Out of Print, Maybe, but Not Out of Mind (3 and final)
by David Streitfeld
Multimedia
The author liked the result. “I was stunned by the amount of work Citia did,” Mr. Kelly said. “They wrote a digest of the entire book, idea by idea.” And yet, he wrote What Technology Wants to present his ideas.
If they were going to be reorganized by someone else, what was the point of writing the original book? Maybe he should have written the book on cards in the first place. The very thoroughness of the Citia approach might be discouraging other authors from signing up. Since its debut in the spring of 2012, Citia has done cards for only four books. It recently branched out into other media with track notes for Snoop Lion, the rapper formerly known as Snoop Dogg, and is negotiating with advertising and talent agencies, financial service firms and consumer product companies.
“All companies are becoming media companies,” Mr. Meyers said. “They all need to tell stories about their products.”
What to label these stories is another question. The Internet by its nature breaks down borders and unfreezes text. Put a book online and set it free to grow and shrink with new arguments, be broken up and reassembled as readers demand, and it might be only nostalgia that calls it by its old name.
Some formats, after all, simply outlive their need. CD-ROMs — compact discs that contained multimedia applications — were thought to herald the future of storytelling, but that business model did not survive the rise of the web. Video arcades disappeared when home computers became sophisticated gaming platforms.
We will continue to recognize books as books as they migrate to the Internet, but our understanding of storytelling will inevitably expand,” Mr. Brantley said. Among the presentations at Books in Browsers this fall: “A Book Isn’t a Book Isn’t a Book” and “The Death of the Reader.” Much of the design innovation at the moment, Mr. Brantley believes, is not coming from publishers, who must still wrestle with delivering both digital and physical books. Instead it is being developed by a tech community that “doesn’t think about stories as the end product. Instead, they think about storytelling platforms that will enable new forms of both authoring and reading.” He cited the enormous success of Wattpad, a Canadian start-up that advertises itself as the world’s largest storytelling community. There are 10 million stories on the site. That is enough to fill a million — for lack of a better term — books.
[from The New York Times, December 1, 2013]
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