Category Archives: digital_literature

in japan: comics via mobile phone

Another mobile lit item. Sony is increasing its mobile comics publishing service, offering around 300 popular “manga” titles to Japanese subscribers in the coming year.
From USA Today (via Smart Mobs):

Cell-phone comics use a technology called Comic Surfing, developed by Tokyo-based venture firm Celsys, which takes viewers through manga stories at a carefully calculated speed and sequence.
The manga frames are specially formatted to fit on tiny mobile phone screens. Pop-up frames and vibration during action scenes add to the drama. Cell-phone comics with preprogrammed sound effects are also coming soon…

Related:
“How Mobile Phones Conquered Japan” in Wired – discussing the new book “Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life”
and
“novels on your phone” in if:book – about Japanese cell phone fiction

the digital novelist

cover-madame.jpg “Print publishing has had a great 500 year run,” says 77 year old novelist Warren Adler, “but the print book is morphing into the screen book.” Mr. Adler, who has published 27 print novels including “War of the Roses,” is publishing his 28th, “Death of A Washington Madame,” electronically and e-mailing it for free to anyone who asks.
In an article in Sunday’s New York Times, he tells reporter Claudia Deutsch that, “the big publishing houses just don’t get it.” So Mr. Adler has taken matters into his own hands. According to the official Warren Adler website, he has:

required the English language and foreign rights to his entire backlist of 25 novels and has made them available in ebook formats and Print-on-Demand formats in trade and hardcover. They are available on the web through all bookselling sites and can be ordered through chain and independent bookstores.

earthcore: a serial novel in podcasts

earthcore_intro.jpg in june i decided to explore the podcast phenomenon. i downloaded a number of different programs on to my ipod shuffle. the first batch included some favorite radio programs that i rarely listen to now that i hardly ever drive anywhere, a bunch of different audio blogs, some serious, some insane or inane . . . and the most interesting – Earthcore – billed as the first podcast only novel. written and performed by scott sigler, Earthcore is a science fiction page turner divided into tweny-one 40-50 minute installments. sigler has been releasing one installment per week. the last one just went up.
siglerfullbw.jpg the plot is original and ingeniously woven and Sigler is one hell of a story teller. his palpable enthusiasm for his story, the Earthcore project and the new world of podcasting is infectious. just as in the best blogs, Earthcore seems to get an extra jolt from sigler’s willingness to put himself and his ideas on the line. his personality comes shining through; getting to know him and liking his attitude becomes an important part of the experience. with over 10,000 listeners by now, you would think that more than one major publisher would have come begging to buy the rights to a book with a significant proven audience. however, as if more proof of the moribund nature of big publishing were needed, to date not one publisher has approached Sigler. he’s on the verge of signing a deal with a small Canadian publisher, Dragon Moon Press. Congratulations to them for going with the opportunity.

e-poetry 2005

E-Poetry 2005, “an international digital poetry festival,” will be held this fall, September 28 through October 1, in London:

E-Poetry 2005 is both a conference and festival, dedicated to showcasing the best talent in digital poetry and poetics from around the world. E-Poetry combines both a high-level academic conference and workshop, examining growing trends in this young and emergent art form, with a festival of the latest and most exciting work from both established and new practitioners.

(via Grand Text Auto)

ebooks in korea

korean ebook.jpg An article in Chosun Ilbo describes the increasing popularity of ebooks in Korea, a shift driven by readers on a tight budget who are drawn to the affordability of digital texts. It’s estimated that about 100,000 electronic titles are currently available, a number that is expected to more than triple over the coming year as publishers ratchet up their digital publishing operations. But most interesting was this prediction of how the form of electronic books will change as they become more widely accepted:

For now, e-books remain at the level of taking printed books and converting them into digital files. But they will soon develop into multimedia books that combine text, sound and video.

(image from Chosun Ilbo)

finding poetry in digital detritus

poundstone.jpg
Spam Poem: For Paul Graham. William Poundstone’s found poetry contructed from spam.
arockyfreedom.jpg
Audio Diary: A Rocky Freedom. Found poem constructed from sound bites; created during the “second” Iraq war.
acronym.jpg
Acronymphomania uses processes of random dynamic motion and text generation to suggest the continuing qualitive changes in the speed of our society

reading manga on Sony Librie

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Came across this Flickr photoset of Japanese comics on a Librie – Sony’s electric ink ebook reader. Even in a photo, the reflective, print-like quality of the screen is striking. People have generally raved about the Librie’s display, but are outraged by its senseless DRM policies: books self-destruct after 60 days. (discussed here and here)
Once E ink enters the mainstream, people might flock to electronic books as rapidly and enthusiastically as they did to digital photography. Screen display technology will undoubtedly advance. The DRM problem is trickier.
(Incidentally, I found this image while browsing recent blog posts under the “ebook” tag on Technorati. Flickr images tagged with “ebook” are placed alongside. An example of how these social tagging systems are becoming interconnected.)

multimedia promo or prose poem?

Marcom.jpg Novelist Micheline Aharonian Marcom has created a website that presents brief excerpts from her novel, Three Apples Fell From Heaven, as audio flash drawings that combine animated text, audio and illustration. The illustration, a red line that scribbles randomly on the screen, subtly alludes to the violence in the text, and the voice-overs add depth to an already intense story. Although this site was only intended as a promotional piece for Marcom’s first two novels, the excerpts she chose and the impact of the sound and illustration makes them feel more like prose poems.

reading, without the book

David Bell, a history professor at Johns Hopkins, has written a smart, well-reasoned article for The New Republic entitled “The Bookless Future,” in which he ponders the changing nature of reading, writing and research in a digital world. Professor Bell and The New Republic have kindly allowed us to reproduce the article in TK3, an e-document reader. Our hope is that it will serve as a springboard for wider discussion, both of the article, and of what is needed to create the optimal electronic reading environment. The downloads are below, followed by some initial thoughts on Bell’s piece. We would love to hear people’s reactions..

First Download and Install the TK3 Reader

Then Download “The Bookless Future”
(when you’ve unzipped the book, you should be able to open it by double-clicking on its icon)

In Bell’s view, the big gains so far have been in the realm of research. “Today, a scholar in South Dakota, or Shanghai, or Albania–anywhere on earth with an Internet connection–has a research library at her fingertips.” A democratization has taken place, comparable only to the change unleashed by the printing press. The ease and speed of searching, comparing, and collating digital documents is similarly a great boon to scholars and students. The benefits afforded by new reading modes far outnumber the losses that opponents of the electronic book frequently lament – the tactile pleasures, the smell of musty bindings, the social environment of bookstores, the art of typography.
This will remain controversial territory for quite some time, but Bell manages to strike the right balance:

What really matters, particularly at this early stage, is not to damn or to praise the eclipse of the paper book or the digital complication of its future, but to ensure that it happens in the right way, and to minimize the risks.

Bell is also thinking what this means for writing. He recognizes the possibilities for new kinds of expression and argumentation that are only possible in the multimedia, not-exclusively-linear, environment of the computer. He cites a few examples in the Gutenberg-e series. But Bell’s enthusiasm is mixed with concern for how we are being affected as readers. First there is the way we absorb content, which has been entirely transformed by hypertext and search – the “browsing” ethos. Bell warns:

Reading in this strategic, targeted manner can feel empowering. Instead of surrendering to the organizing logic of the book you are reading, you can approach it with your own questions and glean precisely what you want from it. You are the master, not some dead author. And this is precisely where the greatest dangers lie, because when reading, you should not be the master. Information is not knowledge; searching is not reading; and surrendering to the organizing logic of a book is, after all, the way one learns.

Questions of form are no less important. Bell reminds us that the digital revolution, unlike the print revolution, is not just about the book. Moveable type may have transformed the means of production for books. But in form, they remained basically the same, and were no less “readable” than their hand-copied forebears. This is not the case with digital books. Until personal computers, and later, the web, it was never assumed that we would do any serious reading on screens. But as technology advanced, we learned that computers were more than just computational tools. A big lesson of the digital revolution is that since all media can be equalized as ones and zeros, then it follows that all media can converge and dance together in a single space. The digital revolution is about this convergence. Text is just one part of it, and so far computers have proven themselves better at handling rich media like graphics, film and sound than at providing satisfactory conditions for sustained reading. This boils down to a few, very simple reasons:
1. Screen display technology is poor – it hurts the eyes, requires large amounts of energy, and cannot be read in sunlight or other such ambient light settings. Progress is being made with the development of electronic ink and cholesteric displays, and Bell hopes that these improvements will deliver us from the headache of liquid crystal displays.
2. Most electronic documents are read in vertical scrolling fields. This is probably descended from the first computer terminal reading which consisted of long batches of code, best read in a scroll, or spit out on long rolls of paper. Horizontal paging keeps words and lines in a fixed position and makes for much easier reading. But you rarely find this today. A good example is the website of the International Herald Tribune. It seems like a no-brainer that screen-based documents should be laid out in this way.
3. And finally, the device is too awkward – heavy, fragile, expensive, and overheated.
Bell recognizes these points, but overemphasizes the need for a device that is tailored exclusively for screen-reading (though he does acknowledge that it would require web-browsing capabilities). One of the reasons book reading devices have consistently failed to catch on is that they are too specialized. In digital space, media can dance together, and there is no reason to corral them off into distinct zones. People are already reading books and other documents on their PDAs, and even their cell phones (check out thread, “the ideal device“). This is not because they offer an ideal reading environment, but because they are indispensable – gadgets that you always have with you. As a consequence, people feel compelled to cram in as many uses as possible. By this logic, the cell phone and the laptop seemed destined to combine. It may end up being something roughly the size of a trade paperback – hold it vertically to read a text, or flip it on its side to watch a widescreen film or play a video game. As with media, it seems inevitable that devices, too, will eventually converge.