Monthly Archive for July, 2011

From Spotlight on Digital Media and Learning

How e-reading may be affecting writing; Harry Potter goes Google; the future of textbooks, chain bookstores; and humanities scholars discuss their digital future, all in this week’s playback.

Digital Lit: Are digital technologies changing the way we tell stories and the way writers write? The Toronto Globe and Mail talks with authors and publishers about what effect e-reading is having on writing and what the new digital literature may look like in the future.

Kate Taylor does a good job of framing the debate around whether e-readers should be trying to reproduce the traditional reading experience as closely as possible or instead focus on encouraging real multimedia experimentation.

“E-books as we know them are electronic replicas of books, it’s paper under glass,” author Kate Pullinger, told the Globe and Mail. “If you are going to put a work of fiction on a computer, why would you not use the multimedia components a computer has to offer you – image and sound and interactive games?”

Pullinger is the author of “Inanimate Alice” a multimedia book that uses text, sound, images and games to tell the story of Alice and her imaginary digital friend Brad. [For more on Alice read Heather Chaplin’s story on the future of the book].

Also fascinating was Taylor’s discussion of authorial control. Publishers are struggling with how to get serious writers to experiment with interactive technology and games while still using literary text to draw in readers.

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From Brian Thill

To attend even the tiniest of community colleges I had to move away from home at age seventeen and head to the relatively big city of Bakersfield, which was only half as populous then as it is now. In college one of the few ways a full-time student could support himself was by laboring in the food service industry. I bussed tables, worked as a line cook in hot and miserable kitchens, and waited on customers who sometimes tipped me in pocket lint and arcade tokens. I did not buy clothes or music. I did not trick out my brown 1983 Ford Escort. The only thing I ever spent any money on (aside from rent, gas, school, utilities, and the occasional meal) was books, and that is how I came to hold a second job alongside the restaurant jobs and full-time school, which is a job in itself.

Waldenbooks was the only bookstore in the area. It was tucked into the western edge of East Hills Mall, a spavined and emaciated shopping center specializing in off-brand department stores, an anemic food court (mildew, Sbarro), and assorted bric-a-brac sold on consignment. The bookstore has long since vanished; and the mall itself, now little more than a decaying husk of plaster and exposed ductwork, will probably disappear as soon as someone can pony up the money to tear it down once and for all. It is another sad relic of an era when it seemed that Bakersfield, like so many other Central Valley towns, seemed to be growing in the implacable way that a metropolis can seem to, progressively outward and upward in noble Whiggish fashion. The northeastern edges of the city, slowly elevating through flat foothills toward the Sierra Nevadas, seemed poised for suburban sprawl of a benign and even beautiful sort. New schools and housing communities, master-planned and manicured, were beginning to appear; and if anything the mall was set to expand and flourish. Instead, the mall withered and died, as did the Waldenbooks chain itself. It was swallowed up years later by Borders; and now Borders, one of the few flagship chain bookstores that dotted the urban and suburban landscapes of so many American towns, will soon be extinct too.

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From Julie Bosman, The New York Times

For decades, even after it was renamed and relocated from its original home at Radcliffe, the Columbia Publishing Course seemed unchanging, a genteel summer tradition in the book business, a white-glove six-week course in which ambitious college graduates were educated in the time-honored basics of book editing, sales, cover design and publicity. Not this summer.

With the e-book revolution upending the publishing business, Madeline McIntosh, the president of sales, operations and digital for Random House, stood at the lectern on the opening day in June, projecting a slide depicting the industry as a roller coaster, its occupants frozen in motion at the top of a steep loop.

“You might be wondering if this is the moment where we’re at,” Ms. McIntosh, a tall figure in a slim navy dress, said with a smile, as dozens of students with plastic name tags hanging around their necks watched raptly.

So the summer session began with a focus on “The Digital Future.” Students were schooled in “Reinventing the Reading Experience: From Print to Digital” by Nicholas Callaway, the chairman of a company that produces book apps for children. Managers from Penguin Group USA explained how to master “e-marketing,” and a panel of digital experts talked about short-form electronic publishing — not quite a magazine article, not quite a book — which is so new, the genre doesn’t really have a name.

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