More Video Essays by Matt Zoller Seitz

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

Some more superb Matt Zoller Seitz links, on Benjamin Button (be sure to view the video version), the follow shot, and Steve McQueen. Here's why th

is kind of work is important. Criticism can help you live your life:

By stripping away the political context that made Gump a pop culture hot potato, Button isolates and magnifies the story's emotional appeal: the sense that, no matter how strongly we believe in the notion that each person is the captain of his or her own ship, the unfortunate fact is that most of us are passengers on this voyage. When we wish to change course, it's difficult, often impossible to get the captain's attention, and even if we manage to do so, the vessel is so enormous, and so beholden to the wishes of everyone else on board, that altering its course even infinitesimally is often beyond the realm of possibility. Button is entirely about this sense of life: the realization that we’re quite small and powerless in the great scheme of things, and the most sensible response to this realization is to try to be as caring and decent as we can and appreciate the life we’ve got.

Wes Anderson, Metadata, and Susan Sontag on Filter Failure

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

Susan Sontag

Interpretation is Like So Industrial Age

I've been thinking recently about Susan Sontag's essay Against Interpretation, which seems today both entirely uncontroversial and extraordinarily ahead of its time. Published in 1964, the piece suggests that our standard approach to criticism -- interpretation -- focuses too narrowly on the idea of extracting a meaning from a work of art. This approach, Sontag argues, under-privileges the sensory experience that exposure to art allows us (and indeed requires from us).

In Sontag's formulation, criticism's job should instead be to

make works of art -- and, by analogy, our own experience -- more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.

The thrust of the essay is that an intellectual revolution in criticism is required; Sontag's insouciant self-assurance that she is the smartest person in the room is the only thing that keeps it from becoming a polemic. But her essay seems so non-controversial today because it would become a mainstay of Postmodernism 101 reading lists. The central point itself -- the rebellion, at least, against artificial division between content and form -- lacks any sort of bite now.

Filter Failure Goes Two Ways

But it seems so visionary and ahead of its time because it touches on the problem of 'information overload'. In 1964 the techniques of industrial mass production had been applied to art for long enough to begin changing popular culture in radical ways. But the surfeit of information that she describes is even more characteristic of digital distribution than it was of the narrow period in which Sontag was writing.

Sontag argues that in an age of cultural over-production, the approach to criticism she recommends is necessary because of the volume of sensory input to which we are exposed:

Think of the sheer multiplication of works of art available to every one of us, superadded to the conflicting tastes and odors and sights of the urban environment that bombard our senses. Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. All the conditions of modern life -- its material plenitude, its sheer crowdedness -- conjoin to dull our sensory faculties. And it is in the light of the condition of our senses, our capacities (rather than those of another age), that the task of the critic must be assessed.

What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more.

In short, criticism should help our filters, not by constraining our inputs but by widening our ability to process them.

An Erotics of Art -- Brought to You by iMovie

That leads to the second way in which the essay seems so ahead of its time: adoption of the approach it recommends is so dependent on tools which have only recently become widely available. Criticism that explores the sensory richness of the work it describes needs to be able to interact directly -- concurrently with -- the work itself. It needs to be available within and during the experience -- not outside and alongside it.

Sontag called for "acts of criticism which would supply a really accurate, sharp, loving description of the appearance of a work of art... essays which reveal the sensuous surface of art without mucking about in it."

Matt Zoller Seitz's superb series of essays on the influences and style of Wes Anderson seem to me to epitomize exactly that approach. It's curious that the Moving Image Source have laid out the text of the essays more prominently, because it's really in the video accompaniment (available for each installment by clicking the small 'video' thumbnail below the image on the right) that the approach shines. And does so in a way that suggests the promise of the kind of 'segmented metadata' that we have outlined here in the past.

The essays are supple, thrilling explorations of the surface of Anderson's work; they augment the pleasure that can be derived from viewing them. In a very real sense, they use technology -- in this case, presumably, some relatively widely-available video editing software -- to enrich the place of art in our lives.

Superb work, fascinating viewing. Highly recommended. And good for you. Who are you to argue with Susan Sontag?

Why Margins Are No Longer Wide Enough for Marginalia

... or, Charles Dickens Wants to Show You London

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

1. Arguing About Reading

Nathan and I had one of those "we're not as smart as we think we are" / "thank god we aren't crazy" moments at BookCamp Toronto last weekend while listening to Peter Brantley talk about the possibilities of "the networked book".

When your regular conversations about the implications of digital distribution tend to be vociferous discussions about publishing -- intellectual property, maintaining cost structures, etc. -- it's easy to find yourself thinking far less about the implications for reading. But the discussion that Peter initiated was an exciting tease about some of those possibilities (before it veered, perhaps inevitably, to the "safe ground" of industry change). And it was reassuring that they are some of the things that we Datachondrians have been kicking around for a little while, in particular about technologies that will enable granular user-generated metadata.

But let's zoom out for a moment.

2. Getting Content to Audiences

Suppose you could tour London in the company of Charles Dickens or Samual Pepys. See the Yosemite Valley alongside John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt. Read Invisible Man while listening to the jazz that Ralph Ellison heard while writing it.

The 26th President's memoirs...

... will not fit into your North Face Jester backpack

There is a vast amount of content out there that already exists, but is barricaded behind forms -- whether physical items like books or intellectual concepts like genres -- that prevent it from reaching its natural audiences. Exposure to a larger audience is always a win-win situation: more readers, more reading experiences, and an exponential increase in contacts to even more audiences. That isn't just more entertainment value or more revenue: there's an obvious gain to society when more people are exposed to more ideas: those ideas can be put to better use, often in ways not imagined by the original authors. As the exhaustive discussion about long tails and fragmented markets has shown, we've already seen tremendous progress in bringing content to previously unrealized audiences. But to some extent the physical forms and intellectual conception of cultural items like "the book" and "the film" remain obstacles. The weekend visitor to Yosemite might love to hear what Theodore Roosevelt had to say about Half Dome, but doesn't necessary want to read through (still less carry) his diaries alongside essential camping gear. Why not direct them straight to the paragraphs that matter to them?

There is, of course, a lot of institutional resistance to breaking down these units and releasing this content, which would essentially to allow readers to make use of it in whatever ways they can imagine. Some of these forces are legal (copyright); some are economic: what business model would continue to allow the production of value that the publishing industry is currently structured around? Some forces are more purely conceptual: what is the role of the author? Where does the involvement of the author -- their original idea, their intent, their control of presentation, their control of interpretation -- end? Where, for that matter, does it begin?

But there are tremendous countervailing forces -- namely the interpretative processes that readers already employ while consuming content. Readers, listeners, and viewers already associate the content they experience with memories, relationships, and other pieces of content. In the past these have been primarily personal associations. They have been communal only in the narrow set of situations that technology allowed: discussions among friends, within book clubs, and so forth. But they have been there, obscured somewhat by the fact that they left no physical mark upon the transmitter of the content (although many of us treasure a particular edition of a book because of the emotional associations that it carries: who gave it to us; what we were doing while we were reading it). As more than a few participants in the BookCamp conversations pointed out, some of the most meaningful "reading" experiences we have had were due to the conversations that they provoked with colleagues and friends, or the access to memories that they allowed.

All this, now, is possible to a degree and in methods hitherto unimaginable. You can already see it taking place. Set up a Twitter search for the title of your favourite novel and you will see, in realtime, the ways in which it is slotting itself into other people's lives. In doing so it is enriching those new readers and (since it is happening in ways so different from your own experiences) actually enriching the book itself as an amalgamation -- a touchstone -- of collective experience. For the first time, books are visible not just for what they contain but for what they release.

And users, given the tools, will enable, organize, and share that universe of possibilities.

3. A World of Associations

So what could that look like?

Suppose that users could geotag passages of text, works of art and design, pieces of music, audio clips, moments of film. This would allow you to engage in tours of cities, landscapes, and parks with a variety of contextually relevant materials (further reading, illustrations, maps; music and artwork inspired by these locations). Art galleries and museums would not only be augmented by those now ubiquitous curated audio materials, but by user-generated recommendations and commentary on what to see, how to look at it, and what music and writing has been inspired by or associated with it. As these user-generated elements age, they become instant historical tours, sitting alongside (for example) the impressions of Samuel Pepys, Thomas de Quincey, and Charles Dickens to enrich your experience of Oxford Street or Charring Cross Road.

There are obvious business applications -- the links to real-world and online goods and services, where you could purchase a poster of that William Turner painting, that reproduction of Harry Beck's first underground map, or a copy of the Dickens novel that you where just listening to an excerpt from.

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Then there are the in-your-armchair experiences. Suppose you could write a soundtrack for your favourite novel? Suppose you could read Blood Meridian with in-text prompts to the music it has directly inspired, to the music that people have associated with it? Inline explanatory footnotes and historical information; photographs and contemporary artwork; moments from classic Western movies that illustrate its spirit and landscape?

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Imagine purchasing a work of literature with an interwoven ‘annotation’ pack to provide explanatory material -- or a ‘translation packs’ for ESL students? A book club pack that could allow groups of users to share tags and embed conversations about specific passages. Imagine a book at which -- within the text -- the author and readers were staging a real-time discussion on specific passages. Imagine if cookbooks would suggest similarly-tagged recipes or dishes appropriate to a menu, and point to the location of a local specialty store for cooking materials.

In short -- imagine everything that can happen to content if it can be broken into distinct pieces which can be rated and evaluated on the basis of their contextual usefulness, rather than only on their relationship to ‘the rest of the book’.

4. Liberating Content

Much of the challenge will of course be about the interface design -- a theme underlined, in a variety of contexts, in a number of Saturday's sessions. What is the physical product design, and the information design, that would enable this reading experience? As Nathan pointed out, we should not assume that this need be a traditional book-based reading: a device should allow 'media switching' to let you to continue to enjoy the content regardless of your current physical activity. Should each chapter, point, paragraph, sentence, or word contain 'hooks' on which readers could hang associations, discussions, and other aspects of metadata? Should this entire question, as we have argued before, be available for constant redefinition in whatever terms make sense for the "reader"?

These appear to be narrowly technical points, although there is a big conceptual debate behind them. As Peter Brantley suggested, the recent Google book search settlement, by entrenching the concept of "the work" as a unitary entity defined by authorial intent, may reinforce the legal and conceptual walls mentioned above.

But the possibilities here are enormous, and the pressure may become unstoppable to liberate content from the old physical forms we built to allow its distribution. Ultimately, if our legal, economic and conceptual receptacles cannot adapt, then writers and readers may simply opt out of the system. Their cultural works will emerge independent of the copyright/publishing system and immediately sit in an open-source universe alongside Antony and Cleopatra and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, awaiting the arrival of content from a historically narrow period -- the period in which copyright held sway and books were closed from the designs of their readers.

Infinite Summer and the Nike+ Model for Books

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

An audience participant at one of today's BookCamp Toronto sessions brought my attention to Infinite Summer, a coordinated, communal effort to read David Foster Wallace's giant 1996 novel Infinite Jest this summer (kick-off date: June 21st). I realized that it was a manifestation of something that had been sitting at the back of my head all day, namely that the Nike+ model of social networking is an outstanding example of the kind of things that could be achieved with books. I started making use of Nike+ only a few weeks ago, having finally reignited a teenage enjoyment for running earlier in the year in an attempt to shake off some late-Winter malaise. Part of the appeal for me was the gadgetry -- the little transmitter to attach to your shoe; the excuse to buy a cute little iPod Nano; the seamless integration that lets you listen to your current distance and pace at helpful increments (or whenever you're desperate for the reassurance that surely I must be halfway by now).

But it immediately became clear that the technology was really just bait for people just like me. The gadgets are transparent enabling devices; the truly addictive qualities are the social aspects -- the ability to indulge my personal instincts in a communal setting that can be moderated on whatever level feels most comfortable to me. I can save all of my 'runs' -- my distances and performance -- and make them public, on a one-by-one basis, as I wish. I can see my workout history at a glance. I can design a route and share it with the community. I can set goals for myself, and have the system provide a training scheme to help me meet those goals. I can ask other community members for advice, perspective, and so forth. In short, it lets me take a personal activity -- something that, in truth, can sometimes require some effort to maintain -- and expose it to a huge variety of social prompts to reward me and encourage me to keep it up and develop it. This would be bad, of course, for most addictions, but for exercise it seems like a relatively benign pleasure.

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Imagine if each of those bars was a chapter of Moby Dick. Yes, the etymology and extracts chapters are hills.

So too for reading. There was a lot of chat at BookCamp Toronto about the music industry: how and whether iTunes, MySpace, etc, provide models for authors and publishers as the terrain of publishing changes with digital technology. The music industry is a great example of what can go wrong if you attempt to fight the inevitable influence of progress and tell your customers that they are wrong to want what they want. But in truth it is a pretty poor example of what publishing could point to as a set of opportunities. That's because the experience of consuming the 'product' is profoundly different. Reading is a much more public, communal activity than listening to music, even though you can piss off a lot more people by listening to music obnoxiously than reading, those Bible-shouting goons in Dundas Square notwithstanding. Reading -- or, more widely, enjoying word-based content -- is something we do in a shared medium (language) and do so against conceptual markers which are continually negotiated in a public setting (was this book good? is what it says true?). So it's completely natural that communal models of the application of technology should be more comfortable fit for reading than those which are more narrowly purchase-based.

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Seriously, you aren't going to read this on your own.

And then there are the door-stopper beasts. Who hasn't balked at The Stones of Summer, Underworld, The Adventures of Augie March, Tristram Shandy, The Anatomy of Melancholy, Don Quixote, Moby Dick? Worthy undertakings, all, but certainly far more akin to committing yourself to a marathon than, say, exposing yourself to a famously challenging album. Setting forth on any of these reading adventures as part of a crowd -- a group to set the goal and hold you to it, not by coercion but by exposing you to an additional set of pleasures -- is a much more tolerable idea than having to beat through its dense and overgrown foliage on your own.

This is why book groups succeed, at least when they succeed as reading exercises rather than wine-guzzling gossipy gatherings. Online reading communities stand to offer even more, because they allow participants to filter out those people who are not dedicated to the challenge on the same level as themselves. The academic reader of Under the Volcano -- looking for every stray reference and allusion to other words -- is not me; I was just looking for someone to help me turn the pages. But, equally, that shouldn't be the bored book club participant who would rather use the occasion to chat about their house repairs. Imagine how helpful it would be if you could simply mute that person whose comments about books always irritate because they stem so transparently from their own narrow and self-involved experiences. In online forums, you can do just that. I have seen the technology and it is good.

So -- here's the challenge: an open communal software solution that would let you share reading experiences; commit to goals (personal and shared); establish, share, and suggest training programmes for undertakings large and small (if Cormac McCarthy's The Road is a 5km run, Blood Meridian is the half-marathon and Suttree is the roaring leviathan); share your reading experiences in a social setting that can be adjusted on a case-by-case basis; link up with real-world events and gatherings in your local community; and probably provide some interface with a retail solution that would let you buy or access the book itself (and any related textual, audio, or video materials) in a seamless, instantaneous manner. And to do all of those things in ways that remind you how good it is that reading, uniquely, is both a solitary and a social endeavour.

In short: a slick, open, one-stop, cloud-based reading solution -- something that offers all this and more -- is the dream app for books. And I want to start using it like yesterday.

And with all of that said, I think I might have talked myself into a comparable enterprise for music. I listened to Miles Davis's Bitches Brew for the first time when I was 18, and my ears were entirely unprepared for it. But what if someone had first put together a "Bitches Brew training programme"? It would have taken me through the enjoyable but increasingly stale conventions of hard bop, Miles's experimentation with the Shorter/Hancock/Carter/Williams quintet, Wayne Shorter's compositional odyssey, the influence of rock's instrumentation, and the breakthrough of In a Silent Way. Then I would have been able to appreciate Bitches Brew as I appreciate it now. Although I still would have been infuriated that Columbia's dodgy CD mastering made me buy it twice.

Digital Distribution and the End of Home Warehousing

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

In late 2005, I had a chance conversation in a bookstore during which a complete stranger recommended that I read The Short Version by Stan Persky. I picked up a copy, intrigued by the promise of Persky's articulate outline of Richard Rorty's thought. The book sat on the shelf, awaiting my attention, for three years.

Last week the mood finally struck. It was a good recommendation: not only was the piece on Rorty one of the best 15-page outlines of Pragmatism (and its implications for liberal politics) that I've read; The Short Version is a delightful personal survey of a number of topics from Constantine Cavafy to ancient mythology to teaching philosophy to the history of Berlin. All of these topics are discretely handled but finely interwoven by the author's clear-headed humanism and keen intelligence. It is also a fabulous incentive to read some of those books about which Persky writes about so enthusiastically.

Winter's Night: Good

Winter's Night: Evil

One of those authors is Italo Calvino. So I have now started reading If On A Winter's Night A Traveler. I own a Vintage UK edition, which I picked up in London a couple of years ago, knowing I would otherwise have to suffer the appalling cover and intermittent availability of the Key Porter edition here in Canada.

It has sat on the shelf, awaiting my attention, for two years.

You may begin to notice notice a pattern here.

The behaviours that led to both of these books taking up space in my apartment for months on end, exercising little function except taunting me with their unreadness, were responses to scarcity. Even the Calvino decision -- apparently a matter of aesthetics -- was driven by scarcity. I was unable to get an attractive trade paperback in Canada: so pick it up in London.

One of the things that book-buyers do is accumulate books during phases of interest, on whims of passing fancy, or with some future plan in mind, even if they aren't going to start reading them immediately. Why? Because you never know when (or if) you're going to see this book again -- whether the store will carry it, whether another customer will have bought it. Whether you'll even remember what book it was -- and whether you'll be able to find it among the wealth of other books. Sometimes items are scarce because they have to wind their way through production processes that may not scale well for -- for example -- deep backlist articles. Sometimes they are scarce because of the abundance of competing, surrounding products.

This is something that Kevin Drum has been thinking about recently:

In the past, I'd go to the bookstore and buy several books at a time. Naturally I meant to read all of them, and just as naturally, I didn't. Another book would catch my eye before I'd finished them all, a review book would come in the mail, I'd get a few books for Christmas, etc. etc. The upshot is that some of the books would fall to the bottom of the pile and never get read.

With the Kindle, though, there's no pile. When I finish a book, all I have to do is decide at that moment what I feel like reading next. Ten minutes later I have it. I don't know for sure if this is good or bad in the long run, but it's certainly different.

It's the same, of course, for music. All that time and energy you would expend trying to remind yourself about rare and essential releases that you would simply have to purchase should you ever find them. That copy of Joe Cocker's epic Mad Dogs & Englishmen double-album, surely one of the finest documents of a drugs-&-booze-fueled transcontinental rock 'n' roll odyssey since Lewis and Clark. Pete LaRoca's meditative hard-bop jazz classic Basra (which, apparently, was on the cusp of a Rudy Van Gelder-remastered rerelease in 2003 only to be yanked when LaRoca hated the idea of being associated with the Iraq war). RZA's bizarre and graceful hip-hop score to Jim Jarmusch's Ghost Dog, only available as an astonishingly expensive import from Japan. The follow-on activities from this kind of thing were exhausting: making lists; transferring them to whatever technology (notebooks? spreadsheets? Palm Pilot?) were most current; remembering to print the damn things out and carry them around with you in case you happened to stop by somewhere that might carry them. Indeed -- planning and preparing to visit a store. And then the hours spent poring through their inventory like a reference librarian.

Not much fun.

Needless to say, all of this activity -- the effort required to make a purchase -- accords a higher value to the product itself, leading to hoarding. That's just one way in which your money (and time) are wasted by the economies of cultural scarcity. Among others: the capital depreciation, the obvious physical degradation (I'm looking at you, crappy yellow-edged UK trade paperbacks), the fact that your current assessment of how much you want something may not efficiently estimate the future return on your investment, and the massive opportunity cost when an apartment full of books prevents you from installing a perfectly good wine refrigerator or vintage pinball machine.

I for one will be happy when this is behind us. When everything is always available, everywhere, and you can quickly tag books, music, or anything else for future purchase (without fear of there being obstacles), where is the incentive to fill your living space with stuff that you may one day read? Couldn't you make better use of all that space?

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.