Does This American Life need a new disclaimer?

The easy thing to do would be to pile on. The harder thing to do would be to acknowledge Mike Daisey knowingly lied and then step back and re-examine our expectations of memoir to begin with. Those expectations are probably unreasonable.

How would, for instance, the stories relayed over the years by David Sedaris or Mike Birbiglia hold up to fact-checking? Does TAL grant these authors more license because the stakes of the stories they tell are merely personal?

What if TAL hired investigators to re-fact check every episode from the past 20 years that has relied on a single-author account? How many retractions would they need to run? How about The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, n+1 or any of the other countless media outlets that carry long-form memoir as a staple to complement the more traditional reporting that comprises those publications?

This American Life has earned its respect over the years by mixing investigative journalism and compelling non-fiction storytelling. They could certainly include a disclaimer at the beginning of every subsequent show they air. But wouldn’t it just be easier for us to confront an obvious condition of reality: that 1) We love TAL (and storytelling in general) because it’s entertaining and 2) Any second-hand account is likely to fail our requirments for what’s truthful?

Why ebooks should follow Instapaper’s lead.

What can ebooks learn from the popular reading app, Instapaper? As it turns out, a whole lot. Instapaper excels at bringing readers a beautifully designed and uncluttered reading experienced, with dynamic elements built into the fabric of the text.
 
Aside from its excellent implementation of typography, Instapaper makes it dead simple to share chunks of what you are reading with other people. The absence of a similar feature on the Kindle has frustrated me to no end over the years. Inevitably, I’m deep in the text of an interesting article or book, when I am suddenly overcome with the urge to share something with a friend or family member. But despite its ubiquitous connection to the web, this is not possible on the Kindle.

Instapaper makes this process very easy, using Apple’s built-in popovers, familiar to any user who’s made use of the cut/copy/paste functionality in iOS. Highlighting a word or chunk of text in Instapaper and choosing the “Share” button popover enables the reader to post that piece to Tumblr or Twitter — as well as the ability to send a simple email.

(It should also be noted that the same popover contains a “define” button for looking up words quickly. The Kindle already implements this, though it’s a clunky experience.)

As we move more and more of things we read from paper to screen, the impulse to share will only become more common. Adding this sort of functionality to our ebooks is a win-win for both readers and  ebooks resellers like Amazon, Barnes and Noble and Apple. The format of the quoted text could easily include a link back the web site where the book could be purchased or sampled.

I think it’s safe to say that while reading may be one of the last vestiges of solitary media consumption experiences, our reaction to thoughtful articles, essays, novels, etc. is to share what we have learned. Instapaper makes this process easy. It should be just as easy with ebooks.

This entry is part of a larger series called “e-books and the future.”

How analytics can enhance e-books.

LastFM offers a popular service that allows users to “scrobble” the tracks they play through iTunes and other music sources. “Scrobbling” is just a fancy word for submitting play counts of songs you are listening to. 

It’s dead simple, but when used over time it can reveal interesting statistics about the music you listen to. I’ve scrobbled just over 59,000 songs since registering in February 2005, so my LastFM profile reveals quite an accurate picture of the music I like.

It’s a bit odd, I’ll admit, to think of music in cold, empirical terms like this, but there’s something vaguely satisfying about “racking up stats” for your favorite songs or artists. And because LastFM is also a full-fledged social network, the more you scrobble, the more accurate the network becomes at identifying other music you might like.

The integration of some sort of analytics engine into e-books is equally appealing to me. It could, of course, do the simple things, like measure how often I picked up a certain book in one week, or how many pages I read on average per session. But e-book analytics have the potential to go far beyond the surface-level analyses provided by services like LastFM. 

Imagine for a moment an e-book that marries this sort of functionality with the embedded discussion forum functionality I discussed in my previous column. You could open your e-reader to a dashboard page that highlighted the “most discussed” books/chapters/passages of the past day/week/month, etc. You could pop into the discussions and sample a bit of the book (most online e-book retailers already allow this) and you could easily buy it or download the first chapter free.

Based on your reading habits, the system could even gauge your reading speed and attention span and suggest books that other readers with similar habits have read. Maybe folks who managed to maintain higher words-per-minute averages throughout the entirety of Moby Dick are likely to enjoy other similarly dense works?

The key to the functionality of these systems, though, is time. So the sooner we could start scrobbling our books, the better.

This entry is part of a larger series called “e-books and the future.”

E-books, Diigo and the future of book clubs.

Diigo is a bookmarklet-based web tool that allows users to mark up web pages with highlights and “sticky notes.” When someone leaves a public sticky note on, say, an article on The New York Times web site, the note contains a link to reply. This means that these notes (visible to anyone who has the Diigo bookmarklet installed in their browser) can transform quickly into threaded conversations. 

I’ve used Diigo extensively in online writing courses I teach for the University of South Florida. An example of what a Diigo discussion looks like in the browser is this:

Readers can view the comments by mousing over the sticky notes on the page. The design of the Diigo system isn’t exactly elegant, but its function is unparalleled: It allows you to start a discussion about an entire web page, a paragraph from that page, a sentence, a word, a picture, etc. 

The sort of functionality a tool like Diigo provides is just the sort of functionality sorely lacking in e-books. Elegantly embedded within the e-reading software, it would make e-reading social. It would inspire activity instead of passivity. It would help legitimize the “e” in “e-book” by making it truly dynamic.

Amazon has already taken the first (albeit baby) step in isolating frequently highlighted passages in Kindle e-books read on the iOS platform. What if they took it one step further and allowed readers to discuss those popular passages, encouraging them to dissect and interpret works of literature with the public at large or within privately created groups?

Recent research even suggests that just this type of discussion — the deep, literary, philosophical kind — is one key to happiness. So what are we waiting for?

E-reader manufacturers have given us big screens, they’ve given us keyboards, and more and more are they giving us ubiquitous connections out to the web. Now, if they could just give us our voices…

(This entry is part of a larger series called “e-books and the future.”)

Today’s e-books aren’t really “e” at all.

The e-book is deceptively named. The “e” is a common signifier that tells us that the word it modifies has been enhanced “electronically.” It can do digital things its analogs in the non-virtual world can’t. This is technically true for the e-books currently being transmitted from online retailers like Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Apple. But practically, these books do little more than provide simple highlighting and bookmarking abilities. They have yet to leverage the vast array of digital tools that have emerged over the past few years to change the way we listen to music, read articles and share content online.

Several services in particular — their functions re-imagined within the context of an e-book — could make that “e” a more meaningful descriptor. In the coming days/weeks/months, I will explore them under the tag “e-books and the future.” Stay tuned.

Three missing e-book features.

The promise of the e-book is that it can deliver an experience unmatched by its analog ancestor. Today, it doesn’t even come close (Though it’s getting there). To me, an e-book should be dynamic, engaging and social. These are three features I would love to see:

• Discuss. I should be able to engage other e-readers in dialogue about a particular passage, quotation, phrase, etc. The web tool Diigo provides a good example of what this might look like.
• Share. It should be damn easy to highlight a passage from a book or newspaper subscription and send it off to someone else might enjoy reading it. The passage would contain a link to the original source.
• Analyze. E-books are composed of bits and are therefore perfect candidates for comprehensive analytics. Applying an analytics engine to our e-books could reveal useful information about our reading habits.

Could Apple netbook be an iPhone/XO hybrid?

Rumors suggest that Apple’s long rumored netbook is around the corner. Additional rumors point to a possible eBook tie-in.

That’s intriguing. My first thought, though, was that what I love most about the Kindle is it’s eInk screen, which requires as much light as a normal book. The downside, is that you can’t read in the dark. The upshot is that there’s no backlit LCD waging war on your sore eyes.

But what if Apple could have it both ways? Truth is, another little computer you’ve likely heard of has already pulled this off…

So maybe Apple’s netbook will come with a nice bright LCD for computery things like YouTubing and web surfing and a black and white high contrast mode (a la the XO Laptop), perfectly suited for lengthy reading sessions in the park or with the aide of a bedside lamp?

Mix in a touchscreen and the iPhone OS…could be a Kindle killer.