How are traditional publishers adapting to changing technology and business models, and what must companies do to stay on the cutting edge?
What does media convergence mean today and what role do you see electronic readers playing in this new culture?
PL: I start with the human brain itself. There is a kilogram of matter in our skulls that basically controls everything. Everything we do as human beings goes on in the brain. So the brain itself is an example of a powerful convergence of all the kinds of neural processes. Media are not getting more artificial, they are really getting more natural, more like us, except they do these things over great distances and with much more power.
AK: I think it means the end of industry silos, the end of publishing, the end of the movie business. Increasingly, you’re going to see the conversion of these businesses in new types of creativity and distribution, new types of artists. There are 15 year olds today who will use devices like the iPad to create remarkable work, something that when we look at it we will go, “Wow, this is incredible.” I think we’re on the verge of major new cultural innovation, but it’s very hard to see what it is.
Chris Anderson, editor of Wired, recently described the tablet (at the American Association of Advertising Agencies conference) as a presentation platform, not a distribution platform. Agree?
PL: Even worse than not agreeing, I think it’s irrelevant. I find it the most boring thing in the world to talk about what a new technology isn’t, because all that counts is where it’s going.
HJ: Not sure I see much distinction between the two in this instance. People will use the tablet to access mass-produced materials.
It sounds as if the tablet may make it harder for noncommercial groups to produce and circulate content, so in that sense, it is less flexible as a distribution platform than the Web itself.
AK: I generally don’t agree with anything Chris Anderson says, so I would have to disagree. The iPad will become an excellent distribution vehicle for remarkably high-end, high-quality content, and certain publishers will actually use it very effectively, but they will
Who’s going to pay for print media in the future and what that means for widespread access to information?
Distribution models are obviously changing and how we consume media is changing, but will that change what we consume?
PL: That’s a very good question and the answer in a sense is “no” because the story, the narration, will stay the same. It’s basically the same good stories, the same interesting words, whether it’s fiction, news, a mystery or romance, a technical book. Content deals with who we are as human beings. That pretty much stays the same regardless of what the distribution system is.
HJ: First, I think the continuities will be much greater than the discontinuities. Cultural change is slower in many cases than technological change and serves to check the excessive claims made for the new. That said, I think the shift from reading as an isolated and individual act to reading as a socially networked process can have profound impacts on how and what we read.
The book will become the occasion for like-minded individuals to come together to engage in conversations, to work through issues together, to perhaps engage in shared activities.
Explain the eminent collapse of print and why the iPad kills.
How far can interactivity go? For instance, is there anything video games are doing that could be translated into other forms of media?
HJ: Games are powerful tools for modeling certain structures of knowledge. They are especially good at dealing with complex systems or processes. They offer strong tools for visualizing and manipulating data. They offer immersive environments that might allow authors to expand their ability to explain complex concepts to their readers. I’ve always thought that Leo Tolstoy wanted to be a game designer and just lacked the tools to do so. If you think about War and Peace, its centerpiece is a complex simulation of
The closing chapters of the book return to that battle and speculate how changing various variables might have altered the outcome. So, what if Tolstoy could have created a game-like simulation of the battle which would allow readers to change different variables and then play through to see how the outcomes would have changed? This would have been true to the author’s vision for the book.
In many ways, that last section is tedious to readers because it runs up against the limits of the printed book to convey certain kinds of relationships between data. A game would be a better way of achieving those same goals. And I suspect that we will discover other cases where games logically extend the argument or narrative of printed books. I am intrigued by experiments by publishers to create multimedia extensions of their novels. Right now, this has mostly been done in relation to children’s fiction with Scholastic clearly in the lead in this publisher-driven trans-media storytelling. These multimedia materials currently live on the web and must be accessed separately, but we may see a more integrated approach if next generation delivery platforms like the iPad live up to the hype.
We may see a generation of writers and readers who think across media. We can even imagine such devices applied to nonfiction titles through interviews with writers or even supporting materials that expand the experience of the book.
AK: The record companies are doing a very bad job. The music businesses that are sort of doing well are the ones that are building new business models around live acts, around a physical performance, I think the media companies of the 21st century will move away from selling the copy, building their business around the value of the copy, and instead focus on the physical act. One of the ironies of the revolution is that it modifies the digital. It makes it valueless. It actually transforms the physical, making the physical the most valuable thing in media. New media businesses will be the ones that focus on the concerts, live readings, actual events where writers and musicians will interact with their audiences. In the movie business, it will be with high-end interactive theatrical experiences. I think physical is good; digital is bad.
Discuss your prediction on the death of CNN and the birth of a global, real-time integrated news network.