, promote, correct embarrassing invariable spelling mistakes.

But the act of writing each of these essays has led to a deeper insight into the subject at hand. Obvious, I know. But this is something many creatives simply choose not to engage. And it's a shame. Reflection through writing can illuminate the next step in a creative process which all too often feels like flailing aimlessly in the dark.

In fact, I'd go so far as to say an unarticulated experience or creative process is one left unresolved. By writing about your experience you close the loop, so to speak. When you publish, both the output of the experience (book, software, photographs, etc) and now the ability to replicate that experience is in the hands of your audience. That's a powerful thing. And I can say with absolute clarity, there is as much satisfaction in seeing your experience manifest in others as there is in the creative output alone.

Public Facing

The second half of 2010 was a full-on world-tour discussing all of the above.

It began with speaking engagements in August at the Apple Store in Ginza, and then Tokyo Big Sight for the Good Design Awards. In September I flew to London — popped into Paris for an intoxicating first visit — then hopped into a car in Slough to drive up to Wales for Do.

In that car, I sat next to one very unassuming Maggie Doyne. I asked her what she did and she shrugged and said, "Oh, I just help out kids in Nepal." Well, help out kids, indeed, she did do. If you want to talk about feeling that diffuse, impossible to neglect energy in your chest, talk to Maggie. Watch her Do Lecture for the backstory. Suffice to say she runs a 200+ child orphanage in Nepal. And made it happen before she turned 25. And she's just getting started.

I turned 30 in November and decided to gift ten years of education to one of her children. Together, with your help — dear followers and readers — we raised $3,000 in the blink of an eye. And little orphan Nani is now set for life.

So, to say Do Lectures was a highlight of this past year would be a gross understatement. The people I met there continue to inspire me. I’ll keep saying it ‘till I’m blue: attend if you have the means (and if you don’t, email me why you should be there and I’ll try to help you find the means).

October sent me off to Sydney for Web Directions South. At which I spoke on a giant stage, scarred out of my wits, arms frozen in a freakish tray-holding posture. It was good to know I still wasn’t over stage fright.

Books in Browsers, an amazing one day conference in October at the Internet Archive in San Francisco, opened my mind to the inspiring state of books in HTML (resonant output from that inspiration arriving soon).

At Adobe Max, I had the honor to share a panel with two amazing book designers: Henry Sene Yee and Ben Wiseman. Finally November brought — in collaboration with Book Builders West — a chance to champion the wonders of digital publishing to a room of traditional book publishers and printers, almost none of whom owned a Kindle or iPad. I think I may have scared them.

Along the way, Graham CopeKoga interviewed me on Brick Lane in London about my book design philosophy. Here's the interview — conducted while homeless men made faces at me, women screamed into cell phones, construction spontaneously errupted nearby and giant trucks rumbled and backed up next to our table. It felt like attempting to balance a chair on my nose while elfs tickled my belly.

And, of course, 2010 was rounded off by putting all of this theory and thought into concrete practice, working with the amazing, inspiring — preternaturally talented and positive — Flipboard crew. It's a collaboration that hits home to many subjects close to my heart. It's a collaboration about which much is still to be written (on my todo list). And it’s a collaboration with still much to accomplish.

Next!

A year ago, all of the above was latent. Nothing was written. No projects completed. No photos edited. No secured source of income. I had only a vague sense of how to get Art Space Tokyo republished. And at the end of it all I never imagined I'd be sitting here in California, working alongside so many talented folks, typing these words at this very moment.

Each step between then and now — nothing and all of the above — was characterized by one quality: belief in that diffuse, demanding creative energy. A belief strengthened a thousand times over by the support, readership, letters, books, cupcakes, links, beers and criticisms (both harsh and loving) by amazing folks the world over. My deepest gratitude goes out to you for that.

If the first half of 2010 was marked largely by creation in solitude, 2011 is shaping up to be the precise opposite. It’s the year of collaboration, humanity — taking time off from my closet sized box in Japan. Of building tools, finding a balance in execution, reflection and articulation — and teaching others to find that balance, too. I truly believe that embracing these three pillars predisposes us towards genuine and well considered output.

Execution keeps you grounded in reality.
Reflection places your output in a macro context.
And articulation makes viral those insights, informing your next step.

Do all of this while keeping an awareness of that energy in your chest.
Rinse and repeat.
This is 2011.

Noted:

Even today, I still find its breadth of reach shocking — every single conference I’ve been to this past year, someone has come up to me with a GF1 and thanked me for inspiring them to buy it. ↩
I also say this because it was this revenue that enabled me to do everything I did in the first half of 2010. It literally paid my bills and enabled me to focus on my own projects without an immediately pressing, or looming concern over money. ↩
And in the factional world of camera geekery, this is a tremendous thing. I suspect a big part of why the GF1 succeeded (besides being awesome) is that it wasn’t from Canon or Nikon. So we could stray without the feeling of betraying our first loves. ↩
I remember sitting at SxSW, just a few weeks after it was published. I was in the lobby of the Hilton, reflecting on the gravity of the past few months, tearing up. I was relieved. I wasn’t crazy after all. Or maybe I was, but at least I knew there were lots of other people who agreed with whatever crazy I might have inside. I guess, after so many years of working alone in my little room in Tokyo, I felt for the first time a deep, pervasive and genuine — if etherial — connection. These were the tears of overwhelming gratitude. This still remains for me one of the best moments of this past year. ↩

Gifting digital books - Satellite - Craig Mod

2010-12-28T21:42:47+00:00

Gifting digital books

Gifting a digital book should be the start of a grand conversation.

Why gift? We gift because we’ve found something uniquely aligned with and yet unknown to the recipient. Something that will add positive value to their life. And there's a selfish motive — particularly with a book — that we really want to discuss the gift with that person. To give a gift is to initiate a narrative.

The best gifts are often unexpected. That beautiful notebook out of the blue. The surprise thank you present. Just imagine how much fun it would be to quietly gift books onto your friends’ Kindles or iPads. How, if properly engineered, that gifting would be the start of a shared conversation around that book.

An ideal gifting flow

I have a book I want to gift to a friend. It’s a book I cherish and, gosh, I want this person to enjoy it. It’s on my iPad. I’ve highlighted my favorite passages, and I’ve even taken some notes.

Seamlessly,^[1] within Kindle or iBooks, I bring up a contextual menu and there’s the option: “gift this book.”

I select that option.

Three fields pop up.

A date for the book to be delivered.
A message to be included with the book.
A space to enter recipient details.

My friend turns on their Kindle the morning of the day I select for the book to arrive. Their Kindle syncs with the Kindle cloud and — oh, look! A gift! The book is automatically downloaded. My personalized message — long or short — is displayed and kept as a part of that book.

Furthermore, if I’ve opted to have my notes and highlights included with the book, those too, are downloaded. As my friend reads, they see the exact passages to which I want them to pay particular attention. They read my thoughts alongside the text. Our books are linked and their notes, too, appear in my copy. I get a summary of new notes and highlights every so often via email or pushed to my Kindle. There’s a web interface for me to respond immediately to those notes whether I’m on my computer, iPad or hardware Kindle.

Intimacy

I’ve watched friends give and receive books this holiday season. Mostly, they’re physical. Physical feels more gift-like than digital. But sometimes they’re digital and, well, digital books still don’t feel optimized for gift giving.

They feel desolate, thin ... without intimacy or warmth. There’s no seamless way to enable the gifting. Often an intermediary email is necessary. Amidst the convoluted transfer process, the gifting is revealed. It simply requires too many steps for the recipient; one step is one too many.^[2] A fundamental precept of gifting is that the person to whom I’m gifting should never have to do anything to get the gift.

Seamlessness is a core component of the above outlined gift flow. Seamlessness in receiving and giving revives some of that physical intimacy lost in digital. It enables the digital equivalent of lovingly slipping a book under a recipient's door in the night. Having the gift giver’s note appear and stay with the book furthers that intimacy. And peeking over the shoulder, so to speak, of the gift giver as you read the book — and respond inline — not only mimics receiving a well-worn copy, but it adds value above what's achievable in a physical exchange.

If the process was this spontaneous and simple, then we’d see a lot more gifted digital books. Someday soon, I’m sure, it will be just like this. Until then, friends, keep your eyes peeled for small packages in the mail.

Special thanks to Enrique Allen for brainstorming about the gifting process and inspiring me to write this up.

Noted:

Ideally, upon reading a passage that evokes the desire to gift, you should be able to do so immediately and seamlessly within your current reading interface. In fact, perhaps one of the best spots to initiate a gift is at the end of the book, where you want to share your journey with someone else.
As an added bonus, you should be able to gift the book at a discount. It could be something as simple as a standard percentage, or it could be the equivalent amount you would have received as an affiliate. ↩
I know, I know. We need these steps so that the recipient can properly send the gift to their device of choice. Or, perhaps, you don't know the email address which is associated with the recipient's Kindle. These aren't insurmountable technical challenges. Perhaps Kindles are linked to Facebook accounts (bear with me) and when we gift, we gift to known identities on Facebook. Or perhaps Amazon provides us with a smarter interface for making sure the person to whom we want the book delivered, is indeed that person. Regardless, this can be optimized. In fact, email addresses probably shouldn't play a part in the process. ↩

Publish. Now. - Satellite - Craig Mod

2010-12-05T11:04:25+00:00

Publish. Now.

This past September I was lucky enough to be invited to speak at the Do Lectures in Wales. It was an honor to be there and I wrote all about it. Given the opportunity and means, you should attend next year.

The talk, however, is something about which I've yet to write. ^[1]

I went to Wales with one set of slides up my sleeve and ended up presenting something almost entirely different. This is — now that I think about it — how talks should go. Built on the fly. A sort of performance art erected on genuine experience and knowledge. Improvisation. Or, perhaps not. But, undeniably, because of the rapidly changing nature of publishing, it's almost impossible to repeat the same talk about books with a straight face. I've spoken at several conferences in the last few months and the data in the presentations — by necessity — was updated at the very last minute. Things are moving fast. And it's fun.

At Do, the changes I made were less influenced by the industry, and more because of the conference attendees. I presented on day three. Midway through day one I was altering my slides. The more I listened to these amazing folks describing their amazing efforts, the more apparent became the grossly under utilized infrastructure of contemporary publishing.

I gutted my talk. Gone was most of the technical babble (then resurrected for Web Directions South, a tech oriented event). Added were real life examples of tangible, digitally influenced changes in the publishing chain. Examples that were representative of new ways of funding books, new ways of writing books and new ways of building publishing companies around communities.

Everything in the talk pivots around a single node regarding digital media: we must shift from the question of, "How do we make books digital?" To, "How does digital affect books?" It's the difference between Microsoft Encarta and Wikipedia. And it's the difference between thinking publishing can't work for you, to understanding how it can.

I had a blast preparing for, sweating over, memorizing all those names, and finally delivering this talk. I hope you folks enjoy it.

Noted:

Hello there — this is totally tangential to the contents of the talk so I thought I'd throw it down here.

What was really fun about the talk was that it was in English. That may be a strange thing to say, but, you see, I've been lecturing in Japan for these last few years. I've spoken at a number of Pechakucha Night events, a few Japanese Universities, the Apple store, some design conferences and a few companies. These talks have been, mostly, in Japanese. The talk I gave at Do was one of the first English speaking engagements I had in years. Certainly in front of such a talented crowd. Which means — I was pretty damn nervous.

I don't say this to make excuses for anything — oh, no no no. I'm pretty satisfied with how the talk turned out. But what that nervousness made me consider was why I was nervous.

Let me explain: You'd think that presenting in your mother tongue would be a breeze. Not necessarily so. I can speak Japanese well enough where I don't think about the words. So Japanese, for me, works something like this: There are ideas. And those ideas manifest in the right sounds coming from my mouth. No bridge in between. It's effortless. A perfect balance of expression and utility. I'm almost never for want of a word to express an idea. And simultaneously my word choices are so limited that whatever emerges is the right choice (probably because it's the only choice).

In other words, my Japanese vocabulary is very utilitarian — raw and functional. I've found that in speaking Japanese, because of these lexical limitations, it's easier to relax. The talking becomes more about ideas than words. Whereas in English, I find there are sometimes too many words competing in my brain. Does that make sense? For example, I almost used the phrase 'least fricative' up there instead of 'a breeze.' See what I mean? What the hell.

Oh, boy. Anyway — I'd like to think I'm getting better with each Anglophonic (see, there it is again) talk I give. And thankful for all the opportunities to share these ideas with 'yall. In person. Learning all the way. ↩

Seeing Prime: Panasonic’s 14mm Lumix Lens - Craig Mod - Journal

2010-11-11T20:22:10+00:00

Seeing Prime: Panasonic’s 14mm Lumix Lens

This is a discussion of seeing (and by extension, photography) under the pretense of a lens review.

Initial thoughts on the GF2 announcement - Satellite - Craig Mod

2010-11-05T07:31:05+00:00

Initial thoughts on the GF2 announcement

If this is your first time visiting — hello! — consider reading my GF1 Fieldtest review for some context.

Update: Here's a promo video for the GF2:

We’ve been waiting a while for this. And by 'we' I mean the legions of obsessive GF1 devotees.

Before considering the GF2 announcement, let’s remember what we love about the GF1:

great RAW photos in a compact package
super simple, always accessible manual controls
amazing battery life
a beautiful and fast prime kit lens

And remember where it was lacking:

no 1080p HD video
mono-mic
ISO speeds above 400 excessively noisy
LCD almost impossible to use in direct sunlight

So, with these points in mind, it was with some excitement and trepidation I read the reports on the GF2 announcement in Paris.

In my opinion, the GF1 is a phenomenal camera. It’s stylish, always with you, unburdensome and the quality of output is outstanding. I rarely shoot video so the lack of 1080p and a stereo mic don't bother me. I would love better ISO performance but the noise reduction algorithms in Lightroom 3 have alleviated some of this issue. And the LCD in bright sunlight, well, I’ve learned to live and shoot on intuition.

The most striking change in the GF2 seems to be the touch sensitive LCD — to which they’ve moved most of the external controls. The end result is a very minimal camera surface. Personally, I dig the new minimalist styling — the lines are incredibly clean. Just look at the sexy curves on the front panel up above. It does, sadly, have the side effect of making the camera appear more 'digital.' There's something about an analog knob on the top of a camera body that screams vintage. Still, aside from the thumb knob (aperture / shutter speed), ISO and auto exposure lock toggle, I almost never manipulate any other buttons or switches on the GF1. That many of the other functions now live in the LCD will bother many, but if you gave me a GF2 today, I don’t think my shooting style would change.

I think DPReview sums it up best here:

“The camera may have slimmed down and lost many external controls, but thankfully the features list has scarcely been trimmed at all. The net result is a camera that's simpler and less intimidating for newcomers, but also one that's less likely to appeal to more advanced users.” — DP Review

Truth be told, the GF1 was never really meant to be a manly — or expert targeted — camera. In Japan, it is almost always marketed directly to women as a fun way to take nice photos. The colors, models and sample photographs at electronics stores in Tokyo targeted playful, bashful, creative, photo-curious women. Panasonic didn't seem too pressed to appeal to the deconstructionist, let’s-throw-a-retro-lens-on-this-thing and hike in Nepal guys. And anyway, I seem to have done all the marketing to that group for them.

So in that context, many of the changes make good sense. The GF2 is now even less intimidating than the GF1, with the same high quality output.

Reports indicate the GF2 body is now 19% smaller and 7% lighter than the GF1. If the functionality remains largely the same, then this is great news for us travelers looking for an even lighter kit.

It seems the LCD has been coated for a better daylight shooting experience. And if you care about video, it now shoots 60fps at 1080p. One large downside, in my opinion, is the reduction in battery capacity to 7.3Wh from 9Wh. I love that I can take my GF1 on a trip and almost never worry about charging. I hope the GF2 carries with it the same experience.

All things considered, it looks like a sensible update to a great camera — a realignment, if you will. Many will undoubtably lament the touchscreen LCD and removal of external controls, but it’s hard to say definitively if these changes are positive or negative until we spend some time with the body. I think our biggest fear is that these are simply changes for the sake of marketing and not changes for the sake of improved experience.

If Panasonic is going to go the simplicity route, my main gripe with the GF2 would be that it’s not even simpler. My dream camera is something whittled down to the essence of an M9, but in a smaller package and at 1/10 of the price. The GF1 was the closest we’ve gotten thus far, and while the GF2 has simplified things, it’s not simplicity in the direction I was hoping for.

If you don't shoot video, the purchase might be hard to justify (but then again, when have us camera geeks ever needed a rational reason to justify a purchase?). I'm curious to see if ISO performance has improved. And lighter and smaller is a great bonus, especially if it doesn't come at the sacrifice of build quality or user experience (after all, something can be too small and too light).

Regardless, I’m very much looking forward to taking the GF2 out somewhere — Tibet? Morocco? — and see what it can do.

For now, the GF1 is doing just fine.

Woods of Wales: Do Lectures, 2010 - Craig Mod - Journal

2010-10-21T06:04:18+00:00

Woods of Wales: Do Lectures, 2010

We did this for four days and on the fifth we went home.

The ereader incompetence checklist (for discerning consumers, editors, publishers and designers) - Satellite - Craig Mod

2010-10-05T19:18:34+00:00

The ereader incompetence checklist (for discerning consumers, editors, publishers and designers)

Translations: Italian

I repeat the same conversation over and over again. It starts:

"You don't like the Wired iPad app? Why? It's so [positive adjective]."

"Well, for one — It's not even text ..."

"But it looks just like the printed copy!"

At which point I then dive into my spiel^[1] about artifacts and digital text and what we should expect from our digital reading experiences.

The bottom line is: most of our ereading experiences are pretty bad. And many of us don't realize it.

iPad is still a baby — barely six months old! — so we're clearly still in a developmental and experimentation phase. But I feel like many readers, authors, editors and publishers simply don't know how to assess their digital reading experience. I always like to follow up spiels with URLs, so consider this the followup URL to my ereader spiel if we've ever met in person.

In order to assess something we need a rubric. Criteria. Standards. Metrics. A baseline. So let's set one together. (Please add your metrics in the comments.)

For me, the first question I ask when trying new ereader software is:
Is the reading experience 'better' than reading in a browser?

In a rush to invent new containers for reading on tablets, we seem to have forgotten that browsers are pretty damn good at text. Thanks to accessibility and standardization efforts, they're capable layout engines.^[2] And the typography is getting better by the minute. ^[3] Reading a webpage on a tablet computer may not be perfect, but you'll see that it fulfills almost all of our baseline digital reading experience and accessibility metrics.

Which begs the question: If most ereading software doesn't offer a better experience than simple HTML and CSS, why are so many publishers reinventing the wheel? ^[4]

The incompetence checklist:

Grab your iPad, open your nearest ereader/magazine/content focused application and ask the following question:

Am I reading text? If the text in your ereader isn’t text but is instead an image (.jpeg, .png, etc) then, by golly, your ereader's incompetent.

Everything else builds off of this.

Does my ereader make the text less accessible to the visually impaired? If so, then sorry, my friend, your ereader is incompetent (and an asshole).
Can you copy text? If you can’t, your ereader's incompetent.
Can you resize text? No? Incompetent. (See accessibility)
Are you a text-heavy publication such as The New Yorker? Is a single issue of your magazine gratuitously large (500mb+ per month)? ^[5] Lazy incompetence. ^[6]
Does a PDF export of your content provide a basically identical reading experience as your ereader? Would a PDF actually provide a better reading experience (zoomable, searchable, real text)? Then your ereader's plagued by confused incompetence.
And, once again, would reading this content in a web browser with well considered margins and font-size provide a better, more accessible, more linkable reading experience? If so, then why isn't the content delivered that way?

As a bonus, I think the following metric will become steadily more important in our ereading experience:

Is there a publicly facing pointer (URL, etc) by which you can reference the content in your ereader?

Many of these metrics are accessibility related. It's scary that most of the highly-praised ereaders (such as Wired / New Yorker / Time magazine's apps) eliminate the inherent accessibility of digital text. Of course, this is a transition period, but why not start off on the right foot? Digital text isn't the same artifact that printed text is. Let's not treat it like it is.

Until things improve, I'll be reading those excellent long-form New Yorker pieces in Instapaper,^[7] thanks.

What do you look for in an ereader?

Noted:

Dictionary says spiel; Twitter folks say schpiel; when you do it, it feels like a schpeel — like sliding down a verbal schp on a banana peel. ↩
http://lostworldsfairs.com/ ↩
Typekit for iPad ↩
Before you bite my head off remember I'm simply suggesting ereaders be built around an open platform like webkit. Which is not the same as saying all ereading should happen on a web page. Instead of rolling your own layout engine — which tends to feel like a broken PDF viewer or something made with Adobe Director — build atop the high quality of what's out there. All the heavy lifting's been done for you! And you can still package and sell the finished product. Enhanced Editions is a great example of an ereader that does this. ↩
Condé Nast’s iPad Apps Are Too Portly. Blame Adobe. — Peter Kafka, September 28th, 2010 ↩
Digital text is *light*. Highly compressible. In other words — transportable. More than video or audio or pictures. Most consumers would rather have giant supplemental videos streamed from the cloud instead of eating precious space on their device. (And for $5 a pop, we’d hope that the issue cost would more than subsidize the bandwidth of a few inline videos.) ↩
Instapaper is probably my favorite digital reading experience. Simple, clean layouts. HTML based, resizable margins, leading and font-size. All content built off of webpages to which you can link! It's lovely and a great baseline to which other ereaders should aspire. ↩

Kickstartup - Craig Mod - Journal

2010-07-27T21:16:51+00:00

Kickstartup

Notes on successful Fundraising with Kickstarter.com & the (re)making of Art Space Tokyo

The cornerstone of digital books - Satellite - Craig Mod

2010-06-14T14:00:41+00:00

The cornerstone of digital books

There's a great post over at kottke.org ^[1] evoking the ghost of a time-traveling David Foster Wallace, commenting on Facetime for the iPhone from back in the '90s. But Facetime's usefulness debate is for another post. The point on which I want to comment comes at the end, and you'll miss it if you've yet to have your morning yerba mate. After reproducing several paragraphs from Infinite Jest, Kottke finishes with:

Those are only excerpts ... you can read more on pp. 144-151 of Infinite Jest.

Oh, page 144? Great — let me just grab ... which edition was that?

Wouldn't it be great if we had some, oh — I don't know — *online* edition of Infinite Jest to reference? Wouldn't it be amazing if someone turned the physical edition of IJ into a digital edition?

Of course, I'm being facetious — there's a perfectly good digital version of Infinite Jest available for the Kindle.^[2] And even one for iBooks. And heck, with the late Mr. Wallace's penchant for footnotes and lexicography, having a built in dictionary and hyperlinked references makes digital a nearly ideal platform for a book like this.

So when a blogger — and Infinite Jest fanatic — wants to point out something he or she loves in the book, and that book has a digital edition, is it not mad that the digital text isn't 'publicly' referable?

Openness is a big part of the discussion behind books in HTML5.^[3] Not openness in terms of 'free' books, but openness as books being free from the referenceability prisons of eReaders. Which is not to say that applications like Kindle or iBooks shouldn't exist, or that the only way to do books is in HTML. But, one might go so far as to say that having a strong HTML based, publicly referable edition of a book is the cornerstone of a strong digital edition.

Again — just to be perfectly clear — this doesn't implicitly mean free-as-in-beer books. It requires very little imagination to come up with an open but metered system for reading books in HTML — not unlike what the New York Times is planning on doing next year with their newspaper.^[4] The system would allow anyone to link to any piece of a book, and allow those who visit the book to read 10 or 20 pages before saying, "Hey, maybe you'd like to buy this?" This is part of what I mean when I talk about "life outside eReaders."^[5]

A standup guy like Kottke has a legion of erudite, handsome, well read followers. When he tells those readers to check something out, I bet a few percentage of them would actually throw-down cash for a digital edition right then and there. Contingent on a convenient purchasing system being in place, of course.

Amazon and Google are working on systems of this very nature. Amazon has their "look inside the book" functionality which allows for, if not referencing, at least partial metered browsing of books. It's barely a hop between what they have now and what I describe — especially as integrated with Kindle editions. And Google Books ^[6] already has a system that lets you link to specific pages in scanned editions of books either out of copyright or given the Google Books greenlight by their publisher. ^[8] We're all itching to see what Google Editions has in store for us — but I'm pretty sure it's the precise opposite of less open books. ^[7]

The question isn't how long until? but when? are we going to emerge from these dark ages of digital text. Currently our digital books are locked in precious little cabinets, untouchable like some bubble boy or Grant's tumor ^[9] — or maybe it's more like a damp dungeon where every now and then they're allowed to be read by one person, and one person only. Bit by bit, digital Stephen Kings and David Foster Wallaces are chipping away behind their own Rita Hayworths (I like to imagine the whole scenario as a Tron where everyone's a digital book and thus nearsighted and without athletic prowess). And it's probably not much longer until we stop saying, "on page 144" and start saying, "right over here."