The mid 19th century was a fascinating time with a lot of technological lessons for today. As Andrew teaches us about railroad technologies that coupled with curious investments that led to bubbles more dramatic than what we see today, another emerging technology would lead to an Internet of sorts that predicted quite a bit about our current Internet.
A few weeks ago I was wandering around the MIT campus spending some time in their excellent naval museum. Naval architecture was obsessed with the clipper ship - 3 or more huge main masts and a square rig coupled with a then-optimal very long and narrow hull design, these things became the fastest way to move atoms about over any intercontinental distance for about five decades. Most of the exhibits illustrating that period were created with the perspective and insight of time and focused on novel propulsion systems and steel hulls. Very nifty and a cool thing for engineers, but if you wanted to get something to China quickly in the day, you really wanted to use a clipper ship.
It wasn't that steam engines weren't recognized, but they weren't quite there yet for the large commercial companies. Clever people were focused on squeezing out efficiency from those greyhounds of the sea (I wish I had come up with that line - it is from the exhibit) and say the steam engine as a sweet power source for the winches that were used on the huge and very heavy sails. They could be great labor saving devices - a 20 hp steam winch could do the work of 100 men.
It made me think about publishing...
When you look at emagazines aimed at the iPad, it quickly becomes apparent that those from the big publishers are confused and don't really take advantage of the platform. This is probably a combination of lack of insight on the part of the magazine - after all - they are experts focused on their existing world, and a poor tool choice. The current model mostly relies on a new spigot placed in the standard magazine pipeline to "streamline" the task. Adding an emagazine means telling InDesign to produce a pdf at the appropriate point. Of course these magazines want to cut costs and sending content electronically to a remote screen that the user pays for seems to be just the ticket. And Adobe has tweaked their toolset so you only have to add about one headcount to your workforce to accommodate this new world.
The problem is the experience for the enduser tends to be poor. Reading pdfs is anything but good and the experience could be much better. Furthermore the pricing structure most of these guys use just doesn't make sense as little real value, other than moving to a paperless world, is offered.
I'm becoming more aware of this as a few important print publications to me have e-versions.. The New Yorker, Science, Physics Today, Nature, and Sky & Telescope are the ones I have tried. Most of these are "free with subscription", but are sufficiently painful to use that I only download them for travel and then find myself getting irritated when reading.
But there are a few guys out there who see the iPad and recognize a new type of transportation rather than a steam engine running a winch on a clipper ship … for about six months I've been addicted to TRVL - a neat publication out of The Netherlands. It is a mostly weekly travel and photography magazine that also happens to be free. To get it into Apple's magazine app on the iPad they had to make a subscription and that meant offering a paid version. They charge a buck, but donate the money to charity. I don't know their business model other than they are very lean and have a couple of big sponsors that haven't really stepped forward yet - at least I haven't noticed them.
TRVL invites interaction with the page - there are maps on the pages, deep information about the beautiful photography, the flexibility for authors and editors of being able to ignore printing constraints and the obvious feature that old issues can always be relevant as it is free to constantly update them if necessary.
Apple featured them as a great app at WWDC this year and that got me looking around a bit the other night to learn more about the company. There are only six employees and a couple of programmers who roll their own publication tools - they have managed to steer clear of the Adobe Victorian model of what a print publication is and that has liberated them.1 Again I don't know anything about their business model and how they will do financially, but they can turn out a great product (I spend about a half hour with each issue -- if you want to try it I recommend the piece on Amsterdam as a good starting point as I think many of you has some experience with the place as a reference - a few even live there:-) with a staff much smaller than any conventional travel/photography magazine I'm aware of. This is a great publication for learning a bit about other cultures as well as seeing some of the nuts and bolts of photography. If you have an iPad it is a steal for the price of $zero and even cheap at a buck.
I don't have a good clue on the direction digital publishing will take, but this gives a sense of at least one potential path that is quite different. I can imagine some possibilities and undoubtedly other people are too. I'd love to have a conversation with some of you to see what sort of wacky ideas are out there. Certainly the notion of who creates content is up for grabs and so much more can be done than just adding audio and video. Reader explorations may become interesting to other readers in their own right. Why not invite interaction beyond the page and beyond the net? I'm thinking about what synesthesia might mean as an example1 ... Business models also will need a lot of cleverness.
At the moment we're confined to a rather rigid and ancient definition of what we think a periodical is. We can see the steam engines just under the deck, but the real trick - building a new hull, engine and propeller - is lurking and some people will go beyond that with airplanes and starships. You get a bit of a shiver thinking about it.
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1 I have a bit of experience here. Some years ago I was the art editor for a very small black women's fashion magazine called FEVA (yeah - long story ... ask sometime if we both have an hour). This was something of a vacation from my research work and I learned a boatload about the fashion industry and magazine publishing. Not enough to claim any expertise, but certainly enough to be dangerous and allow pathways for deeper looks later on. One of the immediate learnings was how workflows worked. At the time it was all Quark based at the layout and editing level - something that InDesign mostly took over, but both of these toolsets are highly constraining and force you to think of your work and projects a certain way. While constraints can be important for some things, this was an enormous sap on creative ideas. I'm really excited by the potential of breaking free of this print-imagined model.
2 I'm thinking about a conversation Juliette and I had on a Central Park walk two years ago that celebrated the midday between our (close) birthdays. We were talking about ways to not only make synesthesia real for those who don't have it, but to go beyond it and mix what sensors can detect in with another sense. With practice you may begin to navigate that new space naturally. Now an iPad has a camera and could easily BT to some other sensors and there is enough computation to do some clever stuff. What about extending visual (wavelength) range or perhaps adding some very fine gradations (what if you could "hear" very fine gradations of color for example?) While a bit orthogonal to the concept of a magazine, it shows that you might ship interesting computation filters and apps as part of the magazine to make points and enhance experiences - and even to collect information and insight from others.
Recipe
Sweet Cherry Tart
I usually make tarts with pie cherries, but tried this with some amazing Rainier cherries a few years ago. You can use of those premade pie tart shells, but it is far better to make your own, and it is very easy if you have the right pan. As it is Summer, quick and easy rules.
Ingredients
° 25g cornstarch (about 3 tablespoons)
° 170g white cane sugar
° 1 teaspoon fine sea salt
° 1 orange, juiced and zested
° 1 tablespoon butter
° 1 vanilla bean, cut and scraped
° 55g amaretto
° 800 - 900g pitted, fresh cherries (about 2 pounds) used Rainiers, but any "eating" cherry will work. If you use black cherries you should increase the sugar a bit. If you use pie cherries, a lot ...
° 1 prebaked tart shell
Technique
° pit and halve the cherries, reserving them in the juice.
° combine everything but the cherries in a pan and bring to a boil, stirring constantly
° Reduce heat to medium high and cook 'til a thick creamy paste forms.
° remove from heat, strain, and immediately stir in the cherries.
° cool until just above room temperature, stirring occasionally.
° fill the shell and bake at 450° F until the crust is baked through.
° cool and serve. It is great a bit warm and also chilled. A good vanilla ice cream can be served with it and chocoholics might appreciate a bit of shaved chocolate on top.
Prebased Shortbread Tart Shell
Ingredients
° 130 grams all purpose flour
° 35 grams powdered sugar
° a pinch of fine sea salt (too small for my scale - I’m guessing about 1/8tsp). Note that iodized salt picks up a strange flavor when baking, so I use a fine grain un-iodized sea salt
° 1 stick of cold unsalted butter - about 115 grams
Technique
° heat oven to 425°F with the rack in a central position
° butter or lightly spray with a nonstick neutral vegetable oil cooking spray an 8” tart pan with a removable bottom. 9” would probably work too.
° cut the butter into chunks and put all of the ingredients in a food processor
° pulse the food processor until the pastry starts to form into pea sized clumps - about 30 seconds for me. don’t let it grow into larger pieces if you can.
° press the dough into the pan and pat as evenly as you can
° pierce the bottom of the crust with a fork to prevent it from puffing up too much during baking.
° Cover the pastry with plastic wrap and put it in the freezer for 15 minutes - this is a really neat trick that prevents the crust from shrinking when it bakes.
° Bake until the crust is golden brown - about 15 minutes for me. Cool on a wire rack. You can cover the crust and store it for a day in the refrigerator f you want.
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