Magazines – Page 9 – Auxiliary Memory

Web Sites I Want – Best Essays from Printed Magazines

Even with the social bookmarking sites, reading from the internet is like drinking from a fire hose. What I’d like to see is highly selective bookmarking site, and in particular, the one I’d love to have most would be Best Essays From Printed Magazines. The top writing on the net is usually reprinted from the major print magazines, but those essays are overshadowed by the gigantic volume of web journalism. Hey, I’m a blogger and love getting readers, and I love reading blogs, but the heaviest of the heavy duty essays are still from print magazines. The cutthroat survival of the fittest in the print magazine industry by its very nature acquires the best writing.

That’s why I’d like a site that helps me find the best essays over 1,000 words. Adding the length requirement is important because too many magazines have gone to filling up their pages with short web level writing. Social bookmarking sites like delicious and StumbleUpon are great for snacking on popcorn and candy level reads, but not so yummy if you’re looking for literary steak. Yes, they will link to long quality essays from printed magazines, but you have to wade through zillions of peanut size stories of questionable value, more akin to Television’s funniest videos in informational nutrition.

No, I want a site that’s very specific and limited. I’d like an editorial board that selects the Top 100 magazines that publishes their content on the web, and offers a system that lets users bookmark and vote on the best essays they are reading. Hell, I’d even pay to subscribe to such a site if they got permission to reprint articles that don’t get reprinted on the web.

The web has gotten too big and mangy, so when I want to know something I go to a specific site, mainly Wikipedia. I’ve given up subscribing to magazines, mainly because I’m against paper for environmental reasons, but also because when I was subscribing to dozens of magazines, all too often I’d only find a good article here and there. Most of the content was filler, like the web. I guess I’ve gotten spoiled by the iTunes model – who wants to buy an album when it’s the hit song you want. This is why I prefer Netflix to cable TV. We need more ways to cut out the noise.

Here’s are examples of the kind of long essays I’d like to read:

Publish or Perish (The New Yorker)
How to Save the News (The Atlantic)
Geek Power: Steven Levy Revisits Tech Titans, Hackers, Idealists (Wired)
A Draft Sequence of the Neandertal Genome (Science)
Yes, Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare (Times Literary Supplement)
L.A.’s Pot Revolution (Reason)
Green Giant (The New Yorker)

I guess what I really want is a web version of the Best American Series to be published monthly, instead of the yearly printed volumes they have now. And if they wanted to make extra money, reprint the monthly web site editions as ebooks for $9.99 for Kindles, Nooks, iPads, etc.

JWH – 5/12/10

The iPad and Screen Evolution

I got to play with an iPad today for the first time. It was beautiful. I’m going to have a hard time keeping my resolution to not buy one before the second generation comes out. I’ve been trying to find a carry around the house computer for years. I tried a Kindle, iPod touch and a Toshiba netbook. I sold my Kindle to a bookworm friend, and my other two devices just sit around losing battery charge. I use each occasionally, but they have the wrong size screens.

I liked the Kindle for reading fiction, but I wanted something to read electronic magazines, RSS feeds and the Internet while reclined in my La-Z-Boy. The iPod touch lets me read stuff the Kindle didn’t plus my Kindle fiction, but the screen is too small. I installed several ebook reader programs on my netbook, but 10.1” landscape screen is all wrong. Seeing the 9.7” inch portrait screen of the iPad today convinced me it was near perfect for electronic magazines, RSS feeds and Internet reading, and probably for fiction too. It was heavier than I expected, and that might be a drawback. But it was damn close to what I want.

The iPad should do a lot to eliminate paper, which is one of my environmental goals. The iPad also well illustrates the role and purpose of the computer screen. The small screen on the iPhone/iPod touch is perfect for carrying around all the time. The interface is tuned to it’s 3.5” screen. iPhone apps that aren’t rewritten for the 9.7” iPad screen will miss their mark. Putting Windows 7 on a 10.1” netbook screen just isn’t right either. Tiny desktop applications don’t cut it, they need to be redesigned to the screen real estate.

For example, Windows Media Center works great on my 52” television screen. It’s an application designed to work on a TV screen with viewers across the room. It doesn’t need a keyboard. Using regular Windows apps on my big TV is clunky. I can make browsing OK with IE 8 by using the Zoom magnification, so I can play music and read Engadget or Slashdot from the couch, but some pages like Pandora just doesn’t resize or work well on the big screen.

It would be damn cool if Pandora, Rhapsody and Lala all were rewritten to run inside of Windows Media Center. In fact, it would be extremely neat if there was a version of IE for Windows Media Player so I could browse the web with just a clicker. It would need a virtual keyboard like the iPad/iPhone, but that’s doable.

Back in the 1990s pundits started talking about digital convergence. They expected TVs and computers to merge, and that’s rapidly happening, but I don’t think they planned for giant screen TVs. Nor did they expect the convergence with telephones, GPSes and books, or even game machines. Now it’s all a matter of fitting the task to the screen size:

Screen Size	Device	Best Use
1-2”	MP3	Music Audiobooks Voice Recording
2-4”	Phone Camera Video Cam Portable Game	Smartphone GPS Photography Videography Games
5-6”	Ebook	Fiction
9-11”	Tablet	Nonfiction Magazines RSS feeds Photos Games
10-16”	Netbook Notebook	Work on the go
18-24”	Desktop	Work at the desk
26-60”	Television	TV Movies Music Home video Internet TV
> 60”	Projector	Lectures Education

You can watch video on all these screen sizes, and even use all of them with computer applications or games. Telephone features like video conferencing, Skype and web cams have moved to the various screen sizes. I think the iPad has been in development since before the advent of netbooks, and I bet Steve Jobs was sick to see them succeed because that 9-11” screen size was territory ripe for exploitation. I tend to think tablets will win out in that form factor and 12-13” will become the ultimate netbook size for extreme road warriors who want to type on the go, while 16” will be the common size for notebooks. I expect 24” to become the ultimate size for desktop machines, although I’ve discovered I like having two monitors at work, one in portrait and the other in landscape.

Now, is there room for a new form factor and unique applications? I don’t know. Will the future just be ones of refining these screen territories? And will there be some repositioning of functions? Do you need a smartphone if you carry around an iPad? Would a dumb phone be good enough? Some people like everything on one device, like an iPhone, but I prefer the right tool for the job. The iPod Nano is perfect for audio books. They are harder to use on the iPhone. Time will tell how everything shakes out, but I think screen size will be the factor that will determine the ultimate use of each device.

JWH – 4/8/10

Libraries in the Age of iPads

If everyone owned an iPad would we need libraries? Don’t get me wrong, I’m not advocating the demolition of libraries, but with the advent of the internet and ebooks talk about the death of newspapers, magazines and books get more common every year. If we don’t need those physical objects anymore, why do we need a building and institution to maintain them? Think about it. If books, magazines and newspapers disappear from our houses and move into Kindles, Nooks, and iPads, why would we go to the library? Why would we go to bookstores, new or used?

Modern libraries are about more than books, patrons also check out movies, audiobooks, music, and periodicals. But all of those media types are now available on the iPad. I know older people who grew up with libraries will immediate protest, but remember, us older folk are a dying breed and the up and coming generations are gadget afflicted.

Libraries used to be storehouses of knowledge and librarians worked to collect and preserve the printed word. That’s still true of academic libraries, but public libraries have moved into an era of supplying what their patrons want, so as soon as a book is ignored for a specific period of time, it gets jettisoned from the collection. Most people think of libraries as free books, free movies, free music albums, and free magazines and newspapers. I think a lot of people think we should have libraries to provide a cultural outlet for the poor. But the internet provides more free stuff to read and watch.

The death of libraries is pretty much unthinkable now, but don’t be surprise when city bean counters start making suggestions about closing them. I grew up loving libraries, and even worked in public and academic libraries. They don’t seem as crowded with patrons as they used be. I hardly go to the library anymore myself, not since the internet. I saw the video of Steve Jobs presenting the iPad and showing off its ebook features and it struck me that devices like the iPad will be the library of the future. When I was growing up futurists would talk about having a handheld device with the Library of Congress in it. We’re getting spookily close, aren’t we?

The book is evolving too. When it escapes the limitation of the page, adding multimedia and hypertext the book will no longer fit on a library shelf. Printed books, newspapers and magazines might become extinct, but imagine what will replace them. There is no reason to make a distinction between newspapers and magazines anymore. That might become true for books and novels too. Newspapers used to be frequently published information printed on cheap paper. Magazines and journals had longer periods between publication and were printed on better paper, suitable for long term storage in libraries.

The electronic page is not limited by time, paper quality or cost of printing. Newspapers and magazines use to be text plus photographs. Electronic publication is text plus photographs, video, sound recording, animation and other multimedia. Go look at the iPad video and tell me if kids will even want to go to the library or read books and magazines. And what about you?

I like the name iPad, just one vowel different from the iPod, but many of my friends have expressed a dislike for the name, and some of my women friends tell me the name brings up bad connotations with them. I think Steve Jobs should have named it the iLibrary.

JWH – 1/28/10

Predicting the Apple Tablet

The computer press is buzzing with rumors of an Apple tablet computer. I don’t think anyone knows anything for sure, and I expect Steve Jobs to wow people when he finally announces whatever he plans to show off as his next big product. It may be a tablet computer, or it might be something surprisingly different. Most people speculate it will be something to compete against netbooks and ebook readers, both of which are hot products that Apple currently doesn’t compete against. A lot of rumor sites show an artist conception of a giant iPod touch like device. Some sites are even predicting it will cost $800-900 dollars.

Well, if the Apple tablet is to compete against netbooks and ebooks the price needs to be a whole lot closer to $400. I do think a touch screen tablet is the perfect competition to a netbook, but I’m not sure about such a device replacing ebooks. Maybe for reading magazines, newspapers and web content, but not for reading fiction. Think about it, reading fiction is something people do for hours on end, and imagine holding a heavy device that long? I think the Kindle and Nook are too big. My ideal ebook would be mostly screen, about the size between a mass market paperback page and a trade paperback page, weigh next to nothing, be extremely durable, and cheap enough so I wouldn’t be afraid to carry it everywhere I go. That doesn’t describe any of the Apple tablet rumors.

If a new Apple device is going to be rolled out it must not compete with the iPhone or the MacBook, and that puts it squarely into the netbook space. Netbooks have keyboards and work just like bigger computers. A tablet doesn’t. So how many of your everyday routines can be enhanced by a 10 inch touch screen? For me, that would be something to replace magazines and newspapers. If bookworms balk at paying $260 for an ebook reader to make novel reading easier, will newshounds accept spending $800 to make reading the news easier? Not me.

You can get a 22” LCD monitor for around $200, and sometimes a lot less. For reading the New York Times, magazines and blogs, I’d love to have a monitor I could hold in my lap and read while sitting in my La-Z-Boy. A 10-12” screen would probably be ideal, but it must be thin and very light. It doesn’t need to be a computer, but just a reader, maybe just a portable Acrobat reader. And I don’t want to pay more than the cost of a monitor to have a monitor I can hold in my lap to read.

I’m not sure I’d even want video and music from such a device, especially if it will raise the price significantly. I just want to read what I normally sit at the computer and read, but in a comfortable chair. My Zune, iPod Nano and Sansa Clip are perfect for audiobooks and music. My iPod touch mostly goes untouched. My netbook mostly goes untouched. I just don’t do that much on the go computing.

The iPhone was brilliant. The iPod was brilliant. Do we really need the iTablet? How many more useful devices can we use? Steve Jobs does have an amazing track record of creating devices we didn’t have before but can’t live without now: Apple II, Mac, iPod and iPhone. But I prefer a PC to a Mac. The Sansa Clip is easier to carry than my iPod Nano or touch, and even though I’d love an iPhone I won’t spend the money. The $64,000 question is whether or not Steve Jobs will announce something I will run out and buy. I’d own a Mac if they were cheaper, so I’m guessing I’ll be waiting on the HP tablet computer.

JWH – 1/7/10

iStories: The Short Story Hit List 100 Weekly

Let’s face it, the heyday of the short story as a popular art form was decades ago, probably as far back as when F. Scott Fitzgerald got rich and famous selling stories to the Saturday Evening Post and Colliers. Except for would-be writers, required reading for students, fan fiction fanatics and a damn few diehard short story lovers, the marketing of short stories is almost invisible to the average citizen of our pop culture country. Is the short story art form unpopular because readers don’t like them or because short stories are so poorly marketed?

The short story art form hangs on by a thread, like the art forms of poetry and playwriting. I expect the remaining for-profit scifi, fantasy, mystery and literary magazines to die off in the next 5-10 years unless something drastically changes. The question is, can a drastic change be made?

Is there anything that can be done to revive the short story art form to popularity? The first question to ask is: What do the popular art forms have that the unpopular ones don’t? Movies, television shows, songs, video games and novels are the most popular art forms in our world today, ranked roughly in that order. A single movie, TV show, song, game or book can be admired and loved by millions of fans, and wide consumption in these artistic endeavors are routine. When was the last time a short story was popular enough to have a 1,000 readers in one week? How many people actually read the short story in each issue of The New Yorker?

Besides legions of fans, the most important factor that popular art forms have and short stories don’t are Hit Lists. Movies, TV shows, songs, games and books are extremely well reviewed, charted, rated and ranked by sales and popularity. Each art has legions of critics working hard to stay current and teach how each example of their craft fits into an overall history.

Every week we are well informed about the most successful premieres of each art. Hell, weekend movie sales figures often get touted on the national morning news shows, and sometimes on the nightly news. Book readers all know about The New York Times Bestseller lists. We have the Nielsen ratings for TV shows and the Billboard 100 for pop songs. There are countless websites and magazines that track the success of computer games. And songs are marketed by hits on the radio and on online stores like iTunes.

As a culture we love keeping up with what’s popular, but is what’s popular just the stuff we track with Hit Lists? I think so. If short stories were ranked weekly would they gain popularity? I think they might, but many factors would have to come into play.

Most important, the Short Story Hit List 100 would have to be weekly and track all genres of short stories. Separating them out into story types is deadly. We don’t rank blockbuster movies or best selling books by topic. The Oscars and Emmys aren’t divided up by genre. It would be a total water cooler buzz kill to divide short stories out into special interest groupings. A hit story must be one that people want to read and talk about because of its popularity, not because it puts the reader into a sub-culture.

Next, its vitally important that short stories be sold as singles, and not part of albums (magazines or anthologies). Few people like to buy a magazine full of unknown short stories. It’s like getting a free music CD with a music magazine – most of the songs are mediocre and the CD is a disappointment. People want hits, and that has to apply to short stories too.

For short stories to make a comeback they need a marketing site like iTunes. They need to be sold for 99 cents in a standard digital format like MP3 songs. Unfortunately, ebook readers, smart phones and computers use a variety of ebook formats that hurt the concept of making short stories popular, so the iStories site needs to offer all the possible formats but hide the dirty details from the buyers. Fictionwise.com illustrates well how this is possible.

Ultimately, this universal format needs to be DRM free so short stories can be easily stolen and shared – or if they have to have a DRM, then it needs a mechanism for limited sharing between friends. Unfortunately, the unethical viral marketing of copyrighted material is too good of a selling tool to ignore. And I think in the future, this universal digital short story format should be roomy enough to contain graphics, music, video and audio readings. In other words readers can read the story, listen to the story read on audio, read with eyes and listen with ears at the same time, read the story with background music turned on or off, and see illustrations or photos to enhance the story. But this super ebook format isn’t an issue right now.

Short stories need to get away from printed formats as their premiere venues (but nice chapbook editions will make excellent marketing additions to the overall sales, and we can think anthology and story collection sales as long term publishing). The primary publishing format should be for ebook readers and smart phones. Like I said, short stories should be sold as singles with the goal of creating hits. Collections and anthologies should be left to the book world to market because they would hurt creating hit short stories.

The key to revitalizing the short story art form is creating hugely popular stories that will become the topic of conversation between people all over the nation. People share both the experience and love of movies, TV shows, books, song and video games. When was the last time you were in a conversation about a short story? When was the last time a group of people at your office discussed a short story they had all read? This happens all the time with movies and TV shows, and to a lesser extent books, songs and video games.

One of the major factors against marketing short stories is there are too many of them on the net for free. Free is incredibly bad for revitalizing the short story art form. Bad editors, no editors and no editing has created a glut of short stories on the Internet. No one likes to listen to amateur musicians or mediocre bands. Every time you play a song you want it to be a great song. When you go to the movies you expect to be blown away. When you read a book you want to find one that has deep emotional impact.

To revitalize the short story art form will require a seal of approval either attained by popularity or critics. Our imaginary iStories site cannot be a slush pile for the common reader to wade through. Nor should its editors have to select from a tremendous slush pile to find stories to promote on the site. Stories should be submitted by agents or professional editors that can be trusted. There needs to be some kind of farm team looking for talent to feed into the system. I would think existing print and online magazines could play the role as the iStories systems develops, but eventually I expect magazines to die off. Thus professional editors would become talent scouts and agents for stories.

A theoretical iStories site should also limit the number of new stories released each week, and find ways to publicize the best. New ways to promote stories should be invented. They need corporate backers like film studies or record companies but I doubt existing book publishers would take on this role. It might be left to magazines – so The New Yorker and Asimov’s Science Fiction would campaign to get their stories noticed, and bring attention back to their business.

We have to get away from depending on fiction magazine sales and magazine subscriptions because those marketing methods are no longer successful at making short stories popular. Buying a magazine is like buying an unknown album with the hope of finding a hit song, especially when you aren’t familiar with any of the artists. Buying a magazine subscription is like buying a bunch of unknown albums hoping to find several hit songs. 200 channels with nothing to read, huh? People want smash hits.

I doubt my ideas about revitalizing the short story art form will ever happen, but at least I’m making a point about creating a popular art form. Look at the short video and how YouTube is promoting them. Until there is a way to sell hit videos they will never become a major art form, but they could. Most people go to YouTube and similar sites and look at the most watched videos hoping to discover something really fun. Yesterday I discovered the Muppets version of “Bohemian Rhapsody” because almost six million people have watched it. That clue paid off because the video was excellent entertainment.

Back in the 1910s, 1920s and 1930s short stories were popular enough that they were the topic of social discussions. If you watch the credits of old movies you’ll often see movies based on short stories. Newsstands were filled with hundreds of short story magazines. Short story reading was a popular evening pastime until radio slowed it down and television practically killed it off. In fact, television is what replaced the short story for people looking for after work diversion.

Short stories are not mini-novels. The best are jewels of intense fictional expression that are a unique art form. Sadly, they are a dying art form. Because of iPods, iPhones, Kindles, Nooks, and other electronic gadgets that people carry around, short stories have another chance to become popular again. Short stories can be read quietly anywhere on an iPhone, or even listened to in an audio edition. They must compete with songs, audio books, novels, movies, videos, computer games and television shows in this small venue, but there is room to compete well if short stories were marketed correctly.

And by correct marketing I mean as singles. Unless people are saying to their friends, “Have you read the new short story by so and so,” to their friends, short stories will be doomed to an ever shrinking fan base.

How to Start

If all the ebook sites, like Amazon’s Kindle home page, Barnes and Noble Nook, the Sony Reader, and the general ebook fiction sites like Fictionwise.com, eBooks.com, eReader.com would create a section for short stories and a mechanism to track their sales, that would be a big start. It would help even more if they would offer spin-off sites that specialized in short stories.

Another angle of attack would be if online magazines maintained a hit list of their most popular stories ranked by web visitor hits. They might need to program mechanisms to keep authors or fans from constantly reloading the page to produce fake hits. And they need to track hits from all their backlog of stories and not just the current issue. It would be important to provide numbers so popularity could be gauged against stories at other online magazine sites. And like songs, and even movies, sometimes it takes weeks or months to have a breakout hit.

We’d also need critics that specialize in reviewing short stories, and ones that would be also willing to track many short story web sites and tally the numbers each week to give attention to the stories getting the most attention each week across the web.

If short story reading ever did catch on again, it would be fantastic if magazines like Entertainment Weekly devoted a section to them like the do movies, DVDs, books, music and television.

It would be a tremendous help if best of the year anthologists like those who compile the Best American Short Stories and the various yearly genre anthologies if they would maintain a blog about their ongoing efforts to select stories, even to the point of showing how they tally competing stories as they are discovering them. We need as much PR as possible on stories climbing the charts, so to speak.

Unfortunately, most fiction magazines are monthly, bi-monthly or quarterly, and hit stories need to be tracked weekly, or even in real time. Web sites that change their content less than weekly get ignored and forgotten.

It would help greatly if a social bookmarking site like StumbleUpon created a short fiction section for tracking popular short fiction reading. On the other hand such sites help promote free reading, and that competes with our goal.

The biggest success for revitalizing short stories is if a company would create a web site like Audible.com, or an online store like iTunes just for the sale of short stories. They should sell both ebook editions and audio narrated editions of short stories. I’d suggest a standard price too, 99 cents for either ebook editions for reading with the eyes, or audio editions for reading with the ears. Short story are longer than songs, so some marketing folk might want to price them higher, but they are usually experienced only once, so they should be far cheaper than renting a movie.

Readers can help too. If you read a great story share it with your friends. Talk about it. Tell them where to buy it. I know this might be painful, but get in the habit of buying short stories, and avoid free stories. If you read and enjoy free stories at online magazines at least donate money, but it would be better if you supported a paid-subscription site. Flooding the market with free stories ruins the market and hurts the art form. Don’t promote free stories, it dilutes the market for selling stories. Don’t read stories that haven’t been accepted by an editorial process and edited unless you’re part of a writing workshop group or critiquing stories for a friend. Even fan fiction could be improved by these rules.

Authors like providing free copies of their short stories on the web to help promote their work in general. This might be good for their career but it has produced so many professionally written short stories for free on the net that short story fans no longer want to buy stories. Many fans now expect to find a copy of any short story they want for free and there are web sites to track free fiction to help them.

Free stories are bad for the short story art form in the long run and maybe an additional reason why print magazines subscriptions are declining even faster in recent years. Maybe free stories should only be those that are older than one year, or five years, and don’t compete with new sales.

If you love short stories and want to promote the art form then do whatever you can to help short story writers and publishers make money. I tend to doubt the short story market will be revived, but now is the time to try because of the switch to Internet publishing and ebook reading.

JWH – 11/28/9