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In 1928, a cartoon character was born. An early Mickey Mouse made his debut in May of that year, in a silent flop called /Plane Crazy/. In November, in New York City’s Colony Theater, in the first widely distributed cartoon synchronized with sound, /Steamboat Willie/ brought to life the character that would become Mickey Mouse. Synchronized sound had been introduced to film a year earlier in the movie /The Jazz Singer/. That success led Walt Disney to copy the technique and mix sound with cartoons. No one knew whether it would work or, if it did work, whether it would win an audience. But when Disney ran a test in the summer of 1928, the results were unambiguous. As Disney describes that first experiment, “A couple of my boys could read music, and one of them could play a mouth organ. We put them in a room where they could not see the screen and arranged to pipe their sound into the room where our wives and friends were going to see the picture. “The boys worked from a music and sound-effects score. After several false starts, sound and action got off with the gun. The mouth organist played the tune, the rest of us in the sound department bammed tin pans and blew slide whistles on the beat. The synchronization was pretty close. “The effect on our little audience was nothing less than electric. They responded almost instinctively to this union of sound and motion. I thought they were kidding me. So they put me in the audience and ran the action again. It was terrible, but it was wonderful! And it was something new!”

— Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture

I’ve just started reading Free Culture (yup, on my phone), and it’s really good. If, like me, you’re very into all this CC-licensing and democratisation of content, but don’t actually know too much about the legal, historical and cultural background, you should give it a try too.

The above quote seemed startlingly appropriate to much of booktech and the wider internet’s attempts to do cool, new things and do them now. The results aren’t always pretty, but they’re often thrilling, and groundbreaking, and point the way to more exciting and new things. Of course, “terrible and wonderful” is not a good pitch to anyone corporate, which is why it’s taking the big guys a long time to turn the boat around.

But not, of course, Penguin. Head over to wetellstories.co.uk and check out the first installment of their six web-based tales, a Google Maps-based adventure from Charles Cumming. Sure, I’m not wild about aspects of the interface (the neophobes should have a field day with all the ‘reticulating splines’) but this is about as new and exciting as it gets.

However, the work—the work of art, the literary work—is neither finished nor unfinished: it is. What it says is exclusively this: that it is—and nothing more. Beyond that it is nothing. Whoever wants to make it express more finds nothing, finds that it expresses nothing. He whose life depends upon the work, either because he is a writer or because he is a reader, belongs to the solitude of that which expresses nothing except the word being: the word which language shelters by hiding it, or causes to appear when language itself disappears into the silent void of the work.

On Tuesday morning, I witnessed a very entertaining debate between Bill Thompson and Dr Nick Baylis at iDesign London. Entertaining because Bill Thompson is a shameless cheerleader for social (and most other) technologies, whereas Dr Baylis believes that technology (or rather, the uses to which we put technology, although he wasn’t very clear on this) are making us unhappy and ill.

Dr Baylis soon emerged as a book-pusher of the Andrew Keen mould, and was easily seen off, although not before revealing his patent lack of research in the subject - his unfounded belief that relationships begun on the internet were doomed to fail was particularly ridiculous, and actually rather offensive to a number of those present. Lloyd’s thoughts on Keen are applicable here too: you get out of technology what you put in, and on Tuesday I saw a very morose psychotherapist telling a roomful of very optimistic tech-lovers that they were wrong…

Anyway, one of the thoughts that came after the debate concerned the perceived distancing effects of technology and, to a lesser extent, of reading. When I was younger, kids who spent too much time on computers were presumed to be lonely and socially awkward - likewise, kids who spent too much time reading, although there was at least an intellectual air to that endeavour. As computers have become joined up, we’ve come to see technology as a connector, and while many of the old stereotypes prevail, most of us now recognise the social qualities of technology.

Reading, however, as largely remained an individual, solitary, even solipsistic activity, and it struck me that what many are resisting in the increasing digitisation and socialisation of literature is not the technology itself, but the erosion of that particular experience of literature. Reading a novel is one of the last ‘disconnected’ activities, and as we move it ever more into the connected world, we must ensure we don’t lose those qualities, of rest, respite, and introspection, that make it valuable.

The opening quote is from Maurice Blanchot’s The Space of Literature, who had some interesting things to say about writing and reading. Possibly.

A short story for you, in a different form.

I’m not entirely sold on QR codes, but I like the interaction that they create, a physical bartering with the environment to obtain the message - providing people are willing to do so. There’s also the element of surprise inherent in uncovering the message.

I’d like to see one on a book cover, or chalked on a wall. I might print this one out and paste it around town…

[ No idea what’s going on? Here you go. ]

[ More info on the story. ]

Quite possibly the best thing ever. Do not watch if offended by language, or without headphones in a busy place. Do watch if interested in increasing literacy rates. And booty.

The video is a product of BET, the ‘black interest’ US cable channel, who deserve utter praise for such a forthright and downright hilarious approach. It has, quite predictably, caused a bit of a furore across the pond due to it’s supposed negative stereotyping of black youth. It’s satire. It has a message. People will get the message. Acting on it is up to them. (Via Print Is Dead).

Whichbook.net is such a good idea it’s surprising it hasn’t been shamelessly copied elsewhere. You move a set of sliders and get recommendations from UK library catalogues. Read the rest of this entry »

A recent literary event provided a chance for an extended chat with various people about the possibilities for new types of readings. I’ve always thought they’re a bad way to appreciate lit, but they’re valuable in promoting new work, and bringing together like-minded people. What can we do about this?

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With new technology comes the need to rethink certain conventions. The above is clipped from a Macmillan ebook (link), and while I don’t wish to do anyone in particular down, and the technology is young, I think it speaks to a disparity in the understanding of ebooks: they are not simply paper books, scanned page by page and uploaded - or at least, they have the potential to be so much more.

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The subject of reading from electronic screens is a matter of ongoing debate. Many claim people will simply never read off screens in the way that they read off paper now. Excepting e-ink-based paper, which promises to revolutionise our understanding of “the screen”, are there simple ways to improve our reading experience on the web?

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I recently talked about ICUE, a company developing a reader application for mobile phones. One of the presentation modes used in the ICUE applications, alongside manual and ticker-tape scrolling, was Rapid Serial Visual Presentation, or RSVP.

RSVP has been around for a while but is only now on the point of becoming widespread. A simple RSVP example is shown here, courtesy of flashreader.com.

Studies at the University of Wichita, among others, have shown that readers attain the same level of comprehension using RSVP at 250 WPM as they do at their own speed on traditionally-presented text. Admittedly, most readers report that they don’t enjoy the experience, but if their comprehension is at the same level, it’s a matter of getting used to the new format.

Devices and programs for reading ebooks have so far stuck closely to the old model: make it look enough like a pbook and hopefully people will get used to it. But this is technologically and philosophically unnecessary: the core of a literary work is the words it is composed of: the way in which these words are presented is not (usually) part of that information (concrete poetry and certain experimental literary works aside). So RSVP presents an equally valid means of reading - one which can reduce the need for page-sized, blocky ereaders (an RSVP reader would work well on the screen of an iPod, or, as shown by ICUE, on a mobile phone).

Conceptually, RSVP text moves more towards film: a continual stream, in which it is harder to go back, simpler to go with the flow, to forge ahead in the torrent of words. One might not wish to read a textbook or a complex work in such a way, but simple stories can carry us along. Different literary techniques might evolve through RSVP technology: repetition becomes harder for the eye to skip over so emphasis and ennui are easier for author to enforce on the reader [repetition repetition repetition repetition repetition repetition repetition repetition repetition repetition repetition see?].

Try it for yourself - there are a wealth of free downloads out there to experiment with the technology: RocketReader, BookMuncher, RapidReader among them. A comparison table is available here.