Two Things
Conversations today solidified two postulations I’ve had for a bit:
- The emergence of simultaneous multi-platform product debuts.
- An inability to keep track of work being done on multiple devices.
Consider the release of Art Space Tokyo over at Kickstarter. A book aimed at “connecting you with the neighborhoods and figure behind some of the most inspiring art spaces” in Tokyo, it will be released in hardcover, PDF, HTML, and iPad formats:
Art Space Tokyo is a perfect book for this sort of experimentation. It contains long, unbroken essays. Interviews with multiple participants. Both large (full-spread) illustrations and small accent illustrations.
We want to add video content (extended interviews, videos of the spaces, interviews with neighborhood shop-owners), and photos. Sounds — recording of neighborhood ambiance. Inline interactive maps. And deeper, direct reader involvement: neighborhood suggestions, commenting and discussions.
In other words, Art Space Tokyo is one of those rare books that spans a myriad of genres, storytelling forms and media. We feel this is a perfect foundation on which to deeply explore the storytelling potential of the iPad.
Is it still a book? Is it art? What does it mean to have the bar raised to the point where creating something won’t succeed because it wasn’t released in enough formats, or in the format I’m most comfortable with?
And just as surely there is overhead in producing those works, there is overhead in consuming them as well. What happens when I stop reading at chapter 3 on my iPad and then open the same document on my laptop?
As this proliferation of devices continues—and as content providers catch on—there emerges a new space for a decentralized third party to manage status, notifications, and emerging attributes like location.
