Buzz - Uranium Tipped Arrows
by John Wolf
I was reading about how technology is displacing so many traditional industries like newspapers, books, book stores, libraries—the list goes on. It's like Cupid shooting depleted-uranium tipped arrows to improve penetration he loves us sooo much. Technology is becoming a curse, not a cure. Don't you think it's ironic that our soldiers in Afghanistan are being badly damaged by their own ammunition, just being near the stuff—sad as it may seem. The books we love so much may be damaging us because they cost more to make than their electronic counterpart.
Focusing more in the literary vein, there is a lot of buzz about electronic readers blowing paper products out of the water. Sit down you tree huggers and stop screaming, yippee. Listen, the toxic disposal of electronic equipment is much scarier than the loss of a replenishable tree. But the combination of technology paradigm shifts and the effects of a down economy are taking a toll on traditional media. What would you do without paperback books, that warm fuzzy pulp that line your shelves?
The tsunami of Kindle readers forming a wave on your beach is not far off. As a writer, I really don’t care, as long as my books are read by someone, somehow. But what’ hurts is the impact to the stores. I don’t want my whole life to be online. That’s resigning to solitary confinement in your own home. I like the smell of Starbuck coffee in the air over the book racks when I run my fingers down a row of books, looking for the next in a series from my favorite author. I want to read a flap or two, ruffle the pages, smell the paper, and gaze at the cool artwork on the cover. My advice is to buy a used book store now and start storing up. People are going to go nuts for the antique known as the book.
I envision disposable book readers. You buy them from a vending machine, read the eBook, and recycle it when you’re done. Technology is the great leveler of anything that gets in its way.
I was just reading about a new technology where this writer hired a programmer to create a half-graphical, half-text freak of nature that can be read by mobile devices like PDAs, Blackberries, and iPhones. She's selling a chapter at a time and what you see on the tiny screen is her sentences turned into textual-graphics, for a better term. It's a weird hybrid between playing a video game and reading a book.
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She will probably fade into obscurity, if the story isn't that great, but the guy that wrote the program will be the next billionaire.
The 5 May Computer World magazine is carrying this article about Aya Karpinska that had this vision of how to deliver her story. She calls it "zoom narrative", where the action or interaction you take zooms you through the story and the twisting, changing font patterns that match the plot line. Aya, to me, is a super-hero independent writer. Not only writer of her own book, but advancing the technology to read beyond books.
Not to be outdone, the major publishers, or those that own other people's copyrights, are poised to start running chapters of well known books through the digital maze and start stamping out clones of their own. You thought Frankenfood was scary. How about Dracudocuments! There will be combo degrees in Journalism-Computer Science that will be the prerequisite for a publisher to even touch your work in the future. Your story will actually be a program. You won't be working in print but 3-D electronic layout. And you thought an agent was tough to find now.
It wouldn't be so strange to have a "book" beamed up to you in holographic form to read while standing in the shower. You can have a"book" dancing in the air in front of you as you wander through the park on a Sunday afternoon—air-reading. People won't ask you, "Who's your publisher?" They'll ask, "Who's your network? Who programmed your last book?"
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John keeps the kennels clean at the Fox&Quill Hunting Club. |
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BookLockerBooks.com in Oakland/Fremont area is now carrying all my books.
