Content or Objects: Neil Gaiman and the future of books

"I worry that too many of us . . . are certain that if only we can get 1993 to come back again, we'll clean up. That if we hold our breath and close our eyes and guard the gates with bigger and more dangerous weapons, time will turn backwards and it will be yesterday again. And we all knew what the rules were yesterday. The rules of publishing were simple. Authors, agents, books, incredibly long lunches--that was publishing. Not any more." 

Neil Gaiman is one of my favorite writers and this keynote at The Digital Minds Conference 2013 is further evidence why. 

​I've been an avid reader my whole life. Growing up in Puerto Rico my parents used to say that I was a "come libros," literally a book eater. The only thing I would consume more was music. You could see me with headphones from a brand new walkman or a book in hand, sometimes foolishly reading while walking. While my schoolmates grumbled at having to read Cervantes, Quijote was my hero.

Nothing has changed, I still devour books and music. Sometimes listening to music while simultaneously reading on the same device. Well, something has changed, I now have a deep understanding of what it takes to both write and produce a book. ​

And then there is digital. I've spent most of the past month tumbling through the wild frontier of editing, programming and packaging digital books in EPUB format. I find all of it challenging, frustrating and terribly exhilarating. I feel that to honor all those books I've read and that in many ways have consumed me, that I too have to do my part in figuring out the future of books. 

Writing, creating, is a dandelion thing. When writing, make good art. When coding, make good art. Produce beautiful content in beautiful packages, make good art. Try everything. 

IBM On Brand

“_____ on Brand” is a series of short films created by VSA to capture the current thinking behind leadership brands—specifically, their origins and intent, audiences and ingredients, and business or societal impact.

In this two-minute tour, the roots of the IBM brand are traced to the company’s management of its character. Narrated by Jon Iwata, IBM Senior Vice President, Marketing and Communications, 

It's fascinating to see how a company with so much history, and so much history of change, has managed to maintain branding consistency over time. It goes to show how in addition to the visual identity, consistent behavior is really important to a brand and it's usually the first thing to go in the pursuit of rebranding. 

Nine Decades of Science in The New Yorker: Looking Back to Look Ahead→

The New Yorker has been writing about science and technology for almost a century. In one of the magazine’s earliest science articles, “Invention Factory,” from 1931, the reporter Malcolm Ross visits Bell Telephone Laboratories, which occupies a ten-story building on the Hudson, at West and Bank Streets in the West Village. Ross tours the building, eager to see the research that, “depression or not,” the telephone company is funding to the tune of nineteen million dollars a year. On the roof, to test its durability, telephone equipment is being prematurely aged in the wind and rain; inside, technicians are working to find the combination of metals that will most efficiently carry a signal. In one lab, hundreds of researchers have been working to create an automated switchboard; in another, a hushed “sanctum,” mathematicians are exploring the relationship between population density and what we’d now call bandwidth. For the past year, Ross writes, “two airplanes have been flying around New Jersey, by day and by night, in the worst weather they can find,” so that Bell Labs’s scientists can improve the radio systems that connect airports to pilots; related technologies are being developed for Hollywood, to help clean up “the buzzing noise which is continually present in all talkies.” Ross speaks to one scientist about the prospects for 3-D cinema but has sad news to report: it’s unlikely that “movie heroines will soon appear on the screen with the rounded effect of your Uncle Stephen’s stereopticon collection of stage beauties.” But there’s better news in the ultraviolet photomicroscope lab, where a microscope Bell commissioned to look at metals is now being used to peer at chromosomes.

The New Yorker has launched NewYorker.com/tech and plans to feature current coverage and articles from the archives, which as the excerpt above shows goes back a long time (and proves the more things advance the more the process of progress is the same.) ​

I am curious to see how the new content will be received given the reaction by some tech writers to a recent post about Apple. ​

A Tuner App That Visualizes Your Pitch In Real Time→

The app’s main function is to tell you if you’re in tune. But it doesn’t just tell you--it shows you. Play a note, and you’ll see your pitch traced as a vertical line on the screen. If you’re within the green band in the center, you’re money. If you’re to the right or the left, you’re either sharp or flat. But what’s so great is that the feedback isn’t limited to that instant. The app continually charts the last second or two of activity on your screen, a "pitch history" that gives you a simple visual sense of how steady you’re playing.

Recently I was having lunch with friends that are music teachers and performers. Ella Fitzgerald started playing in the background and we were discussing her amazing voice when one of my friends remarked how she had perfect pitch, which is why she could so easily scat the way she did. The idea of perfect pitch is fascinating and mind-boggling to me. Almost immediately after that conversation I saw this app and I could not help but think that while most everyone needs this app to help them all that this app accomplishes was happening in Fitzgerald's mind in real time while she performed. She didn't need an external reference, she had this app in her head. 

The Science of Life, Love and The Sky

Today we conclude our visit through my favorite PBS Digital Studio offerings, in honor of the one-year anniversary of PBS Idea Channel, with a look at the recently launched It's Okay To Be Smart based on the great blog of the same name. Through the witty episodes we'll learn about the Auroras, why the sky is blue, and lastly, the odds of finding life and love. ​

Space might seem like an empty place, but the area surrounding Earth is constantly being bombarded by waves of charged particles released by the Sun: The solar wind. Luckily, thanks to Earth's swirling, molten core (and the magnetic field it provides), we are protected from this planet-sterilizing onslaught like an invisible force field.

All that science has a beautiful side effect: It makes the auroras! The Northern and Southern lights are the result of the solar wind and its dance with Earth's magnetic field and polar atmosphere. It's Earth's own cosmic light show!

References for this episode.

Why is the sky blue? It's a question that you'd think kids have been asking for thousands of years, but it might not be that old at all. The ancient Greek poet Homer never used a word for blue in The Odyssey or The Iliad, because blue is one of the last colors that cultures pick out a word for.

In this episode, I'll tell you not only why the sky is blue, but why it's red at sunset. It turns out, those colors are all part of the same sunbeam. And when you're looking at a blue sky, you could be sharing a special moment with someone thousands of miles away. Next time a kid (or the kid inside you) wants to know why the sky is blue, you'll have science to back you up!

(We know that the Earth turns the wrong direction in the animation, sorry about that. Something weird happened when we were programming the animation and it got reversed. Or maybe time travel!)

References for this episode.

Love is a complicated combination of brain chemicals and behavior that scientists are only just beginning to figure out. And it's remarkable that in every society that we have looked at on Earth, romantic love exists. So if love is so universal, and there are 7 billion other people out there looking for it, why can it seem like it's so hard to find?

In this episode, we'll look at what we can learn about the search for love from the search for extraterrestrial life. We'll start with Enrico Fermi's paradox of why we haven't been contacted by any extraterrestrials yet, and then at Frank Drake's equation to estimate the number of civilizations that might exist in our galaxy (updated with current numbers). Finally, we'll meet a young lady named Ann and see if we can calculate how many special someones there might be out there for her. It's a cosmic love story!

References for this episode.

Previously on It's Okay To Be Smart.