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Can You Dig It? by Pop Will Eat Itself
(embedding, ironically enough, not working for me.)

Recently, my agent told me that my next book would go to a kindle publisher and I have to say I was a little crushed. It was like hearing your movie is going “straight to video” and I felt sad that I wouldn’t have something to store in my basement.

However, my excitement mounted considerably when I began to examine the kindle publishing paradigm.

* “publishing” (per se) costs next to nothing.

* the publisher’s role is to market the book, not print & distribute it.

* the split can be MUCH better – you write, publishers market & the split with some is 50-50, from what I’m hearing.

But it gets a GREAT DEAL better than that.

Question: What can you do on the web and in a blog that you can’t do in a “book“?

Answer: *EMBED MEDIA* and this is the reality of Kindle that makes Amazon the Gutenberg of our time. (/hyperbole)

Kindle won’t – or soon won’t be – static – particularly those models armed with on-board wi-fi connections, which ups the ante of author “experience control.” Want a reader to “hear” the song your character is listening to? In a static book, you plug in the lyrics and hope for the best. In a Kindle book, you embed the file, or the video if you want them to see it – or just pull it off web on the fly.

We’re already doing this on websites and blogs all the time – it’s automatic to most of us – the difference is that a Kindle “title” will be a hypermedia “authored experience” that will contain text, sound, chats, videos, you name it, to tell its story in a linear *and* non-linear fashion.

The major obstacle to this phenomenon? Copyright & DRM, of course. In the case of music & video, the RIAA needs to step up to the plate and offer a blanket licensing agreement to EMbook publishers and creators – or they can stamp their feet and watch in horror as their media enhances the literature of the 21st century – with or without a license, because the bootleg market will just be completely out of control. (I’m in Asia – you tell me about “copyright control” and I’ll just giggle at you.)

As for me, my only regret now in publishing a Kindle book is that I didn’t write to the medium in the first place. That was then – this is now – the new one will *totally* take advantage of the format.

caveats: 1) because of tl;dr, this is truncated from the original idea, which came to me in tonglen meditation in a rush. 2) these things need a name – there’s a contest. we’ll start with EMbooks (for Embedded Media book.) 3) I use “Kindle” like kleenex – this concept is not device dependent. see #2. 4) this article is rife with error. Have at it.

Since this course began, I’ve had a lot of opportunity to think about sharing in ways I never have before. When I first discovered facebook and the status report input, I shared all kinds of stuff that I don’t think now I should’ve shared – this accelerated dramatically when I got facebook on my blackberry and began sharing at all hours of day and night, wherever I was standing at any given time.

I remember one night being at a punk rock show (they still have punk rock in America, yes) on the 4th of July and posting “this bands sucks – a lot” from my BB. Two hours later I was in a local watering hole and at least three people came up to me and said, “I can’t believe you thought that band sucked.” I had actually meant it as a compliment, really – it was sort of an inside joke between me and members of the band, whom I’ve known for years, but I posted it live and lots of other people have smartphones and it appeared to them – instantly.

That was the night I realized the power of the network, but it didn’t end there – I later had a row with friends via facebook status report and that’s when I removed the application. It was too immediate and too bizarre and I had to take myself out of that loop of potentiality completely.

Nowadays, I only “share” on facebook when I am very happy and have relatively little to say – “Had a nice day at the beach,” “Just had a great Thai massage.” I no longer report things that are negative or weird or introspective or strange, because there are just too many people on that network now. Friends, of course, but relatives like aunt and uncles and cousins and others that just “wouldn’t get it.” I still have problems with comments to other posts, ranting occasionally, which often touches of a flood of replies that is fun, but later I think, “Why did I do that?”

Twitter is the same – I have relegated myself to only re-posting news articles I am reading, and my blog, once public, is now under lock and key with passwords given out to three people whom I love and trust completely. I made that move long before this course began, and now that it’s that way, I feel *really free* to “share” whatever, because my sharing is a closed loop. With all due respect to Justin Hall, I don’t think I could share all the deep shit he used to share about his father’s death and everything else in his life with “the network” as a whole anymore, though I used to do that quite a lot without regard to the consequences, back when the web was new.

So how about you – what do you NOT SHARE? And have you found yourself creating safety rules of what you do and don’t say to the network? Because people really *are* listening, oddly enough – something I had to learn the hard way.

One of the persistent criticisms of the age of media hyperabundance is that it has shortened our attention spans.  We are like hummingbirds, quickly sipping this or that bit of nectar before darting along to the next flower.  There is always a next flower: there is no end to the web, no end to the creativity of humanity revealed with in it.  We are always torn between the jewel in front of us and the greater spectacle of the jewels all around us.  This constant tension divides our soul, and makes us reluctant to commit to anything unless it promises a quick burst of refreshment or illumination.

Hence, when we are confronted with something substantial – say, an essay of 4300 words – our soul cries out the question, ‘Isn’t there something else I’d rather be doing instead of reading all those words?’  The answer, more and more, is yes.  So we navigate away from that which is too long, on to something else, something bite-sized.  This phenomenon has become known as ‘tl;dr’, an acronym for ‘too long; didn’t read’.  It sums up more and more of our web experience, as text overflows our inboxes, our RSS feeds, and our brains.

Nothing will stop this avalanche of text, but it is possible to write so as to ensure you will be read: the natural limit is 300 words. That’s as much as someone will commit to.  All of my postings have followed this rule religiously.  Now that the inmates are firmly in control of this asylum, it’s become clear that we have a lot to say.  That’s good, that’s as planned.  Now it becomes a matter of how to say it.  Trim it down into a tidy, digestible, nectar-laden nugget.  It’s hard.  But necessary.

Enough said.