No flame intended, but I just have a problem with this.
I don't quite understand at this point why we as geeks seem to think that everything under the sun must be somehow distorted or twisted away from its original form to be worthwhile in the digital world.
Novel writing in its purest form is simply telling a story. The writer controls the flow of the story because, in all but the simplest instances, creating a cohesive story is based on the synthesis of myriad details. Interactivity shatters this, or at the very least greatly debases this. It's just somewhere between extremely difficult and downright impossible to make a great story in Choose Your Own Adventure style.
Why do we think things have to be interactive to be worthwhile? Why can't we occasionally, just once, be happy with a digitized version of the (far superior to anything else available) status quo?
Recordings are a gold mine, as any collegiate a cappella group could tell you. Releasing a CD for even $10 is in effect a license to print money.
Conversely, commercial artists signed to record deals don't make any money on their recordings -- it goes to the massive overhead (and massive pockets) of the record company itself. Signing a record deal is in effect an insurance policy for an artist -- it guarantees a consistent, if minimal for most non-superstars, revenue stream. A profitable album works the same way as [name your favorite insurance company here]'s investments in stocks and bonds -- it's what keeps the record company in business, not the artist.
Artists make all their money on tours. There's a reason that ticket costs you $45 and the T-shirt $28, and it isn't necessarily because the artist wants to screw you.
I'd kinda like to see them get the web browser and mail-reading setup working first... and make it FAST... not add more semi-useless stuff until after the other stuff works.
Most people (and here I refer to the non-geek world that still forms a majority), when they buy today's Washington Post or the newest John Grisham or Tom Clancy paperback, are looking for something they can read once, just about anywhere, and then get rid of. When you make an e-book as easy to read and handle as a paperback or a newspaper, AND bring the cost down to roughly $7-10 for the novel or 25-50c for the news, then people will be interested.
Until then, I'll stick with stacks of paperbacks in my bookshelf and a print edition of the Post that I can take and read anywhere, and leave my online general-news reading to the four other regional newspapers I read daily, but for which I couldn't afford printed editions to be mailed to my dorm room.
Slashdot Mirror
No flame intended, but I just have a problem with this.
I don't quite understand at this point why we as geeks seem to think that everything under the sun must be somehow distorted or twisted away from its original form to be worthwhile in the digital world.
Novel writing in its purest form is simply telling a story. The writer controls the flow of the story because, in all but the simplest instances, creating a cohesive story is based on the synthesis of myriad details. Interactivity shatters this, or at the very least greatly debases this. It's just somewhere between extremely difficult and downright impossible to make a great story in Choose Your Own Adventure style.
Why do we think things have to be interactive to be worthwhile? Why can't we occasionally, just once, be happy with a digitized version of the (far superior to anything else available) status quo?
Recordings are a gold mine, as any collegiate a cappella group could tell you. Releasing a CD for even $10 is in effect a license to print money.
Conversely, commercial artists signed to record deals don't make any money on their recordings -- it goes to the massive overhead (and massive pockets) of the record company itself. Signing a record deal is in effect an insurance policy for an artist -- it guarantees a consistent, if minimal for most non-superstars, revenue stream. A profitable album works the same way as [name your favorite insurance company here]'s investments in stocks and bonds -- it's what keeps the record company in business, not the artist.
Artists make all their money on tours. There's a reason that ticket costs you $45 and the T-shirt $28, and it isn't necessarily because the artist wants to screw you.
I'd kinda like to see them get the web browser and mail-reading setup working first... and make it FAST... not add more semi-useless stuff until after the other stuff works.
Most people (and here I refer to the non-geek world that still forms a majority), when they buy today's Washington Post or the newest John Grisham or Tom Clancy paperback, are looking for something they can read once, just about anywhere, and then get rid of. When you make an e-book as easy to read and handle as a paperback or a newspaper, AND bring the cost down to roughly $7-10 for the novel or 25-50c for the news, then people will be interested.
Until then, I'll stick with stacks of paperbacks in my bookshelf and a print edition of the Post that I can take and read anywhere, and leave my online general-news reading to the four other regional newspapers I read daily, but for which I couldn't afford printed editions to be mailed to my dorm room.