Shimenawa

Learning to ride a bike

Recently, my ebook colleague Martyn Daniels blogged about Random House’s experiments in mixed media books, “… Explodes the Digital Spine.”

The Random House Group has launched its first list of ‘enhanced’ ebooks. ‘Book and Beyond’ is aimed at extending the content past the text that was in the print work and truly exploding the spine. Readers can now enjoy additional content such as videos, games, quizzes, photos, author interviews, interactive graphics and the option to listen to or read the text at the start of each chapter.

This made me think about my 7 year old daughter, who is learning to ride a bike. We had started last year, in the summer and Fall, but held off during the rainy winter. She had been doing alright, slowly acquiring a sense of balance, momentum, speed, and space. It needed more work.

With my own switch of employment to the Internet Archive, I recently purchased a folding bike so I could take BART into the city, and then bike around the Marina to the Presidio. That’s the plan, anyway. But it also gave me an excuse to go out again with my daughter to our local public school playground, so I could teach her new and important skills like how to start off on her bike, by herself.

It was truly as if the world had made a complete circuit. The balance was there, with more assertiveness, and all of a sudden, on our first ride this summer, it so obviously all came together for her. Definitely not perfect, but it’s undeniably there. And yea, she learned to push off. Now comes the hard part: learning all about city traffic and street signs. I’ll be taking my time on those lessons.

So when my friend Mike Shatzkin recently noted that the EPUB format wasn’t low-touch because it did not reflow around charts and illustrations well — I thought about how people learn to ride bikes. Mike said:

Epub can “reflow” text, making adjustments for screen size. But there is no way to do for that for illustrations or many charts or graphs without human intervention (for a long while, at least.) Even if you could program so that art would automatically resize for the screen size, you wouldn’t know whether the art would look any good or be legible in the different size. A human would have to look and be sure.

This comment made me realize the huge gulf in how I see the book world, and how publishing sees the book world. Because we’ll be writing differently. And we already are. We won’t be writing for paper, we’ll be writing for interactions.

And with that change, is coming a whole change in infrastructure that supports communication: duplication, distribution, performance. Our understanding of digital rights.

My friend Joe Esposito, in email, was quick to note that in fact this is already happening to a huge degree in STM publishing. The premise is that links and datasets are live; analyses are replicated in-page; molecules are spun; and perhaps in the near future through devices such as the iPhone and Android, even the atomic repulsion is sensed. The skein of linked data is being knit, article by article, text by text, data by data, feeling by feeling, and the presumption of where and on what device the work is encountered is ebbing transparently into the background, an inconsequence of design.

Today, authoring multimedia fictional or non-technical non-fiction treatises is craft work, but the tools are not simply growing, they are being woven together as well, building a new infrastructure for creativity that will, in turn, re-write our understanding of books — of sharing information. As I sit in a hotel room and write this, my blogging software supports automatic inclusion of media; it’s not hard … and yet my ability to endorse, to enable, my software’s tenacious grasp at other information on the web, seeking my permission for its inclusion here, implicitly or explicitly, will soon be part of my menu bar as well. The world gets smaller; communication is more social, more ubiquitous.

Writing the new book is something we won’t be thinking about soon. It won’t be craft, forcing us to knit together mixed media. It will be transmedia. It will be a skill, like using a phone. Like riding a bike.

Not everyone will have that skill, but most will. Not everyone will have access to the tools, but many will. And that will be the way of it. And I think that will be the way of it, very soon.