The idea of Amazon being giddy in reponse to this antitrust suit is more than a little sickening. Breaking up monopolies should be the priority of the Department of Justice, not protecting them. Amazon’s success is coming at the cost of the people who create their content in the first place. Without any viable alternatives, creators are forced to turn to a model that offers them whatever Amazon feels is appropriate, not what the market has decided. By discounting e-books Amazon creates cash flow and sales but little profit for the authors. I’m glad that the publishers have decided to take a stand with Apple though. If they had been more innovative and created or supported start-ups who were building tech companies that could have gone up against Amazon they wouldn’t be in this situation. Instead they sat around or were befuddled with confusion while Amazon grew and eventually owned the marketplace. They deserve to take a beating with this suit, it might make them grow into a modern industry. Read the whole story by Jacqui Cheng:

Apple has now publicly responded to accusations that it colluded with publishers to fix e-book prices. In a statement released late Thursday, the company says the launch of its iBookstore in 2010—along with the original iPad—not only brought competition to the market, it also broke “Amazon’s monopolistic grip on the publishing industry.”

“The [Department of Justice]‘s accusation of collusion against Apple is simply not true,” Apple told several news outlets. “The launch of the iBookstore in 2010 fostered innovation and competition, breaking Amazon’s monopolistic grip on the publishing industry. Since then customers have benefited from eBooks that are more interactive and engaging. Just as we’ve allowed developers to set prices on the App Store, publishers set prices on the iBookstore.”

Full Article…

NOOKColor, digital comics just got a lot more interesting

Barnes & Noble just announced that the NOOKColor, an Andoid tablet fronted with a 7-inch touch screen, as part of their overall Nook eReading device line, has become their biggest selling product of all time. They sold their entire inventory of devices over the holiday season.
I don’t think there is any doubt that the market will have a ton of options available for tablet-based computing for reading digital texts. The major limit to them opening up the market for comics and graphic novels has been the lack of colour. With the exception of some Manga titles, most comics and graphic novels ship with colour panels. The end result is that most people aren’t going to be interested in downloading a heavily visual digital product that is going to look terrible on a grayscale screen. The growth of colour tablets and their steadily decreasing cost is nothing but good news for the digital comic marketplace. Keep an eye on the Fabler as we start building up the relationships that are going to let independents tap into that market.

How-to play the comic book option game

Recently a buddy of mine, Riley Rossmo, the artist for Cowboy Ninja Viking, had the option rights for the comic purchased by Disney First of all, congrats, Riley works really hard at his craft. I met him at a regular meet-up of local artists at the Kensington Pub here in Calgary when his main project was Proof. He always had a number of creative properties on the go and had a keen sense that Hollywood was always looking around for something new. He was in talks with a number of studios that were all trying to find the next big hit for the film industry. Proof was the first experience but Cowboy Ninja Viking eventually made the deal. This isn’t anything new, in the past few years, comics have increasingly become a place for the film industry to look for creative properties. Next to the stack of scripts on the desks of the entertainment industry is another, shinier pile of graphic novels and trades.

There are some good reasons that comics and graphic novels are there on that pile. They all have a fully formed stories, lots of characters to fill up the story landscape and, more importantly, they’ve already been seen by thousands of people. One of the biggest challenges to the film industry is trying to figure out if the movie they are making is going to be a hit or a miss. If a story already has a fan base and a ton of positive reviews, chances are they’re onto something good. Most of the people making decisions about funding really don’t know anything about their prospective audience. With a large fan base they’ve got a lot of feedback that the audience loved the comic and they are hungry for more. The funders don’t have to rely on a single opinion that may or may not be informed. So basically, if you’ve got a story that works in a visual format you’re lowering their risk that they’re going to fund a bomb at the box office.

There are some other elements you should consider as well. Comics, as a medium, give you a lot of room. You can vary a lot of things in the narrative such as story structure, art style and characters. You can do it in a lot of unconventional ways and play around with narrative because the cost of your comic bombing at the store aren’t that high. If things don’t work out you just start up another concept. The cost of failure in movies is much higher and as a result they tend to play it safe. This means you follow a standard three-act structure that can follow the conventions of a film script. This can be a bit challenging with a long running series as they don’t really have a structured start and ending. In Riley’s case, they brought in the script writers from Zombieland to put it into a standard format that can actually be filmed. It is something that you need to think about if you are looking at your story moving into a different media. Have you built it so that it can move into film? Or is is something that is going to take a lot of work to fit into a standard format that runs for 80 minutes? The easier it is for a producer to see the transition, the easier it will be to get their interest.

Now comes the next steps, someone finally offers you an option on that comic title you’ve poured your soul into for the past year. An option isn’t an outright purchase, they are basically buying the exclusive right to buy the rights to your creative property in the future. It is a producer’s way of buying some time while they try to get writers involved to polish up a script, line up some name actors and get the financing in place to actually film the movie. It is usually 12-18 months, if they haven’t been able to pull all of that together in that time period, they probably never will. At this point you’re not going to get the big Hollywood windfall, options will only pay out a few thousand dollars. The option agreement will usually define how much you’re going to actually make if the film moves forward. If all of that comes together and the producer moves the film into production you can look forward to the big pay-off. This might be in the form of a cash settlement or it might be a piece of the profits from the film, each option agreement can be different.

One last piece of advice, get someone you trust to review the option agreement. I’ve known a few naive writers who agreed to take back-end points on a film, thinking they were getting a share of the profits. What they didn’t realize is that they only get paid after all of the debts for the film are paid off. Just so you know, it is in the best interest of the owner of that film (often the film distributor) to make sure that film never makes any money on paper. The end result is that you will never make any money even though your film ran for 6 months at the theatres and sells out every Christmas at BestBuy. There are a lot of pitfalls and you need to be well educated to make sure you avoid them all. If you don’t have someone who knows all this stuff it is worth it to hire a lawyer who does. You’ll be happier with the results.

Interactive fiction: Trends in how we read it

The website One Book, Many Readings is an analysis of trends in interactive, hypertextual fiction. These were the Choose Your Own Adventure books that began to flourish in the 80s. The design models for quests, side-quests and narrative are used in the game design of a number of adventure based and role-playing video games currently available. The demise of the books seems to coincide with the rise of many of these kinds of video games.

Visual map of a branching story

The analysis pointed out some interesting aspects of the evolution of the books over time. As the books were published, certain approaches seemed to work better than o

thers. These books become more popular, had more sales and helped to direct the next round of publications. It would seem that anyone who enjoyed a narrative that gave them choices would prefer a large range of choices and endings. Although that make sense intuitively, it seems that the opposite happened.

Rather than becoming more complex they began to decrease in branching and increase in linearity. The reason for the change isn’t really clear, perhaps an increased demand for simpler stories or may the genre starting to settle into an equilibrium. A place where it the ability to branch a story doesn’t affect the quality of the story itself. It still remains a solid narrative that resonates with the reader rather than giving them a complex, muddled experience.

The other interesting aspect of the research is the idea that some of the books rewarded the “creative interpretation of the rules”. In one story in particular, Inside UFO 54-40, you could actually get to a special ending by not following the constraints of the system but thinking outside of them. What makes this interesting is that the Choose Your Own Adventure books started to evolve to a place where creative thinking would allow the reader to experience them in a much different way. It is something I don’t see evolving in video game design, an affordance built into the game play that can take you to a completely different outcome if you decide to think outside the constraints of the system. Cheats and exploits aren’t really the same, the help a player gain an unfair advantage. Although they are creative, they aren’t built in as part of the narrative around the game itself.

The Witch of Portobello

Paulo Coelho is an internationally successful author who has written such books as The Alchemist and The Witch of Portobello. It is this last book that inspired The Experimental Witch Project. Coelho decided to explore what his readers saw in the book’s characters and the story he had created. He partnered with HP and created a contest to encourage filmmakers, musicians and artists:

People were encouraged to choose a character in the book and create a short film based on that character. The contest resulted in 6000 submissions and Coelho chose 15 winners. The total amount of footage created by those winners was 380 minutes. That footage is being edited into something that can be presented at a film festival, around 90 minutes, but Coelho intends to create a version of the film that will have all 380 minutes. He is aware that this would be a non-commercial property but believes it is the only way to properly explore all the work created by the various participants of the project.

Film contests aren’t new but what is interesting about this is Coelho’s willingness to embrace social media and New Media as a way of exploring the meaning of his story in the space between the reader and the author. Coelho has actively engaged that world by talking about his books and his life in a diverse number of virtual spaces such as YouTube and MySpace. He believes these are places where a worldwide audience can engage in conversation with an artist that has not been possible in the past. It is not about promotions or ego for Coelho as he is eager to have an opportunity to engage in the imaginative and creative ways that his audience will take his works and make them into something else. His goal as an artist has always been to share what he’s discovered inside his own soul. Using New Media he is now able to instantly gauge his success in the goal by the content and conversations created with his audiences in those online spaces.