Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch has the skinny on why magazine publishers are pushing for a “Hulu for magazines” to get magazines on the iPhone:

Why are these print publishers reinventing the digital wheel? A popular app store already exists. It’s called iTunes. And people don’t mind paying for apps there. By creating their own app store, the magazine publishers can avoid paying Apple its 30 percent cut of sales. But that’s not the real reason.

The real reason they want their own store is the customer data. Magazine companies may look like paper companies, with a little art direction thrown in. But at their core, magazine companies are database companies. The way they make money is by knowing who their readers are and marketing to them by where they live and who they are. For nearly every subscriber, they have a credit card number. And they have whole departments which do nothing but massage the data to figure out who to target for advertising purposes and where the profits are. I’ve seen this machine in action. The database people hold the secret levers of power inside magazine companies.

This shouldn’t be a revelation, but it feels like one: nobody working in print media makes money by selling print media. Newspapers sell advertising, bookstores sell coffee and calendars, popular novelists sell movie options, less-popular novelists sell creative writing classes, popular nonfiction writers sell lecture appearances, less-popular nonfiction writers sell humanities seminars, Ben Franklin sold bookplates, and magazines sell subscriber data. It all makes the movie industry’s reliance on box office and DVD sales seem downright purist, even after you consider product placement and crossover merchandizing.

Also worth noting: the fact that magazines’ core business lies in massaging and selling subscriber data makes them pretty good candidates to thrive on the web, once they get their s— together. That’s where the real money and potential for growth is on the internet, too.

Following Anjali’s suggestion, I steered over to this post, “Bookshops are not dead. Long may it remain so.” Like me, James Higgs reacted negatively to Basheera Khan’s “No more bookshops? Good riddance.” There are some really good points in Higgs’s criticism, and I particularly like this one:

The binding and physical form of the book is an intrinsic part of its content, rather like the frame in a Howard Hodgkin painting. (Another example: James Joyce once made a fuss over the size of a full-stop in Ulysses.) You very much should judge a book by its cover.

Saying that a book can be reduced to a screen is the same thing as saying that a JPEG of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is as good as the original. Thank heavens when we won’t be made to traipse around a physical space, but can have master works beamed into our houses, eh?

This, I think, is one of the major tensions the e-book will have to resolve, or at least develop alternative solutions to, in the years to come. Do we want a perfectly fungible object that the reader is free to resize and redesign according to their own tastes and needs, or do we want a through-designed, screen-independent object that preserves the aesthetic and visual choices of the author and designer? I don’t think that digital can’t do the latter — take a look at iTunes’s recent attempts to bring back album art with iTunes LP, which beats the restricted visuals of the CD, at least. But e-books to date have largely not provided for that possibility, have not sought to create those kinds of objects. Which gives printed books the aesthetic high ground.

My bigger worry, though, with criticisms like Higgs’s, is the following:

1. “the experience of reading a book is fundamentally different from reading a text on a reading device. Many – and I’d contend that these are mainly people who are not compulsive readers – will not care about this distinction, but this is the market that successful booksellers are targeting.”
2. “Borders and Books etc are in trouble because they are not good bookshops. There is little to distinguish one shop from the next and, on the whole, their staff are not knowledgeable about the books they sell. They clearly don’t read reviews, or subscribe to major literary periodicals.”
3. “Most people don’t read seriously, and for them, these arguments will make no sense. But for the millions of people who do read compulsively, eReaders are not going to be universally welcomed.”

Now, I don’t care about the elitism in Higgs’s arguments. I’m an elitist reader, too, and I probably like the same books that he likes and would like the same bookshops and be frustrated by the same things in other readers. I do, however, object to the assumptions that

1. the kinds of texts you like are inherently connected to the kinds of technology you like;
2. that people who prefer either texts or technologies different from those you prefer are not “real” readers, not committed or compulsive or serious readers;
3. that the class of readers you belong to is uniquely positioned to determine what the future of reading will look like, or at least ought to.

It’s this argument from authenticity that bothers me most. What’s more, it’s the same trick Khan tries to pull in her post; Khan thinks that “serious readers” would rather carry a thousand books than a handful, that they prefer the library to the bookshop — in short, that they look and act like she does.

I will say it again: reading includes many, many, many things, in every context. If we’re serious about charting the future of reading, rather than advocating for our particular preferences, we have to try to understand and account for all of them, and to do so with as few assumptions and as much good faith and openness to possibility as we can.

After all, the fact that a JPEG of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is fundamentally different from and not as good as the original is only an argument for preserving paintings; it isn’t an argument for abolishing JPEGs of them, or caring about their quality.

If you’re at all interested in the health-care debate, especially if you’re coming from the progressive/liberal side of things, Ezra Klein’s reporting on his blog for the Washington Post is just essential. Klein just owns this beat, and every day he posts something from academia to think tanks to Congress that makes me think.

One recent post is especially outstanding. Most people know that the big debate right now is over the public option. Most liberal and progressive Democrats — and, um, more than half of all Americans — want some kind of public health care plan available. Some want a really robust plan, and want to fight for it; some just want something, anything, that could compete with private plans and maybe be built on for later. But most moderate Democrats and Republicans — and, um, the health care industry — don’t want the federal government in the health care business at all. So they are working to either strip the measure out of health care reform completely, reduce the scope and availability of the plan to make it as toothless as possible, or holding out for some other bribes concession to health care interests in their states.

But even if the public option has the highest profile of health-care reform measures (whether for or against), there’s lots of other less-sexy stuff that boosts access and reduces costs/prices. A little while ago, Klein asked an important question: if you give away the public option, what do you get? The thinking here is that a super-stripped-down state-run plan that can’t bargain like Medicare and is only available to a handful of people years from now isn’t automatically worth going to the mattresses for just to have something that bears the name “public option.” So instead of fighting for that idea (which the Republicans and many Democrats insist on fighting tooth-and-nail against), you use it as a bargaining chip, trading it away from something that can offer more bang for your political (and actual) buck.

For instance, instead of a state option for people on the exchange to buy into, which can’t negotiate like Medicare, Congress could allow everyone over the age of 55 to buy into Medicare itself. Klein:

The older you get, the tougher it is to find affordable insurance. Private insurers avoid you like the plague or jack your rates sky-high. Some of that will change with health-care reform. Insurers won’t be able to reject older Americans outright, for instance. But they’ll still be able to charge them quite a bit more than younger Americans pay.

One way to ease the situation for older Americans would be to let them buy into Medicare. Medicare negotiates far better rates than private insurers, making it a potentially cheaper option. Moreover, folks over 55 will be in Medicare fairly soon anyway, so this allows for not only better insurance, but more continuity in insurance, which means more continuity in doctors, preventive treatment, etc. This idea was present in Max Baucus’s original white paper, and even in Howard Dean’s 2004 health-care reform plan. It’s due for a comeback.

Another idea (none of these are either/or, by the way): you could likewise expand Medicaid, to cover everyone who lives below 150 percent of the poverty line. In those two strokes, you’ve extended Actually Existing Single-Payer Health Care to the two groups of Americans (the old and the poor) who have the hardest time finding and paying for decent private insurance.

But what about small businesses, and the self-employed? They have a hard time bargaining for good insurance too. Here’s another idea, that achieves all of the goals of the public option without being called or strictly structured as a public option:

Currently, insurance plans are regulated by the states, which means they’re different in every state. That makes it hard for them to achieve certain efficiencies of scale or maximize their leverage against providers. But back in September, I noticed a promising provision in Max Baucus’s draft that would allow for national insurance plans, so long as they met a minimum level of federal regulation. That seemed like a potentially huge change, but I never heard another word about it, so I let it go.

The compromise being discussed is built atop that provision. The idea is that the Office of Personnel Management would choose nonprofit plans that met national standards and offer them on every state exchange (unless states opted out). These plans would be private, but the OPM would act as an aggressive purchaser, ensuring that they met high standards and conducted themselves properly. It’s a private option with a public filter, essentially. But more importantly, it’s a menu of national, nonprofit plans, which would be much more interesting from a competitive standpoint than state-based, public plans.

There’s a great scene in The Fog of War where Robert McNamara talks about how he and the other folks in Kennedy’s war room realized that Khruschev didn’t want to go to nuclear war; he just wanted a scenario where he could say, “the United States was going to destroy Cuba, and I prevented it!” The US didn’t need to invade Havana or drop bombs on Stalingrad to get that result. They could get greater concessions more safely if they didn’t do those things.

Likewise, I wonder — if we give those punk-ass anti-reform moderates the ability to say, “the Obama administration was going to institute socialized medicine, and I prevented it!”, would that be worth it if we could actually get more people better health care more cheaply without it? I think I might take that deal. I bet the pragmatic tactician in Obama might, too — which is why even as he’s pushed for the public option, he’s always left himself some wiggle room.

Stanislas Dehaene tries to explain how when we read a word, the brain gathers and relays information to multiple networks:

Take the verb “bite.” As you remember what it means, your mind briskly evokes the body parts involved: the mouth and teeth, their movements, and perhaps also the pain associated with being bitten. All of these fragments of gesture, motion, and sensation are bound together under the heading “bite.” This link works in both directions: we pronounce the word whenever we talk about this peculiar series of events, but to hear or read the word brings on a swarm of meanings…

Perhaps the easiest way to describe how activation spreads through the dozens of fragments of meaning dispersed in the brain is to compare it to a tidal bore. Some rivers are subject, twice a day, at high tide, to a peculiar phenomenon whereby the leading edge of a massive wave reaches deep into their estuaries. If conditions are right, the wave can travel dozens of miles upstream. No salt water ever reaches this far inland—the tidal bore simply relays a distant rise in water level that spreads in synchrony into the river’s entire system. Only an airplane or satellite can get the true measure of this beautiful natural phenomenon. For a few minutes, a whole network of streams is simultaneously swollen by a powerful surge of water, simply because they all flow into the same sea.

A written or spoken word probably activates fragments of meaning in the brain in much the same way that a tidal bore invades a whole riverbed. If you compare a word like “cheese” with a non-word like “croil,” the only difference lies in the size of the cortical tidal wave that they can bring on. A known word resonates in the temporal lobe networks and produces a massive wave of synchronized oscillations that rolls through millions of neurons. This tidal bore goes even as far as the more distant regions of the cortex as it successively contacts the many assemblies of neurons that each encode a fragment of the word’s meaning. An unknown word, however, even if it gets through the first stages of visual analysis, finds no echo in the cortex and the wave it triggers is quickly broken down into inarticulate cerebral foam.

What a metaphor! A wave, like a thought, consists of countless micro-events which appear to us as a single complex phenomenon. If a stray thought is a wave, then reading is the wave of waves, transversing a network of networks — or a tidal bore.

Which reminds me: So far in the book, Dehaene hasn’t talked about how the brain processes metaphor. It might not be directly tied to reading, but man, I’d love to hear what he has to say. Until then, I guess I’m sticking with that other great French neuroscientist, Marcel Proust.

In the struggle for gay equality (especially marriage equality), the aughts have been the equivalent of the anti-segregation ’50s. Matt Sigl starts with Lawrence v. Texas and rolls from there:

In 2001 The Netherlands (of course) were the first nation in the world to recognize same-sex marriage. In 2003 Ontario followed suit, with Canada granting universal marriage rights to all citizens in 2005. By the end of the decade seven different countries (including South Africa!) have full legal marriage for same-sex couples. Many others have newly enacted civil union laws. And in America, after the shackles of legal and institutionalized homophobia were loosened with Lawrence, same-sex marriage became, just as Scalia predicted, not a lofty dream but a logical necessity and social inevitability. Within six months of the Lawrence decision the ice had thawed enough to allow for the Supreme Court of Massachusetts to demand the that Bay State offer the same marriage license to all its inhabitants, gay or straight.

I’d much rather the aughts be remembered as the Gay Decade than the Hipster Decade.

Both links via Sullivan.

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.

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!

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.)