Thanks of Richard Nash of soft skull press for call­ing my atten­tion to this reminder how the act of engaged read­ing can cre­ate a pro­foundly inti­mate space of infor­ma­tion and exchange between sub­ject and object.

The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm

The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and sum­mer night

Was like the con­scious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spo­ken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The sum­mer night is like a per­fec­tion of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the mean­ing, part of the mind:
The access of per­fec­tion to the page.

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other mean­ing, itself

Is calm, itself is sum­mer and night, itself
Is the reader lean­ing late and read­ing there.

Wal­lace Stevens (1947)

On Fri­day, August 6, Techcrunch reported that Nicholas Negro­ponte, chair­man emer­i­tus of MIT’s Media Lab and founder of the One Lap­top Per Child (OLPC) asso­ci­a­tion, pro­claimed that the phys­i­cal book would be dead in five years. A short arti­cle that I wrote in response to the sub­ject is now live at Inter­net Evo­lu­tion. Nor­mally I’d mir­ror it here, but since there’s a lively dis­cus­sion going on there, I’, just going to link to it instead. Give it a read and join the conversation!

I’m also happy to announce that our panel “Vir­tu­al­ity, Sim­u­la­tion, and Social Life” got accepted for this year’s Amer­i­can Anthro­po­log­i­cal Asso­ci­a­tion Con­fer­ence! Even more excit­ing, one of my dis­cus­sants is an “anthro hero” of mine: Lucy Such­man! How cool is that!

Thats about it! School starts next week and I’m head­ing down to Ithaca this weekend.

(Note — this post was adapted from an email that was later pub­lished as a com­ment at the Insti­tute for the Future of the Book’s blog)

For the bet­ter part of 500 years, beyond seek­ing out new con­tent, pub­lish­ers have pri­mar­ily worked on opti­miz­ing the pro­duc­tion of bibles – mak­ing them bet­ter, faster, and cheaper. Now, and for the fore­see­able future, thanks to desta­bi­liza­tion effects of new media tech­nolo­gies, those same pub­lish­ers are find­ing them­selves in the research and devel­op­ment business.

And while we have a gen­eral name for the busi­ness (pub­lish­ing), as Bob Stein at The Insti­tute for the Future of the Book points out, we lack a real name for the emerg­ing cat­e­gory of prod­ucts that is being devel­oped. And though many pub­lish­ers have pro­claimed they are now in the eBook busi­ness, I find the name problematic.

My issue with eBooks has a lot to do with the power of names.

What does a name do? It enables con­ver­sa­tion and cre­ation by creating/​coming-​to-​stand-​for the con­cept of a cat­e­gory. And the cre­ation of that cat­e­gory allows the con­struc­tion of fam­i­lies and hier­ar­chies. The cat­e­gory allows us to qual­ify resem­blances and dif­fer­ences across mul­ti­ple mem­bers, pro­vid­ing us with bound­aries about “what is” and “what isn’t.“¹

Thus, a cat­e­gory effects what con­sumers expect to get when they buy an “X.” And, more impor­tantly for this essay, the cat­e­gory has a pro­found influ­ence on cre­ators, bound­ing their notion of what they are set­ting out to make, and help­ing decide what tools and tech­niques they are going to use.

I am com­ing to the con­clu­sion that “eBook” is a reac­tionary cat­e­gory, and really can’t stand for what’s com­ing (new media con­tent forms). In my mind, by keep­ing the “book” front and cen­ter in the “eBook”, denizens of that cat­e­gory will, at best, be made up of an unequal part­ner­ship between text and other media and inter­ac­tive elec­tronic ele­ments. And in many cases, it won’t be a part­ner­ship at all. The “e” enabled com­po­nents (music, video, inter­ac­tiv­ity, GPS, etc) will be sup­ple­men­tal the text. Remove any of those ele­ments from the book and the whole remains largely unaf­fected, as you’ve sim­ply trans­formed an “eBook” into a “Book”.

Fur­ther, the influ­ence of the book goes far beyond sim­ply estab­lish­ing a hier­ar­chy among media com­po­nents. The text itself is expected, like­wise, to fol­low cer­tain “bookish“[1] con­struc­tions (chucked into chap­ters, at least for the moment, divided into pages v. scrolling, etc.) – This is the entire MacLuhan con­cept of “look[ing] at the present through a rear-​view mir­ror [… and march­ing] back­wards into the future” — initially bound­ing the poten­tial of a new cat­e­gory with rules from the exist­ing category).

This is not to demo­nize books. In fact, I believe that the book, “e” or other, is here to stay. First, it’s an extremely sta­ble form, hence the repro­duc­tion of its bound­aries in new media. More impor­tantly, the model of the soli­tary author who cre­ates via typo­graphic writ­ing and sup­ple­ments their work with illus­tra­tions (or some­times sup­ple­ments their illus­tra­tions with typo­graphic writ­ing), is still the most acces­si­ble form of media cre­ation. Finally, there is already a huge indus­trial infra­struc­ture to sup­port books.

I’ll repeat that books are fine. And there’s a space for eBooks. But that shouldn’t be con­fused with the new pub­li­ca­tion forms that are coming.

As for these “new” pub­li­ca­tions, the things that we know are here/​coming, but we don’t have a name for, Bob Stein has made the argu­ment that “App” (as in iPhone, iPad) is a good first shot at a name. And I think this is a good thing in many ways, as it opens up an entirely dif­fer­ent field of play when it comes to creation.

This space appears to be fun­da­men­tally more col­lab­o­ra­tive on the human level (teams of peo­ple), the dis­ci­pli­nary level (writ­ers, media mak­ers, pro­gram­mers, etc.), on the con­tent level (text, media, and soft­ware all as inter­de­pen­dent com­po­nents), and per­haps in terms of production/​consumption (rep­re­sent­ing more of a part­ner­ship between writ­ers, pub­lish­ers, and readers/​activators).

A com­plaint that can be brought against “app” is that it’s too “open” of a cat­e­gory to be use­ful. We can all think about apps that are well out­side of the cat­e­gory of pub­li­ca­tion. As social psy­chol­o­gist Mihaly Csik­szent­mi­ha­lyi has pointed out, an unbounded expe­ri­ence can be as detri­men­tal to cre­ativ­ity and work as an overly bounded cat­e­gory. That said, I think at this point, while we’re in the exper­i­ment­ing stages, we ben­e­fit far more from open­ness than constraint.

A more wor­ry­ing con­sid­er­a­tion when it comes to an “app” is that the cat­e­gory is already start­ing to develop some qual­i­ties that we may not want applied to pub­li­ca­tions. For exam­ple unlike a book, apps are not able to be shared or moved about freely. Cur­rently apps are also accepted to be plat­form independent.

Still, just because a name is adopted right now doesn’t mean we are stuck with it. In terms of cat­e­gory nomen­cla­ture, I sus­pect that the sta­bil­ity of “book” has spoiled us in one other way – namely that we expect that what­ever name replaces it will be equally sta­ble (stand­ing for hun­dreds of years).² Expect­ing “App” or most names we come up with at this moment to have that dura­bil­ity is ask­ing a lot. Choos­ing to use “app” doesn’t pre­clud­ing using a bet­ter term when it comes along.

1. Note that as per Wittgen­stein in Phili­soph­i­cal Inves­ti­ga­tions, those bound­aries are not hard and vary from indi­vid­ual to indi­vid­ual. [↩]
2. Prior to (and for quite a while after) Guten­berg “books” as a cat­e­gory were developed/​overseen by a *very* small group of priv­i­leged indi­vid­u­als – essen­tially it was a “closed source” tech­nol­ogy. So by the time they began to become a “mass-​market” item, it was a sta­bi­lized form. Fur­ther, the cost/​difficulty of their pro­duc­tion also assured they would remain under the con­trol of a rel­a­tively small group of indi­vid­u­als. These new appli­ca­tions are being cre­ated in a far more demo­c­ra­tic and dis­or­ga­nized mar­ket­place. [↩]

Yes­ter­day was Scott Pil­grim day for me. No only did Dre and I catch a sneak pre­view of the film (Scott Pil­grim vs. the World), but, prior to that, I got to read the final chap­ter of the Scott Pil­grim comic (#6 aka Scott Pilgrim’s Finest Hour).

Short, spoiler free, rec­om­men­da­tion:

Both rock. If you’re in your teens/​twenties/​thirties and part of the “video games, comics, music, arrested devel­op­ment¹ , cul­ture indus­trial com­plex ” the film is a must see (in the the­ater, prefer­ably one with a good sound sys­tem) and you should track down copies of the books.

On the Movie: The movie is a “valen­tine” to mod­ern music, video games, and comics, and per­haps the best comic-​to-​movie trans­la­tion yet (one that takes full advan­tage of the medium of film). The per­for­mances are great. Its biggest issue is that the sec­ondary char­ac­ters, in par­tic­u­larly the female ones, suf­fer from cuts made to tell the story in a sin­gle film (more on that below). But that shouldn’t keep you from see­ing it.

On the Book: An excel­lent wrap up to a great series, adding depth an mean­ing to events that took place in the pre­vi­ous books. Also, it’s a sur­pris­ingly mature take on the move not just to adult rela­tion­ships, but “adult” liv­ing (if you will). It really kicks things up a notch and then some.

Much longer, mostly spoiler free, reflection:

I came to Scott Pil­grim rel­a­tively late. I’d known about it for a while, but only started read­ing it around Book 4 (aka Scott Pil­grim Gets it Together). Up until that point the only “slice of mag­i­cal, musi­cal real­ism life” comic I had been fol­low­ing was Blue Mon­day, a comic I blogged about way back in 2002. Pub­lished by Oni Press, the same indy com­pany that brings us Scott Pil­grim, Blue Mon­day was John Hughes 2.0 — focused on an impos­si­ble high school expe­ri­ence, heav­ily influ­enced by music, manga, and pop cul­ture. While there was a sort of con­ti­nu­ity to the comics, it was much more about the ride than the des­ti­na­tion for both the read­ers and the char­ac­ters in the book.

It was direc­tor of the film, Edgar Wright, that really got me inter­ested in the prop­erty. While at the Uni­ver­sity of Chicago, I got to see a few bootleged episodes of Spaced, a BBC tele series he co-​created with Simon Pegg and Jes­sica Hynes², and was com­pletely blown away with how much it got, and more impor­tantly trans­lated, the expe­ri­ence of those of us caught between Gen X & Y. My inter­est in Wright was fur­ther peaked by Shaun of the Dead. So when I learned that he was developing/​directing the Scott Pil­grim (SP from here on in) film, I knew it would be a must see for me as I knew what ever he pro­duced would be engaging.

Up until that point, while I’d seen some SP pages online, I’d never actu­ally read any of the books. My inter­est piqued by news of the film, I decided to dive into the comics. My reac­tion was: ok, so this is like Blue Mon­day, but with some added Cana­dian (it takes place in Toronto), video game, and comic ref­er­ences. The SP char­ac­ters might have more “com­plete” devel­op­ment arcs, but it was seemed largely a quick-​read, hip­ster com­ing of age story with more style than sub­stance — per­fect for adap­ta­tion to a film (espe­cially with Edgar Wright at the helm). But that was about it.

And that was my opin­ion until yes­ter­day, when I read the final issue of the comic.

I’m not sug­gest­ing that the final issue trans­forms the series into high lit­er­a­ture. How­ever, in tying up the loose ends of the story of a Cana­dian Rocker com­ing to terms with adult­hood while fight­ing his new girlfriend’s seven evil ex’s, series cre­ator Bryan Lee O’Malley reveals to the reader that a lot more has been going on in the books than the fun but super­fi­cial tale that it ini­tially appears to be. There are no real twists — though at least one char­ac­ter turns out to have taken a very dif­fer­ent (and much more sat­is­fy­ing) course of action that the reader is ini­tially led to believe — or sur­prise end­ings. What is revealed is a metaphor­i­cal depth and matu­rity to the story that I had com­pletely missed. What’s espe­cially great about this is that it sparks a desire to revisit the pre­vi­ous books in order to see how much of this was in the story from the begin­ning (the answer, btw, is most of it was there from the begin­ning). This is all the more impres­sive con­sid­er­ing it’s taken O’Malley more than six years to com­plete his story.

Bot­tom line: to my pleas­ant sur­prise, I dis­cov­ered that, in the end, there was a lot more the SP the Comic than I gave it credit for. And that ele­vates it to a must read for those inter­ested in this type of comic/​story.

Then I saw the move, which deliv­ered on being an “Epic of Epic Epic­ness.” And it was great. And it was and wasn’t the comic. And that was both good and less good.

Lemme ‘splain:

The good/​great about the movie

First, it is a def­i­nite must see. Right from the start — lit­er­ally start­ing with the “Uni­ver­sal Pic­tures” intro — it com­pletely cap­tures the vibe of the comics in a way that no adap­ta­tion that I’ve seen before has ever done. While Sin City (and other comic based movies) look just like the comic, but are emo­tion­ally empty, every­thing about SP full of life. À la Wal­ter Ben­jamin, SP the film isn’t repro­duc­ing the comic on the screen, its extend­ing it and find­ing new things within it. And every­one is hav­ing fun while doing it.

It nicely cap­tures the video game aes­thetic, which, isn’t the biggest trans­la­tion as video games are already a mov­ing image (if not out-​and-​out cin­e­matic) medium. Where it truly shines is in how it uses comic metaphors to rep­re­sent sound. In fact, I think it’s a ground­break­ing film when it comes to show­ing music.

A quick bit of seman­tics to explain that last point — where as the best con­cert films, like Stop Mak­ing Sense, are about show­ing the pro­duc­tion of music, Scott Pil­grim vs. the World is about show­ing the music itself (if I remem­ber cor­rectly, every­one is lip syncing/​faking play­ing music recorded by other peo­ple). To accom­plish this Wright takes the comic metaphor of the writ­ten sound effect and cre­ates some­thing amaz­ingly visual and dynamic (the Bass bat­tle that takes place in the mid­dle of the film is per­haps the best exam­ple of this). His approach is also big — by that I mean cin­e­matic, con­ceived and exe­cuted for a movie the­ater (as opposed to a home the­ater) sized screen. If O Brother, Where Art Thou? was the Cohen Brother’s valen­tine to blue­grass, then SP is Wright’s valen­tine to mod­ern music.

And, across the board, the actors are all great. While many may be accused of play­ing them­selves (Michael Cera and Jason Schwartz­man in par­tic­u­lar), I think that cri­tique misses the boat. While no one is stretch­ing their act­ing range within the movie, what’s clear is that they all “get it” and are very inten­tion­ally deliv­er­ing the per­for­mances needed to make the story work.

So with all this praise so far…

… What about the less good?

The movie and the comics are inten­tion­ally dif­fer­ent. In part, that’s because the movie went into pro­duc­tion before the final two books were com­pleted. Wright worked with O’Malley to include ideas and themes from the later books, but things diverge quite a bit in the two sto­ries after the encounter with The Clash at Demon­head((see the movie or read the books and then this ref­er­ence makes sense)). The diver­gence isn’t by itself a bad thing. And a num­ber of the changes are nec­es­sary, but what’s lost in the diver­gence is unfortunate.

Another rea­son for the dif­fer­ences is the length of the mate­ri­als. The prob­lem that Wright faced is that there was way too much mate­r­ial for a sin­gle film and not enough to jus­tify mul­ti­ple films (in alter­nate uni­verse some­where MTV bought the rights and opted to make SP into a minis­eries and sto­ry­wise, it worked a lit­tle bet­ter.). The movie is a lit­tle too long. So, pac­ing wise, the film ends just as its start­ing to drag.

And though the cuts and diver­gences work in terms of cre­at­ing a sat­is­fy­ing film, they also hurt the char­ac­ters that pop­u­late the story in two ways.

First is that the sup­port­ing char­ac­ters all suf­fer. What makes this espe­cially rough is that many of the sup­port­ing char­ac­ters are well writ­ten women (some­thing that set SP apart from most other comics). In par­tic­u­lar, Kim Pine (one of Scott’s exes and a the drum­mer in his band) ends up get­ting flat­tened from a com­plex char­ac­ter in the comics to a generic “bit­ter bitch” role in the film. Also, to build to a con­cise cli­max in the film, Scotts two love inter­ests (Knives Chau and Romona Flow­ers) also lose a lot of their char­ac­ter­i­za­tion, and in many respects become weaker for it — in par­tic­u­lar Romona. To go fur­ther into this would take me into the ter­ri­tory of major spoil­ers, some­thing I want to avoid. Suf­fice to say, part of the strength of the comics were the female char­ac­ters in it. Ulti­mately that isn’t as much the case with the film.

Which brings me to the sec­ond prob­lem. To keep the story sim­ple and the film length down, the movie becomes more of a “heroic love story” than a “grow­ing up story.” While Scott still has to mature in terms of his rela­tion­ships and gain some self knowl­edge in the movie, the comic (in par­tic­u­lar the final book) han­dles this is a much truer way. The comic is as much about Romona matur­ing and chang­ing as it is about Scott’s jour­ney. That, just doesn’t play out as well in the film, again weak­ing the Romona character.

Bot­tom line about the film

These two cri­tiques should not stop you from see­ing the film. See it when it opens next week! And see it in a the­ater (prefer­ably a filled one). It’s worth it!

Hope­fully, the cri­tiques will lead you to read­ing the books³ in order to get an equally (if not more) sat­is­fy­ing take on the same characters.

1. The phe­nom­ena, not nec­es­sar­ily the excel­lent TV show which fea­tures at least two of the actors from this film. [↩]
2. Nick Frost was also involved [↩]
3. avail­able in most comic shops and book stores [↩]

I am back in Rochester and work­ing on a bunch of projects — includ­ing get­ting ready for next weeks Future of Read­ing con­fer­ence at RIT. My goal is to get onto a post­ing sched­ule by Monday.

Right now I’m try­ing to get my office set up and orga­nized and put the final wraps on a book chap­ter. If every­thing works out — both things should be done later today.