The world’s biggest coffee-table book

Posted on by

This is a terrific interview conducted by Robert Scoble with Jean-Marie Hullot, who was once CTO of NeXT and later played significant roles in Apple. The peg for the talk was the launch of Jean-Marie’s remarkable iPhone/iPad App, called Fotopedia Heritage, which is an endless stream of CreativeCommons images of UNESCO World Heritage sites wrapped up in an information stream.

The App itself is amazing (and freely downloadable from the Apps store), but the really significant thing about it is its hint at how our concept of ‘book’ will have to shift to adjust to the possibilities of this new technology. At one stage in the interview, Jean-Marie makes the point that what will determine whether a publisher succeeds in this new medium is whether he/she can master the software. He uses the analogy of Nokia in this context — great maker of hardware, but always an outsourcer of software. Then one day Apple — a master of software — appears on the scene, quickly picks up the easy stuff (the hardware design) and — Bingo! The moral is clear: publishers who think that their only role is to get passive content out the door in readable form aren’t going to cut it in the eBook world.

And while we’re on the subject of eBooks, I see that Apple has released an update to iWork that enables it to output in ePub format.

Actually, this is part of a big and interesting story. Up to now, print publishers have been able to stand by and watch the Net play disruptive havoc with the music and movie industries. Now, it’s their turn to feel the network’s disruptive blast. In that context, author’s agent Andrew ‘the Jackal’ Wylie’s audacious move to strike a deal directly with Amazon for his authors, bypassing their print publishers entirely, has really concentrated minds. As the Guardian observed:

Once upon a time publishers were the only ones who could find authors, edit manuscripts, print books and distribute them, but new technology from desktop computers to the internet has thrown the doors wide open. As marketing departments have gained the ascendancy over editorial, agents have moved centre stage, filtering submissions and polishing manuscripts. With the messy business of ink and trees and Transit vans receding, Wylie’s latest move is simply the logical next step. None of this will worry those publishers who have made a business out of finding the voices others haven’t spotted, but in the week when Amazon claimed that ebook sales passed those of hardbacks the questions are unavoidable: who needs big publishers? Are the interests of writers and readers best served by big publishers, or the Jackal?

And while we’re on the subject, my friend and colleague Michael Dales has a fascinating blog post about his experiments with Kindle and iBooks versions of Scott Pilgrim books.

Piping hot

Posted on by

Lovely Economist obit of Bill Millin, the man who invaded Normandy with bagpipes.

His playing had been planned as part of the operation. On commando training near Fort William he had struck up a friendship with Lord Lovat, the officer in charge of the 1st Special Service Brigade. Not that they had much in common. Mr Millin was short, with a broad cheeky face, the son of a Glasgow policeman; his sharpest childhood memory was of being one of the “poor”, sleeping on deck, on the family’s return in 1925 from Canada to Scotland. Lovat was tall, lanky, outrageously handsome and romantic, with a castle towering above the river at Beauly, near Inverness. He had asked Mr Millin to be his personal piper: not a feudal but a military arrangement. The War Office in London now forbade pipers to play in battle, but Mr Millin and Lord Lovat, as Scots, plotted rebellion. In this “greatest invasion in history”, Lovat wanted pipes to lead the way.

He was ordering now, as they waded up Sword Beach, in that drawly voice of his: “Give us a tune, piper.” Mr Millin thought him a mad bastard. The man beside him, on the point of jumping off, had taken a bullet in the face and gone under. But there was Lovat, strolling through fire quite calmly in his aristocratic way, allegedly wearing a monogrammed white pullover under his jacket and carrying an ancient Winchester rifle, so if he was mad Mr Millin thought he might as well be ridiculous too, and struck up “Hielan’ Laddie”. Lovat approved it with a thumbs-up, and asked for “The Road to the Isles”. Mr Millin inquired, half-joking, whether he should walk up and down in the traditional way of pipers. “Oh, yes. That would be lovely.”

Three times therefore he walked up and down at the edge of the sea. He remembered the sand shaking under his feet from mortar fire and the dead bodies rolling in the surf, against his legs. For the rest of the day, whenever required, he played. He piped the advancing troops along the raised road by the Caen canal, seeing the flashes from the rifle of a sniper about 100 yards ahead, noticing only after a minute or so that everyone behind him had hit the deck in the dust. When Lovat had dispatched the sniper, he struck up again. He led the company down the main street of Bénouville playing “Blue Bonnets over the Border”, refusing to run when the commander of 6 Commando urged him to; pipers walked as they played.

Millin also played at Lovat’s funeral in 1995.

How to take holiday snaps

Posted on by

The Guardian had a nice essay by Stuart Jeffries on the emotional power of holiday snaps and followed it with some advice from Magnum photographer Martin Parr.

Most family photo albums are a form of propaganda, where the family looks perfect and everyone is smiling: we try to create fabrications about who we are. But if you’re doing a portrait of someone, ask them not to smile. You will get a much more dignified, interesting portrait, and it won’t look like a family snap.

Don’t be scared of photographing a storm-out, crying fit or strop. The instinct is to capture people only when they are smiling around a birthday cake or at a wedding, but never during an argument or funeral. On holiday, of course photograph the daytrips and good times, but make sure you document when everything isn’t going to plan as well.

You have to overcome the feeling that it isn’t the right time to take a photograph if you want to get away from this version of the perfect, harmonious family. I would argue that the more valuable document is the honest one.

One of the things that photographs are very good at doing is showing change. So take a picture before you go on holiday and when you have just got back. Similarly you should take before-and-after shots when you redecorate your bathroom, or if you replace your car.

And

When you are away, why not record all of the food that you eat? If someone has spent a lot of time cooking a meal, or if you’re going out for a treat, photograph the food. You could make a series of each breakfast, lunch and dinner that you ate. That would be fascinating.

Photograph the caravan, guest house, tent – wherever you are staying. Think of yourself as a documentary photographer; up the ante and take yourself more seriously.

Parr thinks that we should also print our pictures, and I suspect he’s right. “We are in danger”, he says,

of having a whole generation – and this will continue into the future – that has no family albums, because people just leave them on their computer, and then suddenly they will be deleted. You have to print them and put them in an album or a box, otherwise they could be lost. And write captions. You might think you are going to remember what is happening in a picture, but you probably won’t in 10 years’ time.

The lost decade

Posted on by

Interesting, thoughtful talk by Umair Haque.

The real crisis isn’t about bankers, bonuses, and bailouts — it’s about an economy that’s geared to create thin value; value that’s artificial, meaningless, and often, actually worth little, in human terms. So the real challenge isn’t about eking out another penny of profit by laying off more another hundred people, offshoring with an even greater ferocity, crushing your fiercest rival more savagely, or churning out more lowest-common-denominator “product.” It’s about learning to create thicker value: authentic value, that endures, resonates, and multiplies. Unless, of course, you think you can survive another lost decade.

Remembering Frank

Posted on by

I wrote a small tribute to Frank Kermode for today’s Observer.

Ever since Tuesday, a movie has been running on a continuous loop in my mind. In it, I am driving down Grange Road in Cambridge, passing Selwyn College’s gloomy front range and turning right into Pinehurst, the enclave of classy apartment blocks sometimes known as “life’s departure lounge” because it’s where retired dons go after they’ve downsized. I park outside the most upmarket block and ring the bell. The door opens into a discreetly carpeted foyer and the lift whooshes me upwards. Then it stops and the door opens. And there is Frank, smiling, with pipe in hand and twinkle in eye. “Come in, come in,” he says, and we settle in his booklined sitting-room with the view over Selwyn Gardens to drink, smoke and gossip. And each time this happens, I cannot believe my luck, because I spent a good deal of my earlier life in awe of the man who is now – apparently – treating me as an equal…

The ‘Death-of-the-Web’ meme rides again

Posted on by

This morning’s Observer column.

It’s possible, of course, that the Anderson-Wolff scare story was the product of an innocent mistake. But let us, for a moment, refuse them the benefit of the doubt. The core of their argument is that the popularity of apps as on iPhone and Android phones signals the death knell of the web. The marketplace has spoken, they write. When it comes to the applications that run on top of the net, people are starting to choose quality of service. We want TweetDeck to organise our Twitter feeds because it s more convenient than the Twitter web page. The Google Maps mobile app on our phone works better in the car than the Google Maps website on our laptop. And we’d rather lean back to read books with our Kindle or iPad app than lean forward to peer at our desktop browser.

That’s the message. Now, who is the messenger? Answer: Condé Nast, the publishing conglomerate that owns Wired — as well as the New Yorker, GQ and Vanity Fair. The web has posed a serious threat to their business model as it has to almost all print publishers because they have thus far failed to find a way to get people to pay serious money for online content.

The arrival of iPhone and, later, iPad apps was the first good news that magazine conglomerates had received in a decade. Why? Because, in contrast to the Wild West Web, apps are tightly controlled by Apple and consumers willingly pay for them. As a result, print publishers have fallen on the apps idea like ravening wolves…

Something for the weekend

Posted on by

Well, actually a few things that struck me in the course of my customary haphazard reading.

  • Trapped in the Anglosphere: Thoughtful column by Martin Kettle about how the Net is increasingly making us, if not exactly Europhobic, certainly Euro-ignorant.

    This autumn we will be bombarded with news about the US midterm elections. Fair enough. These are significant elections in the world's most powerful country. But if we are to be intelligent and rounded beings we also need to be well informed about and engaged with elections in places much nearer to home, and especially those that arguably have more to tell us about the temper of the times in our part of the world – like those in Sweden next month – above all.

    But that is not going to happen as long as we are voluntarily imprisoned in the Anglosphere. Yesterday, once again, the latest generation got fewer A-levels in French, German, Russian and Spanish than the generation before. Next week, there will be fewer GCSEs in modern languages too. The trend is inexorable. We are cutting ourselves off from the world. Another New Yorker cartoon, this time by Robert Mankoff, comes irresistibly to mind. A woman is talking to a man at a cocktail party. She asks: “One question: if this is the information age, how come nobody knows anything?”

    The answer is simple. They are speaking to us from outside the Anglosphere but we no longer understand them. The internet – on which we all spend so much of our time, as Ofcom reported this week – is in danger of becoming Britain’s staycation of the mind.

  • Julian Barnes on Ford Madox Ford’s love affair with Provence: Nice piece which includes this lovely quote from the autobiography of Ford’s lover, Stella Bowen:

    “It is something to do with the light, I suppose, and the airiness and bareness and frugality of life in the Midi, which induces a simplicity of thought, and a kind of whittling to the bone whatever may be the matter in hand. Sunlight reflected from red-tiled floors on to whitewashed walls, closed shutters and open windows and an air so soft that you live equally in and out of doors, suggest an experience so sweetly simple that you wonder that life ever appeared the tangled, hustling and distracting piece of nonsense you once thought it. Your mind relaxes, your thoughts spread out and take their shape, phobias disappear, and if passions become quicker, they also lose their power of deadly strangulation. Reason wins. And you are released from the necessity of owning things. There is no need to be cosy. A pot of flowers, a strip of fabric on the wall, and your room is furnished. Your comforts are the light and warmth provided by nature, and your ornaments are the orange trees outside.”

  • Christopher Caldwell on “Google versus the Pixelators” — the row that has broken out in Germany over Google StreetView.

    This week, interior minister Thomas de Maizière sided with Google. Mr de Maizière, who has a reputation for thoughtfulness on technology issues, called a summit of consumer advocates, cyber law specialists and “geo-data” services such as Google, to be held next month. He does not seem that worried about Street View specifically. Google’s images do not differ in obvious ways from postcards, he thinks. A “Lex Google” of the sort Hamburg envisions could throw out the high-tech baby with the privacy bathwater.

    Maybe so. Maybe the information Google makes available is only a streamlined version of what we had in the past. But the quantity and velocity of information can effect a qualitative change in privacy. It was in response to the camera, the penny press and other 19th-century inventions that the American jurists Louis Brandeis and Samuel Warren first formulated the idea of a “right to privacy” in 1890. Something similar will be necessary with Street View.

    Technology has advanced to the point where similes (“It’s like you have a postcard of everything!”) no longer capture what is going on. Imagine if, 20 years ago, an unfamiliar person appeared on your street with a camera, and began patiently photographing everyone’s front garden. He would explain that, no, he was not an artist. He had been sent by a large American corporation to make a faithful photographic record of your street. What’s in it for the corporation? Who knows? People would be suspicious, even alarmed.

    Image-taking confounds one of the conventions on which our social order rests – the demarcation between public and private space.

  • Paul Krugman on the Bond Cultists: One of the strangest aspects of the ConDem’s fiscal policy is its manifest irrationality. It’s as if Osborne & Co are now to locked into nonsense that they have no escape. So they’re going to take us all down with them. Paul Krugman has been consistently sane about this — as here, in his latest column:

    But the apostles of austerity, sometimes referred to as “austerians”, brushed aside all attempts to do the maths. Never mind the numbers, they declared: immediate spending cuts were needed to ward off the “bond vigilantes,” investors who would pull the plug on spendthrift governments, driving up their borrowing costs and precipitating a crisis. Look at Greece, they said.

    The sceptics countered that Greece is a special case, trapped by the euro, which condemns it to years of deflation and stagnation whatever it does. The interest rates paid by major nations with their own currencies – not just the US, but Britain and Japan – showed no sign that the bond vigilantes were about to attack, or even that they existed.

    Just you wait, said the austerians: the bond vigilantes may be invisible, but they must be feared all the same.

    This was a strange argument even a few months ago, when the US government could borrow for 10 years at less than 4% interest. We were being told that it was necessary to give up on job creation, to inflict suffering on millions of workers, in order to satisfy demands that investors were not, in fact, actually making, but which austerians claimed they would make in the future.

    But the argument has become even stranger recently, as it has become clear that investors aren’t worried about deficits; they’re worried about stagnation and deflation. And they’ve been signaling that concern by driving interest rates on the debt of major economies lower, not higher. On Thursday, the rate on 10-year US bonds was only 2.58%.

    So how do austerians deal with the reality of interest rates that are plunging, not soaring? The latest fashion is to declare that there’s a bubble in the bond market: investors aren’t really concerned about economic weakness; they’re just getting carried away. It’s hard to convey the sheer audacity of this argument: first we were told that we must ignore economic fundamentals and instead obey the dictates of financial markets; now we’re being told to ignore what those markets are actually saying because they’re confused.

    It’s hard to believe that grown adults can act on such idiotic, contradictory beliefs. But they can. As Krugman puts it, “As I look at what passes for responsible economic policy these days, there’s an analogy that keeps passing through my mind. I know it’s over the top, but here it is anyway: the policy elite – central bankers, finance ministers, politicians, who pose as defenders of fiscal virtue, are acting like the priests of an ancient cult, demanding that we engage in human sacrifices to appease the anger of invisible gods.”

    Yep. I’m reminded of a recent New Yorker cartoon which shows two bloated capitalists sitting in their club smoking cigars. “I really approve of the way the government is mismanaging the economy”, says one.

  • John Sutherland on Frank Kermode: Terrific tribute by one literary critic to another. Also very good at explaining why Frank was such a seminal and original scholar:

    He himself liked to complain, ruefully, that “there are no Kermodians”. FR Leavis had his servile Leavisites, Paul de Man had his “Yale School”, Christopher Ricks (with whom Kermode boxed and coxed) had his Ricksians. Frank Kermode stood alone.

    The fact is, he didn’t want disciples: any more than Tiger Woods, when he was at the top of his game, wanted them. The analogy is apt. Kermode loved sport – more particularly the virtuosic skill displayed by sporting competition at its highest level. It was a thing of beauty to him. So too, when it was done best, was literary criticism a thing of beauty. It wasn’t a pit-stop job on books, with wrenches and tyre-irons; it was Ayrton Senna.

    When asked, as guileless undergraduates sometimes did, what was the point of studying all these dusty texts, he would fall back on the sport-game analogy. After three years in my department, he would promise, you will play like a master. If, that is, you have the right stuff. If not, try somewhere else.

    The literature he himself liked best to play against, and master, was complex. He had little time, for example, for Thomas Hardy. Why? Because he felt Hardy gave up his meanings too easily. The modern poet Kermode most respected was Wallace Stevens – never a writer who yields to the reader without a struggle. Once at Edinburgh in the 1960s (I was there), he mischievously asked the audience if they wanted his easy or his difficult lecture on Stevens. We stuffily opted for “difficult” and tried, desperately, to keep the bamboozledom off our faces over the next hour. Kermode was hard to keep up with in those days.

    When, at University College London, Kermode was given a whole department to play with, he created a syllabus which was the curricular embodiment of his belief in the primacy of the difficult.