Category:Books

Black Hockey Jesus gets self-referential:

I want to pause here and clear a space to allow the post to become aware that, before now, it was merely a post about wanting to write a post; however, it just entered the quirky new realm of being meat-meta blogging, aware of itself as blogging about blogging about blogging and, if we had some really good pot, we could infinitely regress into an abyss of metalicousness where we might vomit or have an orgy or some other signifier that revealed us as bloggers on the fringe, man.

Over at Wired UK, Olivia Solon says book publishing is having it's Radiohead Moment with the move by JK Rowling to publish her own e-books on her new platform, Pottermore.

Platform! Ha! How about that. I was just writing about fucking platforms yesterday.

I didn't even plan that.

Craig Mod starts putting some critical thinking towards the tablet page:

Tablets are in many ways just like physical books--the screen has well defined boundaries and the optimal number of words per line doesn't suddenly change on the screen. But in other ways, tablets are nothing like physical books--the text can extend in every direction, the type can change size. So how do we reconcile these similarities and differences? Where is the baseline for designers looking to produce beautiful, readable text on a tablet?

This essay looks to address these very questions. This essay also marks the release of an HTML baseline typography library for tablet reading. It's currently iPad optimized. It's called Bibliotype and the hope is for it to provide a solid base atop which we can explore. It's very rudimentary, but rudimentary is a damn fine place to start.

Frank Chimero on Reading Readiness:

It irks me when people say that blog posts are too long. Sometimes, I catch myself saying the same. Who ever decided the proper length of a blog post? Not me. Not you. Not anyone. An individual only decides the length of their attention. Text takes time--to make, to design, to read. For things to work, effort must be matched. To return to our kung-fu movie: effort and attention from the student is matched with the attention of the master. Similarly so with the writer and the reader. To be willing to match attention is to be kind and ready.

Yesterday Amazon announced their new ad-supported Kindle. They didn't called it the Ad-Supported Kindle. They wrapped it in a cute little euphemism - Kindle With Special Offers.

Kindle With Special Offers (KWSO) - it's like a Friend With Benefits - except the benefits are ads in your face. Awesome. But it's cool, because your friend is a cheaper date because of the ads. Instead of the regular price of $139, the KWSO is only $114!

I say Amazon goes balls-out, Morgan Spurlock styley.

From the NYTimes.com (via daringfireball)

The Ford Crown Victoria served as the mainstay of taxi and police fleets. Its close cousin, the Lincoln Town Car, could reliably be found idling outside Lincoln Center or waiting to whisk a Wall Street type home for the evening.

And:

But in a little more than a year, both models will go the way of the Checker cab. Ford Motor Company plans to shutter the Canadian plant that manufactures the cars and discontinue the recognizably bulky frame that gives them their shape.

From a lecture Kurt Vonnegut gave in NYC in 2005 called, “Here is a lesson in creative writing.” (via my brother):

Now let me give you a marketing tip. The people who can afford to buy books and magazines and go to the movies don’t like to hear about people who are poor or sick, so start your story up here [indicates top of the G-I axis]. You will see this story over and over again. People love it, and it is not copyrighted. The story is “Man in Hole,” but the story needn’t be about a man or a hole. It’s: somebody gets into trouble, gets out of it again [draws line A]. It is not accidental that the line ends up higher than where it began. This is encouraging to readers.

MacNN: GQ records extremely low iPad magazine downloads

VP and publisher Pete Hunsinger doesn't seem to get digital:

Hunsinger defends the iPad edition, claiming that it costs "nothing extra," given that there are no printing or shipping costs. The iPad app is $2 less than the print edition, and GQ is also charging just $2 for back issues. The VP says he expects the iPad to eventually become a "major component" of circulation; one boost is anticipated with the June issue, which will feature Australian supermodel Miranda Kerr.

First off, I would argue that the iPad version should cost as much, if not more than the print version. From my experience, most people don't understand the costs that go into building products/experiences/tools for the web. There's an incorrect assumption that because this product isn't physical and 'real', it must be cheaper to make.

The truth is that it should cost a lot of money to create an iPad version of GQ magazine if they truly exploit everything that makes experiences on the iPad great. This doesn't mean you have to go overboard when using a new medium, but it does mean creating an appropriate experience.

And that's what we're talking about when talk about building for iPads and iPhones - experiences. I've read a number of stories in the press about the iPad being a device for passive consumption, but that's a premature dismissal. If GQ is simply digitizing text and making image galleries that you can flick through, they've missed the point. That's easy.

My second point is that the iPad is not and should never be 'the savior' of the print industry.

Every company is responsible for their own fate. Whether you're Conde Nast trying to convert your print publications into digital experiences, or Adobe trying to make Flash relevant to mobile computing, blaming or praising Apple for your failure or success is to sell your company short.

Conde Nast is moving their properties onto an amazing platform. They're responsible for creating an amazing experience.

Evolve or die.

I have to say, since they redesigned their site in 2009, there's absolutely no heirarchy on the homepage of CNN.com.

Apparently a spotlight on Facebook games is more important than the biggest recall in automotive history by Toyota.

Unless you were looking at the advertisement on the right first.