A Stream of Ones and Zeroes

I have had this blog post clanking about in my head for a month now, and today is the day it finally makes sense as a story. If you have read my previous posts this month (thanks by the way!) about my reflections on a book called Instant: The Story of Polaroid by Christopher Bonanos, this post represents the climax of several stories crashing together to form a new one.  You see, I read Instant eagerly to help me better understand a story I am living right now. Instant takes a long, hard look at the intriguing rise and fall of a technology company who created then cornered the market on instant photography. Through the genius of its founder, Edwin Land, and the magic of its cameras that literally put a dark room in your hand, Polaroid, like it’s rival Kodak, captured the memories of our youth, in stunning saturated, halcyon-ic hues framed in white, and made them available to us in an instant. But with the rapid onset of digital photography and in the frame of one short decade, both companies fell, failing to understand the impact that digital photography would have on their existence. As Bonanos writes:

“What everyone had missed was that the digital revolution was changing the very nature of the photograph. From the very beginning, a photograph had been a physical thing: a glass or metal plate, a negative, a slide, a piece of paper. If you didn’t have a tangible object, you didn’t have a photo. As Polaroid grappled with the world of digital photography, it had embraced the catchphrase “All roads lead to a print.” For a century and a half, they all had. No longer. Today, a photo is not a thing; it’s a stream of ones and zeroes.”

As an 18 year veteran of the Canadian publishing industry, the paragraph above is chilling. Read it again, and replace the word  photograph and photo with the word book.  While the publishing industry and the book have been around much longer than photography or the music industry (think Gutenberg), the shift from print to digital has been equally jarring. More revolutionary than evolutionary. And just like Polaroid and Kodak, there have been and continue to be casualties at the hands of the stream of ones and zeroes as the industry shrinks and fights for relevancy in this new digital age. Just this past week we learned that a long-time publisher is closing up shop in Canada, with untold jobs lost in the process. This is just one example in a string of examples over the past five years as our industry contracts. You would be well within your right to ask me, is there still hope for the publishing industry and Patti, why are you fighting so hard to stay in it?

Yes! Yes there is hope.  Just as evidence abounds that the digital revolution is taking publishing prisoners, even more evidence abounds that publishing companies are learning from this revolution and capitalizing on the opportunities that the shift from print to digital bring to tell new stories in new ways. At the end of the day photos and books are not about technology but about the powerful stories each can tell. In fact, it is this belief in story-telling that inspired a number of Polaroid employees to resurrect the Polaroid brand in what is now called The Impossible Project. The “coda” as Bonanos calls the last chapter in the compelling story Instant, reveals that a new, smaller, scrappier Polaroid has risen from the ashes to continue to bring the Polaroid look and feel to photographers who love the medium and the unique stories it tells.

Similarly in the publishing world, there are intriguing examples of the understanding that story-telling can take many forms and formats. Take for instance the new project called A Calendar of Tales that witnesses an innovative hook-up between author Neil Gaiman and Canada’s own Blackberry. Gaiman used the crowd-sourcing power of Twitter to elicit ideas and inspiration to create a new multi-media short story per month, launched on Blackberry Hub. In the UK, publishing house Faber recently teamed up with app developer The Story Mechanics to create an interactive digital adaptation of The 39 Steps. Please check out their fascinating development story here.  Back in Canada, Penguin recently launched The Echo Project in support of author Khaled Hosseini’s new book, And The Mountains Echoed. The Echo Project provides a companion platform for editors, fans, visual artists and even photographers to add their interpretations of the novel in real-time. And you cannot write about digital story-telling in Canada without mentioning Wattpad, the “library in your pocket” for the writing and reading community. Wattpad is a truly Canadian success story. Founded by Allen Lau, Wattpad represents the next generation in social reading communities where the gulf between writers and readers is eliminated. Readers are given the opportunity to comment on stories and writers get the chance to test their writing chops in front of a supportive and interested audience. Even Margaret Atwood and Cory Doctorow are active writers and members! As a recent member to Wattpad, I have yet to comment on one of Margaret Atwood’s stories, but that day may come 🙂

It will be innovations in story-telling like these that will help publishers remain relevant in the challenging days ahead. It is not impossible, but it will not be easy. A blog this week by Futurebook’s Sophie Rochester called Ten Challenges to Innovation in Publishing highlights the various forces at work in the push and pull between print and digital, from the opportunities to learn from “big data”, to the challenges of the digital walled garden erected by device developers. As Todd Sattersten, author of Every Book is a Startup writes in a recent article  “We need some new language that describes what happens and, more importantly, what is possible when words are separated from the paper”. Perhaps the last word should be given to publishing’s most thoughtful critic and supporter, Brian O’Leary who recommends in Book: A Futurist’s Manifesto that publishers need to consistently remind themselves what they have always done best: focus more on the context (the story), than on the “container” (format). All the rest will follow.

I want to thank Christopher Bonanos for giving me a story that made me think, question, learn and hope. Don’t the best stories do that? I will leave you with a quote about the power of story-telling from one of my favourite authors, J.R.R. Tolkien:

“Frodo: I can’t do this, Sam.
Sam: I know. It’s all wrong. By rights we shouldn’t even be here. But we are. It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger, they were. And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn’t. They kept going. Because they were holding on to something.
Frodo: What are we holding onto, Sam?
Sam: That there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo… and it’s worth fighting for.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers