In the above TEDTalk, Mike Matas gives a demonstration of the e-book Our Choice, written by Al Gore as a sequel to An Inconvenient Truth and brought to iPads and iPhones everywhere by Matas’s company, Push Pop Press. From what Matas shows in the demonstration, the book (or app – he uses the terms interchangeably in his presentation), the interactive version of Gore’s book looks strikingly similar (though perhaps a bit more image-reliant) to the Penguin Amplified Editions I’ve mentioned in a couple of other posts. Using touch-screen technology, readers are encouraged to manipulate elements of the text, resizing images and scrolling through pages, listening to Al Gore’s voice read and explain the text, and even blowing on the device in order to set small digital windmills going, producing virtual energy for digital houses. In a strictly non-academic sort of way, I’d just like to say that this is very neat.
Still, even though it adds the fun little feature of giving the reader the opportunity to create wind by blowing across his or her screen, this book/app is not so different from Steve Tomasula’s TOC or the Penguin Amplified Edition of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. To expound upon these features would be repetitive; check out my earlier post On the Interactive Reader for a few thoughts on that. Please note, however, that I am not pretending I’ve said all there is to say on these works or others like (or unlike) them. I just want to move onto what initially interested me about the Push Pop Press situation: its purchase by Facebook.
This is a big deal in the publishing industry, apparently. Though Push Pop Press has only published one e-book and states on its website that it will not publish any more, the loss is seen by many in the innovative technique the company offered for e-book/app creation, and in their former promise to make the platform available to publishing houses. This may well be true, but at this point I would argue that the innovative technique has already become subject to imitation. Others can pick up where PPP left off, in other words. By selling their platform (and consequently themselves) to Facebook, PPP is potentially offering something much larger than their promise to offer their platform to publishing houses. If Facebook plays its cards right, the ideas and technology used in Our Choice will offer something relatively new to the masses: the ability to create something, while undoubtedly not as complex or polished as Our Choice, that gives life to the day-to-day narratives we share constantly via Facebook.
The question I’m considering right now is how this kind of ability will effect the telling of our day-to-day life stories? Clearly, an application like this will not offer the temporal shrinkage of microblogging, status updates, live blogging, or even “normal” blogging. Even in a simplified state, temporal distance will have to exist if someone takes the time to organize their story and present it in such a fashion. Still, though, the distance has the ability to be much less than what it would be in a print situation.
Even more interesting to me is the prospective ability for fiction and nonfiction authors to make use of this platform. Currently, a semi-savvy author is able to publish on the Kindle platform without having to go through a traditional agent and publisher; as I discussed in Obsolescence and Nostalgia, however, this ability is more or less limited to the traditional e-book platform; in other words, their products are not so different from those they might have produced in print through more traditional channels. When a self-publishing author wants to venture into the world of innovation and interactivity, however, (s)he will hit some of the same roadblocks as in those traditional channels: namely, even if (s)he does not have to look for a commercial publisher, (s)he will have to find someone who can code the narrative, and will have to cede at least some authorial control to that person and will then have to contend with the multiple formats for distribution. This could change, though, if the same author is given access to PPP’s storytelling platform through Facebook.
All of this speculation stems from the assumption that Facebook makes decent use of their recently-acquired publishing platform, of course. Though all parties involved have reassured (or warned) the public that Facebook is not planning to enter the digital publication market, even a simplified version of it available to the millions of savvy Facebookers could be yet another game changer in the world of digital authorship.
Digital Authorship 