Don't Judge a Cover By its Book

[NOTE: this post originally appeared on Datachondria, a blog dedicated to technology, data, and modern life.]

An interesting trend with digital distribution is how cultural objects are not simply being reshaped into digital -- presumably streamlined -- versions of their content. Instead they are exploding and reforming as fairly complicated new 'clusters' of component parts.

The rebirth of cover art

Take the reappearance of liner notes for albums. During the initial stages of the MP3 revolution, liner notes and cover art seemed like the most disposable part of the package. In part that's because the scene was so unpleasantly grungy: underground, tarnished with illegitimacy, and not very easy to use. Most users wouldn't have that many songs; those that they did have might be of dubious provenance, and organized rather poorly in some system of directories -- perhaps by the P2P software by which you obtained them. Assemble a large library, and you're knocking up against the capacity of your hard drive (and the width of the pipe through which you obtained your music). You probably don't want to crowd that out with large cover art -- and even if you did, what use would it be to you?

Then came the iTunes Music Store: slick, legit, intuitive. The average user's library was likely to consist of far more songs than it might have a few years ago, and all of a sudden you need something to help you navigate, and to prompt the impulsive listen. The hard drive on your current machine was significantly larger than it was a couple of years ago. And Apple needed something to give it the stamp of legitimacy to separate it from unpleasant competitor services (legal or otherwise).

Re-enter cover art.

Liner notes are similarly making a comeback, presumably for a comparably complex matrix of reasons. They take advantage of iTunes' ability to store and display PDF files. Which is, by the way, criminally under-utilized: why doesn't the New Yorker have an iTunes store from which I can download articles for 99 cents each?

Crowdsourcing cover art

Right now, digital covers and liner notes are still soft versions of what had accompanied the physical object some years ago. But that's beginning to change.

Take these fantastic covers that Logan Walters is putting together for early Wu-Tang albums:

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As Walters points out, these are in the spirit of other recentdesignremixes. His rationale is very clear:

The problem was that almost all of the Wu-Tang album art was horrible (ODB's two albums being the only real exceptions) -- no offense to the original designers, but as iconic as they might be they're looking pretty dated these days.

Those are of course subjective opinions (though I'm inclined to agree, in spite of some nostalgia for Chambers and Cuban Linx). But that's exactly the point: it isn't terribly important why he wants to redesign classic Wu albums in the spirit of Blue Note; all that matters is that it helps him enjoy the material more. Looking at Walters' work, I think I might have the same reaction. I'm certainly going to try it out.

Don't judge a cover by its book

As we move away from cultural materials manifesting themselves solely in physical form, our expectations as to what exactly constitutes a 'book' or 'album' itself is obviously going to change. New reading devices will shape what is acceptable, or appropriate, in terms of raw content. The MP3 made the single the default commercial unit of music for the first time in decades.

But that doesn't mean that the ancillary materials around these works no longer have a place. Indeed, it may augment the importance of those materials. On the one hand, having communally recognized album art will help me show off my record collection when friends are over and browsing my collection via my gorgeous (and at this point theoretical) touchwall interface.

On the other hand, having album art that speaks to an aspect of the music that's particularly appealing to me -- or that shades my appreciation of it in an unexpected or unfamiliar manner -- may significantly increase my enjoyment of it.

Monetizing ancillary products

There's also a juicy financial incentive, both from the crowdsourced and top-down content creation models.

Why wouldn't artists crowdsource their album art, provide a voting interface for fans, and make alternative versions available for download from their websites? The publicity implications -- the permission marketing -- are obvious.

There is somegreatwork being done in book cover design at the moment. There a great deal of value embedded in it -- in the dialogue in which it engages with both the contents of the book and the visual culture within which it exists. Why don't publishers make book covers available for posters, T-shirts, and the like, via a one-click interface? They've already commissioned the art. Digital distribution costs are next to nothing to make the design available to third-party services like Cafe Press or Threadless. Pay a bit more to the designer for the rights to reproduce the work in different media; consumers will engage in a free marketing campaign on your behalf.

Consumers define the sum of the parts, not distributors

Cultural works are always imperfectly contained explosions of component parts -- whether they are purely physical aspects or an assemblage of expectations and impressions that consumers bring to their decision to experience a book, film, or album.

Publishers and other distributors of content need to think about how to monetize every aspect of a cultural work that has value of its own. They need to think of themselves as a 'hub' for all cultural goings-on associated with a piece of content. That's the only way to guarantee themselves a role in this new world.

Digital distribution offers a myriad of ways to re-imagine each of component parts. Cultural signifiers change so fast attach themselves with such promiscuity, and the costs to distribute pieces are so low, that book covers, pieces of music, and film posters, can float free and attach themselves to whatever uses consumers can imagine for them.

I'm sure Walter Benjamin wrote something about this. Maybe I'll go read about it -- if I like the look of one of the covers.

* Wu-Tang covers via John Mark at 33 1/3.

Tell Me Where to Read, Not What to Read: Or, What to do When Your Cultural Objects are No Longer Objects

[NOTE: this post originally appeared on Datachondria, a blog dedicated to technology, data, and modern life.]

LibraryThing has a wonderful "local" functionality which enables users to indicate their favourite bookstores and libraries -- the places where books as physical objects can be found, acquired, purchased. But why not allow users to indicate their favourite public places to read? Favourite cafes, parks, beaches, hotel lobbies, bus shelters. These are the places at which the various social and personal functions of books are best served -- whether those be isolation or flirtation, communication or solitude.

What does it mean as we move away from cultural objects as objects -- things -- and towards cultural objects as nexuses of cultural and social moments?

We've written elsewhere about the way in which books are not just containers for their ideas, but also become receptacles of our memories, of the images we hold of ourselves, and of the images that we want to project of ourselves to others. The same, obviously, is true of music, of art, of all cultural pursuits in which we engage -- and should be true of the metadata by which we navigate all of this stuff.

That's all true at a conceptual level, but has implications for how we live with these objects. When you are free from dealing with books primarily as stuff requiring storage space, you can start to organize them according to aesthetics or other whims and fancies.

For all of our "cultural objects", we should start to think about how our world is (or should be) organized around their cultural purposes -- not their physicality.

At last month's BookNet Canada Technology conference, DailyLit founder Susan Danziger and BookNet CEO Michael Tamblyn both touched on the social utility books have for flirting -- Tamblyn coining the term "Date Repellent Mode" to describe the current state of eBook devices (skip to 10:02 if you don't want to watch the entire -- wonderful -- presentation).

We need to become better at recognizing the social and personal spaces that our cultural objects serve, rather than the physical spaces that were previously the most manifest -- and challenging -- aspect of their existence. When that takes place, we will have an ecology of business and services around those objects that serves them all the better. And, most probably, better books too. Let's stop making the best ideas for the physical form they have to inhabit, and concentrate simply on the best ideas. In the best places.

Push vs Pull, or, How I Need to Know About Your Product

[NOTE: this post originally appeared on Datachondria, a blog dedicated to technology, data, and modern life.]

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Sharing some love for the extraordinarily attractive Harvard Business Review Classics series, which appears to be devoid of any presence on the web as an independent entity. This I don't understand. A series obviously aimed at capturing and retaining a consumer -- attractive design, brilliant product aimed at a specific market, consistency in both to encourage that 'collect them all' instinct. I will buy them all as they come out.

So why isn't there an RSS feed or Twitter account to inform me when each new volume comes out?

Contrast the blog maintained by 33 1/3, Continuum's series of books on classic albums. There are usually five or so posts per month (I know this, obviously, because I can look at the Google Reader stats), featuring news on new additions to the series, alongside events and media surrounding each publication. It's low volume -- but enough to alert me to things in which I have already indicated my interest. What's more, it's done with an openness and transparency -- for example taking readers step-by-step through the submission process for new titles -- that encourages me to think of it less as a marketing tool, but more of a dialogue on a subject (and with a product) with which I'm already engaged.

It's surprising how few companies are aware of the change in consumer mentality that is taking place with the increase in available data and the appearance of filters to help users better manage their inflow. RSS readers, Twitter, even Facebook -- these are content aggregators allowing incredibly supple management of inputs at a granular level. My Twitter account is a highly idiosyncratic mixture of friends, information pertinent to my job, and select entertainment/leisure news. It's unique to me, and it's something that I'm continually redesigning to meet my needs. Which means that I'm spending more time with it than I am in the presence of content distribution hubs -- magazines, websites, bookstores, TV, the transistor wireless machine -- over which I can exercise less control. So if you've made it onto my Twitter follow list, you're there because I want you to be. It's permission marketing in the purest sense.

Indeed, there is the possibility for the impact of your message to be amplified; as Matthew Forsythe points out, ReTweets are "socially targetted":

People usually only retweet things they’re interested in or they think their followers might be interested in. So as the tweet travels through the twitterverse (for lack of a better word), the message is finding people who are more and more likely to be interested in its content.

I'm not asking you to beg for my attention. That would get on my nerves. Just send me a little note every now and then when you have something new that I would like. Cost to your business = zero (well, thirty seconds each time you publish a new volume). Increased revenue to your business = more than zero.

Why not help your customers build their identification with your product? This is a recession, isn't it?

Update: More offenders from the world of publishing. Hesperus Press's striking On series: Stendhal On Love; Virginia Woolf On Not Knowing Greek, John Donne On Death... are there more? Who knows? Bloomsbury's indescribably elegant The Writer and the City series, so far only catalogued by enthusiasts on LibraryThing.

Entertainment Guides: Or, How the Publishing and Recording Industries Combine to Create the Purest Hell

[NOTE: this post originally appeared on Datachondria, a blog dedicated to technology, data, and modern life.]

The new -- ninth -- edition of The Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings is out now. It's actually been out since October but somehow I missed it, perhaps because Sam's no longer exists and there is therefore nowhere in the city where I might be required to have done a great deal of research before visiting in another episode in my ongoing quest for rare mid-50s hard bop gems. Anyway. The Penguin Guide is still going strong. This is a good thing. Let's just pause to acknowledge that, before I tell you how very, very wrong it is.

The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD is the definitive printed resource for jazz lovers. It is a brilliantly curated collection of reviews and general aesthetic advice put together by Richard Cook and Brian Morton, an extraordinary cultural service they have been performing for more than 15 years now. It is to the jazz fan's armory what David Thompson's New Biographical Dictionary of Film is to the film buff's. Only without perhaps quite the same volume of page-turning salacious gossip.

An adventure in the unknowable

The 9th edition will be the fourth copy of this massive book that I will own, with other editions strewn in storage lockers across the globe like obelisks marking my places of former habitation. And, of course, I can't possibly get rid of those editions, because they contain reviews of recordings which are no longer actively "in print", but which might still be available -- or might be rereleased in the time before the next edition. Or (imagine this) released digitally without any corresponding physical presence whatsoever by an enterprising record label looking to earn money from its back catalog with very little capital investment.

And there's more -- this, from the Wikipedia page about the guide:

Due to the increasing numbers of CDs on the market, space limitations and depth of coverage have increasingly become an issue: in the 7th edition, for instance, the index was dropped to save space, but it was restored in the 8th edition (but a number of entries were dropped or shortened to make room for it).

So it's always a contingent and partial exercise. It's a real-world experiment with the unknowable; a test of your stamina contrived by the publishing industry and the recording industry to see whether you are up to the challenge.

Are you worthy? Do you want it enough? Do you deserve the musical pleasures that you think you want? Will they still be there when you realize you want them? Will they have been reissued in thirteen different editions, each of them offering superior remastering and spectacular studio outtakes?

A problem of organization

Ultimately, however, the problem with books of this type is that their organizational assumptions are now fundamentally out of date. You have to navigate by artist, which can be a pain -- there's no way to see the highest-rated albums by genre, search by sidemen, and so on. And obviously there's no preview link to listen to parts of the album or actually download the album(s) directly should you want to purchase.

This is obviously stupid and must be stopped. Users should be able to tag entries by artists, participants, genre, rating, or anything else they want; they should be able to make use of links to direct download, and make links themselves. You could then search for a combination of tags -- for example, 4-star hard-bop albums featuring Hank Mobley. And then you could download like a crazy download monkey.

The same goes, obviously, for any other type of entertainment guide on the market. Videohound -- you're next. Release that fine content from the silo of your website.

Of course, I will buy the Penguin Guide. Even though I would much, much rather spend more money for access to an electronic version that integrated seamlessly into iTunes and any other online music service of which I might make use.

(I will also continue to buy jazz CDs, if only because iTunes can be so dreadful at distinguishing top-quality remasters from their poor initial digital iterations. That isn't to say that I'm not just going to rip them anyway, to the horror of audio purists everywhere. But it does illustrate just how godawful those early CD masters were. Apparently there are two bass parts at the outset of Bitches Brew -- who knew? And the vibraphones on Idle Moments really should shimmer and throb, rather than sounding like bland aural wallpaper as if they were recorded in some appalling bar at the front of a dive motel.)

Entertainment guides should guide you to entertainment. Repeatedly.

I've recently rediscovered Charles Shaar Murray's guide to Blues on CD, a book published in the mid-90s which was invaluable to me when I was first trying to get beyond Robert Johnson and John Lee Hooker. Part of the frustration back then -- aside from the fact that I could afford a fraction of what was recommended -- was the difficulty in finding this stuff. In hindsight, actually, it seems astonishing that I could find a compilation of Otis Rush's mid-50s Cobra sides in a record store in a suburban English town. I'm quite sure that I couldn't find anything nearly as specialized in any of Toronto's largest record stores today (particularly post-Sam's). But I certainly couldn't find Furry Lewis or Ishman Bracey.

Nowadays, I am able to find much of what I want on iTunes -- and most of it in the form of the individual tracks I want to hear, rather than the dull filler that was inevitably recorded as radio bait and pads out most of those CD compilations that I bought when I was 18.

Now, if only Charles Shaar Murray's guide was actually a constantly updated, organically evolving online resource, rather than a one-off produced according to the whims and routines of the publishing industry?

Touchscreen, Touchscreen, On The Wall...

[NOTE: this post originally appeared on Datachondria, a blog dedicated to technology, data, and modern life.]

Laura Miller had an interesting piece in the New York Times last year about the difficulties some people face keeping their book collections lean. It contained this observation:

When you're young and still constructing an identity, the physical emblems of your inner life appear more essential, and if you're single, your bookshelves provide a way of advertising your discernment to potential mates. I’ve met readers who have jettisoned whole categories of titles — theology, say, or poststructuralist theory — that they once considered desperately important.

We surround ourselves with books and other cultural objects not only because we enjoy them and may wish to enjoy them again. They also help us to moor ourselves -- to remind us of the identities that we have constructed for ourselves; to delineate those identities to others; to remind us of the arduous processes we've undergone to create and solidify our cultural perspectives. Cultural objects actually come to embody us if we allow them to. We arrange our book collections -- consciously or unconsciously -- to show a side of ourselves to others and back to ourselves.

What's true of books can be even more true of music, which is more explicitly public. Music, obviously, transforms the atmosphere around you, both figuratively and literally. Unless your sole experience of music is by headphones, your visitors and friends are exposed to your music regardless of their own preferences or interests. Music selection at a party is as critical a part of the activity as planning food and inviting the appropriate mix of people. While displaying your books -- just like prominently reading Gravity's Rainbow on the subway -- is public manifestation of a (usually) private activity, listening to music is always, by default, public.

What better way to show off your superlative cultural taste than to have your guests literally stand in it?

This is why, I think, the digitization of music risks losing an important element -- the ability to have one's music collection available for the browsing of visitors. Without LP bins or CD shelves, how might a casual browser chance upon something that showcases your cultural identity?

Fortunately, we already have a model for this. It's been around for decades, and it has served as a model for the iTunes GUI for some years.

It's the jukebox.

So here's what I want: a massive wall-mounted multitouch iTunes jukebox interface. It's a big multitouch monitor that lives on your wall, displays images of your choice while you're not using it, and would enable a coverflow interface to browse your music library. And would serve all the other touchscreen applications that we've been excited about for some time.

As Nathan points out:

Bolt a high endvirtual surround source to the screen, and you've got a one-panel touch-screen media centre. Naturally, you're already using an iPhone as the remote control, so why not employ it to calibrate the system to the room? Sync it to the unit and follow the instructions to stand a little to the left, a little to the right, hold it, point iPhone at the screen, away, got it, and voila, reflecting surround sound calibrated without employing anything as cumbersome and wasteful as a cheap single-use proprietary microphone.

Note that the virtual surround effect works best if your walls are free of clutter, i.e. shelves full of books and CDs.

It's the perfect fusion of a classy consumer product and a cultural need. We surround ourselves with cultural works not just because they speak to us -- about their authors, about our memories, about who we were when we experienced them for the first time -- and because they speak to others about us. Locking all your stuff in your hard drive obscures this. But technology should enable all aspects of our relationships to culture, not only those that we think are most obvious.

Last.fm and the Fear of Accidental Exposure

[NOTE: this post originally appeared on Datachondria, a blog dedicated to technology, data, and modern life.]

I enjoy Last.fm a great deal. That's less, I think, for its admittedly rather limited utility to me at this point, and more for its set-it-up-and-forget-about-it aspect. There's a silent promise that it is taking note of what I'm listening to, and that at some point in the future this information may be of some use to me. In the meantime it's all going into the communal pot to help other people. If you can make your peace with companies storing a great deal of information about you in this way (and if you can't, I'm afraid that you may not enjoy the rest of your life very much), there is a definite social good that can come of it. By telling Last.fm what I listen to -- what the pathways of my taste are -- I am contributing to someone else's enjoyment. Indeed, the more people like me share their listening tastes with Last.fm, the higher the chance that it will allow me to discover something genuinely new which thrills and excites.

(There is also, of course, the danger that we travel in packs and never discover anything new outside our particular cultural envelope, a trend which Oliver Burkeman discusses in his latest Guardian column.)

There is at least one more immediate benefit to society, however, and it's one that at first blush seems horrifying. It dispenses with the guilty pleasure -- the ability to listen to a track, watch a movie, or enjoy a book without the knowledge of others.

The guilty pleasure allows you to maintain a distance between your carefully constructed public identity (perhaps the face you show to friends alone; perhaps the profile you showcase in front of some wider public) and the things you enjoy by 'slumming it'. I'm certain that much of the work of cultural discovery -- finding unknown artists or writers, chancing upon sounds that refresh popular music -- happens by accident or by exposure to works under the liberating cover of anonymity.

But it's also an inhibitor of cultural development, building walls around blocks of content believed to be discreet and in some way -- usually unrelated to their artistic merits -- antagonistic to one another. One doesn't listen to Tosca and Tosca side-by-side.

When I picked up Kylie's Fever a few years ago and listened to it obsessively for a weekend, a friend emailed to make the observation, with a great deal of mockery, that it didn't exactly fit with the avant-garde jazz and austere IDM that I had been listening to for the preceding few weeks. Had my critical faculties been replaced by those of a thirteen year-old?

Well, it's no good being ashamed about these things any more. Shame requires the ability to hide, and Last.fm doesn't let you do that at all. The exercise of snobbery as a substitute for critical faculty is going to become very much harder, because everybody's cultural preferences -- their true preferences -- are that much more visible. We're one step closer to the democratization of taste.

So here's a challenge: if you're a music critic, why not make your Last.fm profile public for all to see?