Archive for January, 2010
Shelves
Jan 27th
I added a page where I’ll post links to articles, posts and so on, that are great food for thought and worthy to be easily reachable (and well organised, but that’s asking too much of me…)
First in the line, the landmark shift speech by Mike Shatzkin.
Mobile disruption
Jan 27th
Andrew Savikas has an interesting post on the importance that mobile multi-purposes device will eventually gain – or has already gained – compared to the dedicated devices like the Kindle, the Sony Reader and so on.
It’s a sustaining against a disruptive approach, Savikas argues. Mobile devices are more affordable and portable. And I would add they are already more widespread, besides having less (let’s call them) psychological barriers: people are buying them for doing lots of things, with reading being just one of them, and certainly not the main one. It’s still early to see who will emerge the winner – if there will be (only) one – but the argument for the mobile multi-purposes devices it’s strong. They will be with any probability the real driver for the explosion of the e-book market, despite the smaller screens and retroillumiation.
The related question is: what will become of the (e)book? Different formats bring to different texts: it would also be possible to argue that an e-book readable on an iPhone will have to be designed entirely differently from one readable on a dedicated device – which once again brings to some heavy-thinking on the workflow side.
And then there’s the tablet, of course. And anything else will appear in the near future.
Getting the basics right
Jan 25th
A very nice post (not surprisingly) by Kassia Krozser on Publishing Perspectives: How about a little back to the basics? points out what every publisher should know but is able to get amazingly wrong.
The article is well worth a read, I’d just like to stress a few points.
First of all, the shift from the quality itself of the object/content, to the quality of the reading experience:
I have no interest in improving the print experience. I’m looking to improve the reading experience, which to me going forward means getting digital books right.
This kind of requires a shift in perspective: in a book you don’t really need to work on the reading experience, it’s been more or less the same for the last centuries. But now it’s open sea, and it will be interesting to look at all the experiments that will be made in the near future. Should I name my favourite insight on this subject, it would be this:
Consider the Medium: It’s digital, not print. Endless “pages” of breathless quotes about previous books are annoying and pointless. I’ve already bought the book; I want to start reading. Dump page number — they make no sense and highlight the lack of thought going into the digital edition. There are more logical ways to create these references.
Finally, and this will be a (the?) crucial point in the next few years:
It won’t come as a surprise to see that most of the basics noted below relate to production and workflow.
A well laid-out workflow is paramount. But this does not simply means to get the contect out in as many devices as possible with as less work as possible: it means rethinking the content itself (back on this, soon).
What’s this all about?
Jan 23rd
Working in publishing and trying to make some real sense out of the digital shift seems sometimes like trying to cover yourself with a blanket that’s too short – you pull here, and your feet freeze, you pull there, and bam! a sore throat.
Inchiostro elettrico will try to put up a blanket wide enough to keep warm both throat and feet. In doing so, it will lovingly sew some patches of its own, and take lots (and lots, and lots) of other patches from other sources, be they blogs, tweets, magazines, conversations, everything.
Maybe the final blanket won’t be visually stunning, but hope it will do its work.
This blog will probably (necessarily? well, definitely not voluntarily) have an European – if not Italian – perspective. This is because, if the cloud’s creating faster and faster a single, wide world, it’s almost impossible not to look at the reality of things in which one is immersed. And that’s Italy, where change is usually looked at like it’s a bizarre, not-enticingly-smelling new food. That still moves.
On we go.
Ps: if anyone’s wondering about the name – yes, Inchiostro elettrico is an Italian name for a blog that will be written in English. That’s because in the weeks during which Inchiostro Elettrico took shape, my ideas and plans for it changed a lot. Nevertheless, I decided to keep the Italian name, as a token to evolving ideas and to the perspective I told about.
Mhm.
To be honest the real reason is that, you know, I liked the name a lot. (I mean, it’s cool! It reads like Electric Ink in English, or Encre electrique in French, or… hey, Encre electrique is beautiful too! I should get the domain…)
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