On publishers 'clearing out the attic'

James Bridle has an other excellent piece up about the evolution of text - or I should say the evolving value of text while text itself needn't evolve into other media. It's a good read if you are interested in text as a medium and/or a business.

Toward the tail end, he discusses the challenges to publishers bringing online their back catalogs of text - and how they must do things to add context to the work in today's connected world:

 As publishers spin up their digital and print-on-demand backlists, more and more is published with less and less context. These efforts amount to land-grabs and rights-squatting, without adding value. Works without TOCs, indexes, author bios, footnotes. Placing work in context is one of publishers’ primary tasks, stretching out to commissioning introductions, assembling background material, supporting biographies and critical studies. Design belongs here too: good book design, appropriate book design, as important now as it has ever been.

It struck me that this can easily apply to all those game publishers looking to sift through their back catalogs and re-publisher works onto new platforms and business models. Something to think about.

Sunday Futurism - TL;DR

If you are someplace where the weather has you reading on the couch instead of enjoying the sunshine, here are a couple good though lengthy pieces I came across and now got around to reading.

1) BookTwo.Org -Seven Posts About the Future.

I've been following James Bridle's blog for a while. He's one of the more forward thinking people in the (book) publishing industry, and consistently links to really interesting pieces, adding a bonus of thought-provoking commentary.

The above is a list of seven more lengthy posts on his thoughts. The whole thing is a great read, but if you have time for nothing else, at least make time to read the 7th. It's a short story to tie together some of the ideas, and does so beautifully.

2) The New Yorker: The Information - How the Internet Gets Inside US

Good piece contrasting the different schools of thought (Utopian, Distopian, and Plus-ca-change) about how the Internet is affecting culture, thought, and thinking. Seemingly objective, and perhaps as a result of being so, it seems to side with the Plus-ca-change'rs. Regardless, it does a good job of taking a contrarian view to each point of view and as a result is a good read. Fave quote:

at any given moment, our most complicated machine will be taken as a model of human intelligence, and whatever media kids favor will be identified as the cause of our stupidity. When there were automatic looms, the mind was like an automatic loom; and, since young people in the loom period liked novels, it was the cheap novel that was degrading our minds. When there were telephone exchanges, the mind was like a telephone exchange, and, in the same period, since the nickelodeon reigned, moving pictures were making us dumb. When mainframe computers arrived and television was what kids liked, the mind was like a mainframe and television was the engine of our idiocy. Some machine is always showing us Mind; some entertainment derived from the machine is always showing us Non-Mind.