musings

I’m looking forward to the future…

When no one makes any money from buying and selling .coms b/c no one really uses them anymore because apps are the new .coms and they’re available on any phone.

When we don’t need phone numbers.

When paper books are something special and digital stories only scroll or slide without the annoying fake page turns.

When something new becomes available and it’s not just in the US.

When data limits are irrelevant.

When I can download something — film. book, music, navigation, television — and I only have to pay for it once and use it wherever and whenever I want across a range of devices.

When I can make a TV show and my friends can choose to watch it in their living room.

When gigabytes become bits.

When computer screens are 1:1 with real life objects and no one under­stands what you mean by ‘it looks Jpeggy’.

When newspapers don’t use paper anymore.

When my friends don’t use bit torrents because it makes more sense to buy the content.

When ‘share’ doesn’t mean promoting links to your website in the hope that someone clicks on your banner ad.

When digital content is available to all people at a price that is relative and not based on the US dollar.

When telecom­mu­nication becomes simply commu­nication and is a basic right and not only for the rich and educated.

When advertising exists in an opt-out user-pays system.

When I can learn about a new tech service that is available in the US and not have to wait 12 months for it to be available in Australia.

When the Twitter fail whale is a distant memory.

When we don’t have to spend 15 mins trying to understand the latest Facebook change and how it affects our privacy settings and explain it to our friends who have children.

When fear just doesn’t work as an election platform because everyone watches programs like the Gruen Transfer.

When I don’t have to explain what cross-platform is.

When we can stop discussing technology and start to take it for granted and remember that it’s just something we use to commu­nicate, tell stories, make our lives better, learn about the world, respond to crises, and find other like minded people.

It’s an encouraging thought to think that that future is possible.

Sandy Cull invited me to post some stuff related to what I’m doing on her Australian Book Designer’s blog. I thought I’d post an excerpt here.

My current passion is working on creating AppBooks for the iPad, and — as they come on the market — other ‘tablet’ devices running OS like Android, in the belief that the future is an inevitable one in which digital books outsell printed books.

Lately, I’ve been looking at cross-platform solutions for AppBooks with audio, video and/or animation enhancements.

‘Darby’

A few years ago, Sandy Cull designed my book ‘Darby’ — she did an amazing job — you can see a couple of examples of the design here.

It’s been a bit of a challenge. One of the issues with converting a physical book to digital and supporting two orient­ations is deciding whether to crop full page images for both orient­ations or decide on one for full screen and the other to display as a smaller image with white or black space either side.

For example, if a book was full screen in portrait mode, then in landscape you could choose to centre the portrait image leaving ‘white space’ either side. I may not do this with my own book — as I can make the creative decisions about its presentation — however when presented with adapting someone else’s book design, I see this as a potential solution that maintains the integrity of the photos and without having lengthy discussions with the original designer, author or photo­grapher. Unless you just support one orientation.

I’m fascinated to see how the publishing and book design industry is going to develop to embrace digital books. I’m also excited about how authors, illus­trators and storytellers are going to approach a hybrid future where books, video, audio and websites are all formats that are available as storytelling mediums of enter­tainment, study, manuals, ‘cookbooks’, ‘novels’ and biographies… the stuff that we know as books now.

The book publishing industry is in transition — we’ve already seen it happen with music, photo­graphy and a number of other indus­tries - it’s an adaptation to a new medium — an extra one — in our continued desire to consume, learn, engage and contribute to the age old tradition of telling, sharing and enjoying stories.