The best entry by far of this otherwise uninspired “Top Digital Trends For 2010” is the one for “Info-art”:

Where we once had pop-psychologists and pop-philosophers, we now appear to have pop-statisticians and pop-economists. The growing wealth of data and the access to rich and diverse data sources that are significant byproducts of information networks have made the art of data analysis a defining skill of our time.

By the same token, the skill of elegantly visualizing those data has become a defining art of our time. The art of the infographic is becoming increasingly pervasive as people look more and more to the growing amount of data at our disposal for insight, and more refined as the interactions of those data becomes more complex.

With an ever-increasing need for real-time analysis of a growing torrent of raw data, expect to see greater innovation spurred by more elegant ways of capturing and visualizing information by a growing number of info-artists.

Poet Christian Bök, on how constraints equal creativity:

I think that my poetics makes it viable for me to excuse a whole variety of obsessive compulsive disorders. It’s not Asperger syndrome; it’s not a bug, it’s a feature. Half the battle of being a poet is trying to transform what would otherwise be dismissed as a weakness into a strength, trying to find ways in which something that should fail under other circumstances finds an ecology within which it can succeed…

I’ve put the constraints in place in part to conduct a kind of scientific experiment; I want to be surprised in a relatively rigorous way by the work that I do. I think it’s almost impossible to surprise yourself because of course you’re supposed to know everything about yourself in advance. But by adopting a series of otherwise programmatic constraints, you create a hypothetical set of controlled conditions under which an experiment can be quite literally conducted and the outcome has the potential to be surprising. In effect, it has the potential to produce information.*

Bök’s most famous book, Eunoia, restricts each chapter to a single vowel. So the “E” chapter prohibits any word with an A, I, O, or U. Here’s a short section from “I”:

Writing is inhibiting. Sighing, I sit, scribbling in ink this pidgin script. I sing with nihilistic witticism, disciplining signs with trifling gimmicks impish hijinks which highlight stick sigils. Isn’t it glib? Isn’t it chic?

*P.S.: I wish I’d heard this talk, which was at the Kelly Writers House here in Philadelphia, if only to savor Bök’s punchline. It’s tremendous:

I always joke with my students that poetry couldn’t possibly be as hard as they think it is, because if it were as hard as they thought it was, poets wouldn’t do it. Really, they’re the laziest, stupidest people I know.

Vladimir Nabokov, interview with the New York Times, 1969:

How do you rank yourself among writers (living) and of
the immediate past?

I often think there should exist a special typographical
sign for a smile–some sort of concave mark, a supine round
bracket, which I would now like to trace in reply to your
question.

: )

(Shared by a friend on Google Reader.)

Basheera Khan’s post for the Telegraph, “No more bookshops? Good riddance” is as clear an articulation of the technofuturist position on the future of reading as I could imagine. Here’s the key section:

I’m happy to see the back of bookshops, and not just because the paper publishing industry is inherently wasteful of natural resources.

When you buy a book, you’re not just paying for a few hundred bounded pages. You’re paying for the bookshelves you will need to store your books. The time it takes to dust said shelves. The effort and cost of lugging books and shelves if you happen to move house. The psychological debt that builds every time you survey all the books you bought over the years, on a whim, because they were cheap, but which remain unread — because with all the will in the world, there’s just no way to read every book you may want to.

I’ve been slowly divesting myself of the staggering piles of books I accrued when I still bought into the notion that to read a book you had to own it. I look forward with immense relief to the day when all my books are ebooks – light as a feather.

Actually, it’s not quite pure technofuturism. There’s a sop for bookservatives, too:

To people who bemoan the loss of bookshops as a loss to society, I say this: there’s already a place where you can go to find books you simply have to read in physical form. It’s a place where you can browse to your heart’s content, meet friends, take your kids, and do everything you did at your bookshop. It’s called the library. When did you last visit yours?

This is actually a weird binary, almost as weird as the one between bookservatives and technofuturists. Almost every full-throated embrace of technical/social change needs a still point, something that remains unchanged and which can still serve the function of whatever’s being swept aside.

In Khan’s post, it’s the library. It might be self-contradictory — shifting the locus of physical books to the library seems to solve the “hard to move house” and “annoying to dust” problems, but not necessarily the “inherently wasteful of natural resources” or the “I can’t read all of the books!” ones — but that doesn’t matter. She needs libraries. They’re a safety valve. And by praising libraries (and damning bookstore aficionados for not using them) she out-bookserves the bookservatives.

In the same way, folks who want to get rid of all of the physical books in a library would say, “if you still want a physical book, there’s always the bookstore.”

P.S.: If this “technofuturist”/”bookservative” language gets obnoxious or reductive, please tell me. Again, I want to advance “bookfuturist” as an alternative to both of these positions, so if I seem stuck on the words, that’s why.

If you follow my other feeds (Twitter, robinsloan.com), you’re going to be sooo sick of this by now—but most of you don’t, so let me point you to some fun Friday reading: a very short story inspired by a pair of pants.

Not to be grandiose (I mean, it is a very short story), but there’s actually a larger idea at work here.

The meta-inspiration was an idea that Geoff at BLDGBLOG threw out a while ago. It went something like this: How about fiction commissioned specifically for a new building? Imagine it: There’s a swank new apartment tower going up, and the developers pay a writer to compose a book of short stories about it. (It would be great arbitrage: a fortune in writer-terms is a pittance in developer-terms.) When you move in, there’s a crisp, limited-edition copy of that book waiting on your polished-concrete kitchen counter. The action is all set in and around the building: characters move in and out of spaces you recognize. They walk down your street, shop at your grocery store. They have the same view out their window that you do!

Why do I like this? Well, one of the things writers need desperately, I think—especially writers of short fiction—is new venues, new contexts. General-interest magazines used to provide one (I guess?); the internet sort of provides one now, but honestly, a short story on the internet can be pretty random. The most vital venue for short fiction today is probably, uh, school. Which is fine if you’re in the 7th grade, but what about the rest of us? How do you ground a story and—here’s the crux of it—give people a reason to read? (And, optionally, how do you support the creation of new fiction? Where does the money come from?)

So, as one of many possible solutions, I really love this idea of hooking a story to something in the real world, whether it’s a new building or (in this case) a pair of pants. Imagine that you took this a step further, and the story actually came with the pants. You open the trademark blue-paisley Bonobos box that just arrived in the mail and there, folded neatly atop your new khakis: a short story to get you started, to fire up your imagination.

What if every product shipped with a story?

Imagine analogues in other media: an album composed with a new car in mind, and when you buy the car, the album is loaded into the stereo, waiting for you. (It’s fine-tuned for the car’s acoustics, natch!) Or a movie set in that swank new apartment tower—filmed after construction is complete but before people move in.

It’s fanciful, but I think it connects to the idea of a data shadow—the idea that every physical object has tons of metadata attached to it, cascading away from it—and expands it. That “metadata” can be more than, like, a stream of usage information. It can be narrative; it can, in fact, be fanciful. Call it a story shadow.

It happens naturally, of course. Think of New York City’s story shadow! It’s huge! It’s like, a fifth of all movies ever made! Most cities already have story shadows; some buildings do; relatively few products do. So really what we’re talking about is priming the pump: producing a starter story-shadow on the front-end. And I think done right—again, this is the whole point—it could give people new reasons to read new fiction.

Probably the best example of story-shadow engineering today is the super-awesome Significant Objects. I feel like you ought to be able to take what they’re doing and move it up the food chain—imagine a future for new objects, as well as a past for old ones.

Does this even make any sense? It’s one of, like, the top ten things I’m interested in these days—but I’m not sure I’ve figured out quite how to articulate it yet.

P.S. Ha ha, now here’s a reason to read. Dave Eisenberg from Bonobos chimes in and offers a discount to short-story readers!

In the comments on a recent post, Tim Maly mentioned that cool Sports Illustrated concept video that’s been making the rounds. And it occurred to me that right now, today, at this moment, we have before us two brand-new visions of the future of content that complement and contrast each other in interesting ways. One is beautiful; the other is both beautiful and the future.

The first is the SI video. To be clear: I think it’s really neat. Some of the ideas—that moving cover!—are sublime and many of the interactions are really clever. As a piece of design work, it’s wonderful.

But it’s not the future. You know, it actually reminds me of Apple’s old Knowledge Navigator video. Both deliver some cool ideas; Apple’s video was influential, and I think the SI video might have a ripple effect, too. But ultimately, both get it wrong because they imagine products that are too neat. There’s no chaos; there’s no life. This is the thing that’s great about the internet, right? The human vitality. This is what makes all of our favorite blogs worth reading; this is what keeps us glued to Twitter.

The SI video shows us how all the latest touchy-swipey interface technology maps to a magazine—beautifully!—but it turns back the clock on the content. The magazine of the future feels a bit too much like the magazine of the past: glossy, static, top-down.

Now contrast that to the just-launched Pictory. The reason I put these two visions together is that Pictory is a new sort of magazine too, in its way—and at a higher level, both the SI video and Pictory seem to be, at least in part, reactions to the general lameness of content design on the web. They both provide an alternative to content shrapnel.

The SI video demonstrates a cool new way to look at big, rich, well-designed content… and so does Pictory! But then Pictory goes a step further, because it’s also alive. It has a striking new look, but it still feels of the web. There are ways to join in. There are, like, links.

And also: Pictory is not just alive but live. As in, you can use it today, not just watch a YouTube video about it. I know that seems unfair to the SI video: “Dude, come on, it’s a D-E-M-O.” But it’s important! Product and process go together, and the process that works on the web is iteration. A live site beats a beautiful mockup, and in the time it takes Time Inc. to actually implement anything approaching the concept they’ve laid out in that video, Pictory will be learning… growing… improving.

And you know what? I think when those dream e-tablets finally do come along, from Apple or whoever, it’s going to be Pictory—and more new sites like Pictory, sites inspired by Pictory—that we’ll be reading on them.

But this actually ended up a bit more prescriptive than I intended. Mostly, I just think it’s interesting to juxtapose these two visions and notice what they have in common and where they part ways.

Update: Tim Maly just pulled a Carmody! His comment is better than my post; check it out.

Okay, I’m partial. But Pound’s life, writings, and character were so outsized, so dramatic, it’s amazing we haven’t seen a movie version of his life already. (Tom and Viv must not have grossed well.) Check out Lawrence LaRiviere White’s spare allusions to just a few of the events surrounding the Pisan Cantos:

For example, I’ve always been partial to one part of the story, something not in Sieburth’s intro, something that happens long after all the Pisan stuff: after he gets out of St. Elizabeth’s, and after his great photo op, giving the fascist salute on the boat, throwing out some red meat for the boys in the press, his first stop is Schloss Brunnenburg, home to his long-suffering daughter & her aristo husband. The way Kenner tells the story, it’s a miserable spell, during which Mary for about the first time in her life has a chance to spend some quality time with her dad, but then all these wackos show up, her dad’s friends—poetic sycophants, escaped fascists, fellow former mental patients. It could make a great play, kind of like a realist, big cast version of End Game, & a dark dank broken down medieval castle for a set. All of Pound’s pretensions come home to roost & the nest gets stinky. There’s an arc to that story.

There’s an arc to Sieburth’s version of the Pisa story, one that doesn’t get played up in the Kenner. Both versions give us the capture in Rapallo by the partisans, with Pound picking up the eucalyptus pip on the way out (& I’m fond of that pip. I too collect fetish objects, if too many. I’ve got this box of rocks. I used to know where each came from). & both gives us good details on his time at the DTC, the weeks in the cage & the weeks in the infirmary. Sieburth emphasizes the racial dimension, something that has a sharp presence in the poems. The Detention Training Center was the only segregated [sic; I think White means desegregated, TC] unit in that theater of operations, and Sieburth believes that the contact with the black voices, their inclusion in the poem, is the crucial element in the Pisan Cantos.

But it’s the time between the two events that fascinates me. Pound isn’t taken directly to Pisa. His first stop is at a military intelligence facility in Genoa, where some sympathetic officers give him the good cop treatment & Pound sings like a bird, for the benefit of J. Edgar Hoover’s files. It’s a glorious manic phase for Ezra, lifting him up to make for a better depressive crash in the cage. Pound is at his delusional best (& whether or not he was insane, he was grandiosely delusional), firing off letters left & right, telling everyone how all he had to do was have a quick chat with Truman (& even Stalin) & he’d get everything fixed, & by everything he didn’t mean his case, he meant the world.

A. David Moody has already banged out a solid biography of the young Pound (1885-1920) and is working on a second volume; I wonder if anyone’s optioned it yet. (Among other American modernists, Gertrude Stein would also make a great movie subject.)

Alan Jacobs:

If you want people to believe that the populace is becoming more literate through digital technology, you need to be sure not to misspell “populace.”

The whole post is quite good.

There are a few ways in which the future of bookstores will resemble the past. Here’s one you might not know about: The money in bookstores has never been in selling books.

Don’t believe me? Read The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. Franklin was a printer, a publisher, a newspaperman, a bookseller, and of course an author, scientist, inventor, and über-citizen. Do you know where he made his money? His stationery shop. He sold bookplates, printed invitations, letterhead, and plain writing paper. This was always the high-margin AND high-volume end of his business. Franklin’s newspapers, pamphlets, and books were a labor of love, patriotism, and intellectual overflow, but functionally, they were loss leaders.

And really, this is still the way bookstores work. Yes, we go in to browse, be comforted by, and perhaps even purchase books — but really, the big-ticket items are greeting cards, blank books, calendars, wrapping paper, college sweatshirts, candy, coffee. That, at least, is where the money is. Booksellers are still primarily dealers in 1) paper and 2) social goods — books are merely the low-profit-but-high-prestige emblem of that intersection.

Of course, now big-box retailers are using books as loss leaders in a very different way — selling hot books below WHOLESALE in the hope of getting you in the store to buy a big-screen TV. It’s not just books and media, but also groceries, tube socks, and prescription drugs. The Targets, Wal-Marts, and Best Buys of the world arguably have just taken the stationers’ model to parodic heights. And since there wasn’t exactly an independent tube-sock market before, the people who stand the most to lose from this are booksellers. Booksellers who, again, are already selling books as loss leaders to get people into the store to buy their high-margin items. You can be more charitable and say that the sale of the high-margin items subsidizes the sale of the books, which is what sellers and readers REALLY care about. But functionally, it’s the same model. It’s just that when it comes to high-margin goods, a photo album simply can’t beat a Blu-Ray player — so Wal-Mart can “subsidize” their book sales a lot more than the booksellers can.

This is the economic substrate of the American Booksellers’ Association’s open letter to the Justice Department. Here’s the ideological payload:

For our members-locally owned, independent bookstores-the effect will be devastating. There is simply no way for ABA members to compete. The net result will be the closing of many independent bookstores, and a concentration of power in the book industry in very few hands. Bill Petrocelli, owner of Book Passage in Corte Madera, California, an ABA member, was also quoted in the New York Times:

“You have a choke point where millions of writers are trying to reach millions of readers. But if it all has to go through a narrow funnel where there are only four or five buyers deciding what’s going to get published, the business is in trouble.”

We would find these practices questionable were they taking place in the market for widgets. That they are taking place in the market for books is catastrophic. If left unchecked, these predatory pricing policies will devastate not only the book industry, but our collective ability to maintain a society where the widest range of ideas are always made available to the public, and will allow the few remaining mega booksellers to raise prices to consumers unchecked.

Okay. So let’s just grant all of that stuff about independent booksellers – or hell, even chains like B&N or Borders, so long as they primarily sell books – being essential to the functioning of a free society. I’ve got my doubts about how or why that might be true, and way too much (bookstores, newspapers, the American auto industry) seems essential to the functioning of a free society these days — but screw it. In the case of bookstores, I want to believe it.

At the very least, let’s grant that bookstores are awesome, and add a lot of value to their communities. Let’s also grant that even if the DoJ tries to keep big-boxers from selling below wholesale, they’re still going to exert a lot of price pressure on bookstores so long as they’re selling books cheaply. We can also assume that online bookstores, too, are going to continue to chip away at brick-and-mortars by offering greater selection at a lower price. And let’s assume – or pray – that the ABA’s request that “the loss-leader pricing of digital content also bears scrutiny” by the DoJ doesn’t lead to crushingly high price-fixing on that end. Then we need to figure out a new business model that can keep local brick-and-mortar booksellers alive.

Clay Shirky proposes going co-op (or at least, offering some kind of NPR-style patronage):

Reservable space for book clubs, writers rooms, or study carrels; membership with buy-back options for a second-hand book market run out of the same space; certain shopping hours reserved for members or donors; use of volunteer labor, like a food coop; sponsorships from the people or businesses in the neighborhood most interested in the social value of the store and most interested in being known as local machers.

The core idea is to appeal to that small subset of customers who think of bookstores as their “third place”, alongside home and work. These people care about the store’s existence in physical (and therefore social) space; the goal would be to generate enough revenue from them to make the difference between red and black ink, and to make the new bargain not just acceptable but desirable for all parties. A small collection of patron saints who helped keep a local bookstore open could be cheaply smothered in appreciation by the culture they help support.

There are already existing models for this, like the mighty Seminary Co-Op bookstore in Chicago. Barnes & Noble offers paid memberships that translate into free shipping and discounted books, well worth it for high-volume purchasers. It seems to keep the Sem Co-Op running, and probably nets a significant profit for B&N, so there are good reasons to think that this program has got a shot — especially if bookstores are inventive in how they come up with member benefits. For instance, it would be fascinating to see a bookstore run as a real co-op, with members actively driving the direction of the store. The Sem Co-Op certainly gets a lot of feedback and advice from its members (especially the U of C profs), but it’s pretty far from direct democracy.

Cory Doctorow offers a different way for customers to contribute to the stores’ future — and it’s not unlike what Franklin offered in his stationers’ shop:

At the Harvard Bookstore, they have someone who spends the day mousing around on Google Book Search, looking for weird and cool titles in the public domain to print and shelve around the store, as suggestions for the sort of thing you might have printed for yourself. This is a purely curatorial role, the classic thing that a great retailer does, and it’s one of the most exciting bookstore sections I’ve browsed in years. And even so, there’s lots of room for improvement: Google Books produces the blandest, most boring covers for its PD books, and there’s plenty of room for stores to add value with their own covers, with customer-supplied covers (the gift possibilities are bottomless), and so on. I can even imagine the profs across the street producing annotated versions — say, a treatise on Alice in Wonderland with reproductions of ten different editions’ illustrations and selling them through the store’s printer and shelf-space, restoring the ancient bookseller/book-publisher role.

Of course, most of the mass-produced catalog will probably end up in the print-on-demand catalog some day, and stores will be able to fill those orders, too. But if you already know what book you want, why bother going to a store? (Unless you’re in too much of a hurry to wait for the mail).

On the other hand, there’s plenty of ways that a physical store could offer added value on mass-market titles: localized covers, signed books, high production-value gift editions, a point-of-sale “donate to our neighborhood schools” kiosk that lets you print a book on the spot for a classroom that’s requested it…

The key point seems to be that bookstore patrons today are kind of like the Republican Party — almost everyone who hasn’t given up on the project altogether is a zealot. To stay alive, bookstores need to foster their communities and harness that zealotry, making sure that they don’t lose a generation of future zealots simply because they didn’t show up.

I like Doctorow’s formulation: “In that world, booksellers become a lot more like bloggers who specialize in all things bookish — wunderkammerers who stock exactly the right book for the right people in the right neighborhood.”

Now this actually loses bookstores the pure democracy argument. It will no longer be the case that bookstores are the only places offering salvatio — er, I mean, books. Bookstores might not be our Catholic churches, where everyone is welcome — but they could be our hard, thrifty Puritan churches, whose members go out into the world and demonstrate their salvation through their worldly works.

Counterintuitive hypothesis: The most significant thing that Amazon and now Barnes & Noble have done for e-books hasn’t been the creation and updating of their dedicated reading machines. It’s the creation of a genuine marketplace for e-books, where consumers can pick up titles easily, publishers can offer them and make at least a little money, and [in Amazon’s case] even little guys can get their stuff out there. You might have needed the reading machines to push the marketplace, but the marketplace will continue to be relevant even if everyone decides tomorrow that they don’t actually want a Kindle anymore. You can already read e-books on computers, smartphones, and pretty soon video game consoles. Amazon sold the razors, sure, but they can sell you the blades even if you don’t buy a razor at all. That’s big.

But creating a marketplace isn’t just about syncing to a device and matching readers’ eyeballs to content. You also have to establish, respond to, and eventually stabilize readers’ and publishers’ expectations about sales, especially about price.

This is harder than it sounds. How much should an e-book cost? How much should publishers have to share with the retailer? Just what are you buying? For hardcovers and paperbacks, these expectations have built up over a long time. This tweaked a bit when online sellers and big-box retailers started offering moderate-to-steep discounts over cover. None of this makes establishing norms for digital sales any easier.

For music, Apple pulled this beautifully in the early days of iTunes. At the time, CDs sold between 10 and 18 dollars for a typical album. This was actually really frustrating, because percentage-wise, it’s a huge variation. It was also an uptick from cassettes, which had rarely cost over $10.

Apple just perched on the low end: every track is 99 cents, every album is $9.99. They were competing with the free (P2P or friend copies) and the physical (real discs with better sound quality that you could play in your car), and they found a way out. Round numbers (good retail numbers for any product), close to what we were used to paying (but still offering competitive advantage). And they held it there, even when big media companies huffed and puffed because they wanted to charge more for high-demand (or high-cost) products. Apple’s establishment of trust with the music-buying public won out. And held out. Singles still cost a single. Which makes the digital music marketplace oddly pure.

At Booksquare, Kassia Krozser argues that the same price-stabilization is beginning to happen with e-books:

At Digital Book World, I’m going to do a brief presentation called “The Case for the $75 eBook”, because there is a marketplace for high-priced ebooks. In fact, I think there’s a robust marketplace for higher priced digital books, and I believe I can make a strong case for these price points.

That being said (ha!), I don’t believe the publishing industry can make a valid, solid, logical case for pricing most narrative fiction (and some non-fiction) ebooks above $9.99. Not only is this price point being cemented in the minds of readers by retailers, but, let’s be blunt, publishers have done a lousy job of making the value argument. The near-cynical approach of publishers to producing and selling ebooks has backfired. The process, the pricing, the product has been weighed by consumers and they are not amused. They like the $9.99 and below price point. It makes sense to them.

So, yep, I’m predicting publishers will have no choice but to swallow this one and figure out how to make their business work with ebooks priced below $10. It’s better to initiate this change rather than scramble when the retailers start demanding better terms. You can do it, publishing industry, you can do it!

It’s true! Maybe it’s just because we’re already primed by iTunes albums, or because $10 is the low-end price of a good trade paperback, or that $9.99 is one of those psychologically great retail numbers (Just dollars and cents! Not tens of dollars!), but it’s got real power.

For instance, I priced Stanislas Dehaene’s Reading in the Brain at both Barnes and Noble and Amazon. The book lists in hardcover at $27.95. At Amazon, it sells for $18.45 in hardcover and $14.76 for the Kindle. At Barnes and Noble, it’s $20.12 (huh?), or — yes — $9.99 for the e-book.

Now this was easier because I like the B&N app for the Mac and I preordered the Nook. But if B&N sells its e-book for $18, I either buy the hardcover from Amazon or pass altogether. At $9.99, I bought it right away. I did the same thing for China Mieville’s The City and the City: Kindle $13.73, B&N $9.99. On the other hand, I sprung for The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway for almost $18 and still feel like I got hosed.

Now, digital books also offer the possibility that books, like CDs, can be split and sold separately. Maybe I just want to buy a copy of “The Undefeated” and “In Another Country” – a taste of Hemingway, not the whole short-form corpus. Big publishers haven’t really done this yet. But among independents and self-publishers, the other price point that seems to be emerging – the symmetry with iTunes is astonishing – is the 99 cent short story. And again — this feels just about right, especially appealing to folks reading these things on their iPhones, who don’t want to leaf through a whole novel or anthology, right around the same price as a cheap iPhone app or a single song.

But Krozser’s hypothetical $75 e-book suggests that there are still plenty of other price points and formats to be hammered out. Maybe $25-$40 is the perfect price for an e-textbook. Maybe a short, indie nonfiction pamphlet – 2011’s version of New Liberal Arts – could sell well for $3.99. Maybe digital copies of new books will be free for readers who buy the hardcover (factored into the sale price). It’s still wide open. But with competition between sellers and tug-of-war between customers and publishers, we’re bound to figure it out.