The iTunes of short stories
Well, Motoko Rich is convinced this is a harbinger. Christ, I hope not. Let me explain. The Atlantic monthly magazine has made moves to ‘partner’ (ugh) with Amazon to offer short stories for the Kindle. A price per story at $3.99 sounds a bit harsh until you realise that one story at least is 15,000 words. Short? Really? I can’t find publishers prepared to take on stories more than 5,000 words, and anyone accepting over 2,500 is pretty rare these days, so I question whether this is really a novella, but anyway…
Rich declares, rather excitingly:
Let the iTunes-ization of short fiction begin.
Really could have done with an exclamation mark, but it’s the New York Times—they use such punctuation sparingly. So the analogy works like this: the iPod is the Kindle is and iTunes is…what exactly?
Added to that this horrifying aspect:
The authors with the Atlantic agreement have been paid a four-figure fee and will split sale proceeds with both The Atlantic and Amazon. Although the authors may at some point obtain the rights to republish the stories as part of a collection or in another magazine, the stories cannot appear in any other e-reader format.
You are joking right?
I’m not sure people have grasped why the iPod has been as successful as it has. The iPod built on the success of iTunes, both of which were built on the success of the open and freely available mp3 format. To play songs in iTunes and sync them with an iPod, you didn’t need to buy your songs from the iTunes store (indeed the store was still a good two years away in the USA and about four or five in Australia). The framework was already there and it didn’t depend on Amazon or anyone else locking the songs into some ham-fisted exclusivity deal.
One of the authors, Christopher Buckley, has said:
“Sure, ideally, I would like it printed on archival paper and bound in red morocco with gold embossed for a limited edition and signed by the author,” Mr. Buckley said. But if the Kindle edition “grabs some eyeballs — and I guess grabbing eyeballs is what the Internet is all about — then I’m all for it.”
Nice idea, but Mr Buckley is kidding himself. The internet is all about grabbing eyeballs: potentially billions of them. Locking yourself down to one single e-book reader (grabbing maybe thousands of eyeballs at best) is about something else entirely.
So, yes, let the iTunes-isation of short stories begin. Let it flourish regardless of any back room attempts to tie readers down to any single platform or device.
Read MoreImmature debate
Kat Hannaford’s post yesterday at Gizmodo got me thinking, which is probably the point, but I am always wary of emotive arguments for or against particular technologies. The word ‘hate’ in the title gives the game away.
Ever since Annie Proulx’s ‘twitchy little screen’ put down, writers high and low have queued up to tell anyone who will listen why they must be an idiot to want to read anything on an electronic device. Hannaford’s post is a little different, making a clear distinction between dedicated e-readers (Kindle, Nook, et al) and multi-purpose devices such as tablets and smart phones. Aside from this concession, the rest is classic preachiness: equal parts bile and ridicule.
…the ereaders are so physically large you also need to invest in a manbag just to avoid being mugged. Did we say mugged? We meant “laughed at.” There’s a reason why you don’t see people using them on public transport.
This is not helpful.
For the most part, I actually agree with her reasons for disliking the technology. Ridiculous pricing, lack of support for open standards, clunky form factors: all are good reasons to criticise the devices, but not to harangue the people who want to use them. I’ve said this in a lot of different ways but for good measure, here it is again:
Writers need to get on with the business of writing. It’s up to reader to choose how they read. I might not like the Kindle, but I’m not going to ridicule the people who are prepared to pay good money for Kindle e-books.
Our grandchildren won’t be housing first edition ebook copies of War and Peace in an antiquated Kindle, passed down from generation to generation. There’s no opportunity to get sentimental over an e-book…
Of course not. As far as I’m aware that’s never been the point of e-readers or e-books. Again and again, there’s a pervasive tendency in the media to characterise e-books as a threat to traditional publishing as though some magic device will suddenly make people want to stop reading things on paper.
Many polemicists fall into the trap of stating the inevitability of their argument, before moving immediately onto a concerted effort to persuade and cajole their reader into agreeing. If it’s inevitable, why bother? If the technology behind e-readers is really that bad, then the devices won’t take off no matter how much hype surround them or how much scorn others heap on them.
Source: Why I Hate eReaders, And Doubt They’ll Ever Hit The Mainstream | Gizmodo Australia.
Read MoreQWC Blog Tour
Since Somewhere back in October, the Queensland Writers Centre has been quietly winding its way through the blogs and backwaters of Queensland’s writers. Today the bus has parked outside and a ragtag bunch of blog tourists are welcomed in. Make yourselves at home. The coffee machine is on, but I can only do two cups at a time.
Anyway, to answer your questions…
Where do your words come from?
I could be a smart arse and say ‘the English dictionary’, but instead I’ll respond in the spirit of the question.
The words come from characters and scenes. The better I can imagine those two things, the better the words. Words come easily when I have characters I know well bouncing dialogue off each other. That stuff is fun. Other times I can be moving so slowly through a scene or stretch of narrative that I wonder how the hell I will ever get to some kind of conclusion. Such stretches are hard, but inevitable in a big manuscript. My only hope is that it won’t be obvious in the final draft which bits came in the blink of an eye and which bits contain blood and sweat and other body fluids that no one wants to see on a page.
Where did you grow up and where do you live now?
I grew up in Mitchelton: a standard Brisbane suburb in the shadow of a shopping centre. We literally lived a block away from the thing. I spent much of my childhood watching the place expand like the Blob, devouring land as it went. I went to school next door to it. On weekends I rode my bike illegally through its carparks (ah, those days before Sunday trading…).
Mitchelton has little literary tradition that I know of (though I heard Janette Turner Hospital lived there for a while), but then both my brothers and I have ended up writers. I think it’s a combination of genetic predisposition and clearly some kind of social engineering experiment conducted by the the city council on our suburb during the seventies and eighties.
Right now, I’m in exile by the beach (it’s a nice exile), but in a few short weeks I’ll be back in the city surrounded by good coffee, restaurants, and extended family (that’s not necessarily in order of importance…or maybe it is…let me think about that).
What’s the first sentence/line of your latest work?
I don’t tend to decide that stuff until very late in a work’s composition and I don’t usually overload that first sentence with Dickens or Tolstoy style witticisms. I looked up the first sentence of the new novel and it’s not all that flash (and my editor has suggested a new intro anyway). I looked up the last and realised that it will probably remain the final sentence regardless of whatever further work will go in, so here it is:
Brisbane is beautiful this time of year.
At least I can keep that line in now.
What piece of writing do you wish you had written?
Pretty much anything from the Twelves. If I had to choose one, it would probably be To Kill A Mockingbird. If it meant though that, like Harper Lee, I would never write another novel? That I would have to really really think about. That would be a classic deal with the Devil, wouldn’t it?
What are you currently working towards?
A balance of work and life with some kind of writing taking the fore in the work side. Simple.
Complete this sentence… The future of the book is…
…assured. Readers will continue to read. Writers will continue to write. And there will be something in between that we call a “book”.
Read MorePublishing in iTunes LP
Apple has lobbed over their wall an interesting development in the ongoing will-they-won’t-they tablet/e-book manoeuvres. They have made their ‘TuneKit’ tools (that create iTunes LP and iTunes Extras) available to download.
Cool huh?
Oh, alright, I’ll explain what it means.
One of the recent developments in selling digital music has been bundling the song files with other stuff: images, video, and text. All are presented in a stylised and designed format as a kind of interactive CD booklet. Think a cross between a DVD menu and a web site. This goes some way toward negating one of the problems with digital content: the lack of any physical object. It doesn’t replace CD packaging, but it might make you feel better about not getting any packaging (especially when you’re not paying that much less for the digital files, which I’d have considered a better incentive for driving sales). So far, this kind of bundling has been available to a handful of big record labels as a bit of an experiment to sell some classic back-catalogue stuff. They’ve called these bundled packages iTunes LP (for music) and iTunes Extras (for movies).
And the tool these labels have used to create the format is TuneKit. So now, Apple have opened up this tool to anyone.
Okay? Still don’t see why I’m excited? Read on.
Consider the news against the backdrop of Apple talking to publishers supposedly over their top-secret-tell-anyone-and-we’ll-kill-you tablet computer and e-reader and things begin to fall into place. TuneKit may end up being as much a misnomer as iTunes itself. The tool could be used for creating anything involving text, images, sound, and video. See where this is heading now?
Better yet, TuneKit uses open web standards (basically the same stuff that allows you to build web sites and applications) to build its content. Apple have suggested that anyone with a bit of web coding experience could pretty easily whip up some cool designs using TuneKit. Open standards also means instead of relying on closed ecosystems like the proprietary Kindle format or pretty much anything Microsoft have ever done, the resulting e-books could potentially be available for reading anywhere on any device. This is exactly the kind of interoperability digital publishing needs if it wants a de facto e-book standard. I’ve always argued for the PDF format, but this has some serious potential.
Of course, Apple is no benevolent society, so they may still throw a proprietary sting the tail. I hope not.
Still, this is encouraging and possibly a sign of how digital publishing will get shaken up next year. I have the strangest feeling 2010 will a hell of a ride. I hope I’m right.
Source: Apple – iTunes – iTunes LP and iTunes Extras.
Read MoreThe Books
