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History breaking through [updated]
Supposedly a picture is worth approx 1k words. That may or may not be an accurate assessment, but I can vouch for the fact that the right picture can trigger a whole cartload of ideas - a whole screenplay of them in fact. When I look at these I can imagine them as stills from a cool sci-fi film - one I'd like to see, if it existed. Take a look. It's modern colour photographs of iconic locations with photoshopped portals opened into dramatic, B&W moments from the past. [source]
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Interview
There's a smashing interview with Wayne Simmons, author, of course, of Flu, in August's SciFiNow mag. Out on Friday!
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"Those little sparks in our brains that differentiate PLEASURE from PAIN"
I would recommend, my friends, that you head on over to http://www.andyremic.com/ to read a corking guest post from our very own Wayne Simmons on how apocalypse, amongst other things, frees us from bureaucracy.
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Triangles part 2
After the downer of the last post, let me make it up to you slightly. As you may know, I like clever design. I like practical clever design especially. But I think I like the idea of C2C design best of all. In case you don't know, there's an idea called Cradle To Crade (as contrasted with conventional design which is cradle-to-grave - or mine-to-landfill if you prefer). C2C thinking involves making products out of materials that can be reused forever more. The idea separates the world into two cycles, the Biological and the Technical. An apple is biological. You throw whatever you don't eat on the ground and it gets perfectly recycled (provided we don't, say, seal it in a plastic bin bag). A technical product is pretty much anything we make or anything that the biological world can't process back down to raw materials. The technical cycle needs to work the same way as the biological cycle. We need to be able to pull our products apart and separate out the raw materials to a level of purity that's indistinguishable from what we started with. Biologicals get returned to the earth, technical materials are turned back into raw ingredients. Currently we're very good at mixing plastics or metals together and then bonding them to something else. Just getting the labels off packaging can be tricky because at the moment no one seems much bothered what happens to those materials once they're thrown away. But if they were the raw ingredients for the next cycle of manufacturing there'd be enormous incentive to make everything reclaimable. The founders of Cradle To Cradle, McDonough and Braungart, wrote a book about their ideas. It wouldn't be an easy thing to implement, but sooner or later it'll be cheaper for manufacturers to get their raw plastics from the piles of plastic refuse on all sides than to dig more oil out of the ground to make fresh plastic. Likewise with rubber and glass and concrete and steel. If all our industries are based on digging stuff out of the ground and then burying it a little later, we'll run out of planet. But if we make things so that they can be taken apart and made into something else - indefinitely - our way of life could actually look very similar to how it is right now, only it would be sustainable. Closed biological and technical cycles, replenishing themselves forever - new products every year without using anything up - just add energy and ingenuity.
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Triangles part 1
Apparently Stephen King didn't realise he was an alcoholic until there was a garbage strike and all the bottles and cans he'd been getting through started to pile up. Being considerably less hardcore than Stephen King, my recent revelations are rather more twee and liberal, but nevertheless a little similar.
I recently decided to do more recycling and Step One was not throwing away things that looked like they could conceivably be deposited somewhere other than landfill. So I put aside bottles and jars and tubs and dispensers in glass and plastic and coated paper. And two very troubling things happened. Firstly, there turned out to be so much of it. A week's worth of packaging pretty much provided me with all the plastic bottles I thought I could ever reuse myself; so what about the other fifty-one weeks of the year? And secondly, a lot of it turned out not to be recyclable - at least not by my local council. And looking online there didn't seem to be anywhere else I could take these things.
I've even started to get familiar with the little recycling triangles with the numbers on that you see on plastics. I can locally recycle 1s and 2s, but nothing else. And I've been surprised to see that maybe a quarter of the packaging I buy still doesn't have those marks on it. Are they made of mysterious moon-plastic? Or are the manufacturers just lazy? If they can fit the maker's name on there I reckon they can manage a little number in a triangle.
Anyway, picturing what the heap of rubbish - mainly packaging - little-old-me must have produced in his lifetime is guilt-inducing. Picturing what that heap would look like if you were to combine it with everyone else's from just, say, the UK... well, that's a mind-boggling and scary thought. I've even found myself looking for alternative brands of my favourite things but which come in packaging that I could recycle more easily and it hasn't been easy. Guilt has made me cut way down on eating and drinking some of the things I like, because once you line a few week's worth of bottles or tubs up on the counter the whole exercise starts to seem recklessly wasteful. I'm even beginning to think I'm going to have to learn to cook properly. Not because I have any interest in it at all, but so I can find a greengrocers, like my grandma used to use, and only have a few brown-paper bags left over once I've eaten my fruit and veg. (And I think I'll try to find somewhere that doesn't fly in half the produce from the other side of the world.) I know this is a cliché, and not a very interesting one either, but when you think about the vats of oil that get used up making indestructible packaging for something that only lasts a week, it really is difficult to imagine we can all do this for much longer.
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Ebooks part III
Like most publishers, our two biggest costs are wages and print costs (including returns). Wages are predictable, so they're not likely to suddenly sink the business, but print costs, especially the money that gets wasted when we get an unexpected surge in returns, is our biggest risk. It's a particularly nasty risk too because you can bank the cheque for sales, spend the money, and then many months down the line be told you need to give the money back - and pay a load more besides to your distributors to pulp stock you thought the retailers had already sold. If a publishing business dies suddenly, returns would be the prime suspect. (Granted, retailers are often to blame for this situation, but that doesn't make you any less bankrupt.)
And all that risk largely goes away if we're not maintaining physical inventory. Each additional sale of an ebook is pure profit - there are no incremental print costs - and returns are no longer a factor. Our business - if it dealt entirely with ebooks - would suddenly find that its risk profile had plummeted. And if a book really takes off you wouldn't have to agonise over whether to print a hundred thousand or two hundred thousand copies - knowing that a mistake, even with a blockbuster on your hands, could ruin you. With ebooks you can satisfy every potential sale no matter how unexpected and without betting the business on colossal print runs.
There's still the threat of unexpectedly low sales, but they're more of a risk right now, when fear of crippling returns or a warehouse full of unsold stock stops us pushing a book too hard. You'd still gamble your promotional budget in a world of ebooks, but your losses would never exceed what you spent - which isn't the case when physical returns suddenly spike. Ebooks look like taking a lot of the risk and most of the waste out of the publishing supply chain. Fewer trucks on motorways, fewer felled trees, no pulping - and any book available in seconds whenever you want it. It doesn't sound like a bad future to me.
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Ebooks part II
I mentioned in part I how amazing ebooks have the potential to become. Maybe you've played with the extraordinary interactive encyclopedia, The Elements, from Touch Press. Or you've read Alice in Wonderland in iBooks on the iPad, with its moving pictures and shake-able figures. For the novel, the possibilities are interesting, if not earth-shattering, but for the non-fiction book the sky is the limit. Imagine textbooks with test questions after each section. A medium score might trigger a little more explanation, a high score might take you onto the next topic and a terrible score might jump you to some remedial foundation reading. What's more, content could be updated and the tests could contain different questions each time you take them. And I'm picturing embedded video of experiments being performed while simultaneously a table of readings updates and a graph of data points gradually draws itself. Now position the trend line where you think it should go. Touch here to reveal the correct line. Do you know why the line goes there? Touch the answer you think makes most sense from these three possibilities.
Or picture a book about the history of The Beatles with video footage, a soundtrack and interactive elements such as timelines and discographies you can touch to take you to the relevant chapter. Perhaps the book itself reorganises itself based on your interests. A chapter on each member of the group or a chronological retelling of their shared story: you choose. Buy albums, order memorabilia, and check recent Beatles news without leaving the book.
Imagination, and the effort you're prepared to put in, would be the only constraints. Granted, these aren't traditional books we're talking about, but with so few people reading these days, doesn't education - including the ongoing general-knowledge reading that many of us do in our leisure time - need to drag itself out of the nineteenth century?
(And for the ultimate in ebooks - one that can raise our children for us - why not read The Diamond Age. Here's the Kindle store link.) [image courtesy of Amazon]
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Cui bono?
I haven't stepped into the mire lately by mentioning man-made climate change. Does it seem the subject has also gone a bit quiet recently in the media? Maybe it's the recent cool summers plus this latest cold winter that did it. Actually, on that subject I loved reading an explanation of why getting your short-term predictions wrong doesn't mean you're wrong about the long-term stuff. Basically you can be wrong about the little tricky things without being wrong about bigger, more obvious stuff. It's all about statistics. Picking which exact days will be hot is tricky, but saying that they're more likely to occur around June, July or August rather than, say, December, January or February is a lot easier. Specifics are weather, overall trends are climate. Several wet summers in a row doesn't mean that the concept of 'summer' has now been disproved.
I've also been reading up a bit on the those who think man-made climate change is a hoax - and the PR campaigns which push that idea. (They call it a 'hoax' because if you call it a 'conspiracy' you sound crazy.) As someone who believes the government routinely lies to us and makes terrible decisions in our name, I have nothing in principle against the idea of a climate hoax. But the idea that low-paid scientists are the bad guys, and the oil companies, energy companies and heavy industry are the innocent victims has me confused. Why would anyone believe that? Around 99% of climate scientists agree that man-made climate change is real and a threat to humanity. Whereas among non-climate-experts scepticism runs at around 50%. If it's a hoax, then who's running it because almost everyone with money or power is on the opposite side. The idea seems to be that by falsifying their conclusions and scaring the rest of us, climate scientists get bigger grants. Whereas, in reality, the opposite is true. The handful of scientists who say man-made climate change doesn't exist tend to find it easy to get sponsorship from private industry think-tanks.
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Ebooks part I
So I've been busy reading books via the Kindle software on my iPad for a couple of weeks now. And while it's not perfect, I don't see it being any sort of problem either. I read heaps of text-only non-fiction (the sort of titles that you'd buy in paperback) so I'm not referring to picture-rich coffee-table books here. But if I could only ever read paperback-style books this way, I don't think I'd mind - though I'd want them to do a lot better with the software.
I mentioned this before, but I'm amazed at how rough around the edges the Kindle app is. This is 2010 after all. They've had years to get this right and Amazon are far and away the market leaders in selling ebooks. Apple have their own iBooks app but Amazon have nearly eight times as many titles (=450,000) so if you're at all eclectic in your reading habits (which I am) then Amazon is the only realistic option. It has the titles I want and they're a cinch to buy and download. The drawback is that everything looks it was just transferred straight over from Word, without being typeset first.
Part of this is down to the iPad itself with its poor choice of fonts (a problem I linked to previously). Part of it is down to the Kindle app and the way it handles things like justification. Its justification options guarantee every book looks awful. To get the spacing between words looking nice you either have to hyphenate (i.e. break a word over two lines) or you have to let the right-hand edge of the text be a bit ragged. Most Kindle books do neither, preferring to open huge gaps between the words in order to keep both margins straight.
Given the sci-fi-ness of the iPad and the level of mature design it exudes, it's a real blow to the electronic book market to have many people's first experience of an ebook look like it's running on software from the Nineties. Ebooks are capable of amazing things - touch a word to look it up in Wikipedia - add a soundtrack - embed interactive illustrations - you could even make books intelligent. I picture, for instance, a spotter's guide to trees and animals which asks you questions to help you identify which specimen you've just encountered and then takes you to the right chapter. The iPad has just introduced around three million people to ebooks and it will have done so rather badly.