Why fandom won't leave LJ until LJ collapses
This is pretty much what went through my mind when all the kerfluffles happened last summer. I've only gotten around to expressing it coherently now. I continue to think about it because the project is tempting: I look at fanfiction.net and I see a terrible archive platform; I look at LJ and I see an even worse one. But today seems like a great day ( Read more... )
Yes, with exclamation marks.
I really don't see the next phase being built from within fandom. Fandom's just too eager to eat its own young; we'd much rather take over something that looks workable and then bond over complaints about how it isn't exactly what we want. Also, anything big enough to support us will need to be bigger than us.
I expect that the next platform, whatever it is, will draw us in with things we never expected to want: eight years ago, who on mailing lists was looking for 100 pixel-square icons? And yet, I think that was the biggest draw to lj.
After reading the cellphone ring article you just linked me to, I think you've missed the biggest thing that will mark the shift. I think it's going to be hardware that pulls us. A platform that's seamless with the next generation of web-enabled phone. Since my first days in fandom, I've been wanting a better way to read fic on the train. There've been tentacles (hee) out in that direction: rocket ebook, palm pilots, but nothing that's met your criteria for the rest of fandom's needs. It can't be too far away, though, and no way is any fan-built platform going to be close enough to cutting edge to be where we hook into it.
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I'm not sure about asking-to-link etiquette. I may have to post musingly on that, at some stage. ~g~
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But so many people do it these days, that I'm starting to think I missed a link to Miss Manners, or something.
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What makes me wonder is what I hear about the popularity of mobile phone books in places like Japan and China. Obviously, people are willing to read on the go if it is made easy and content is easy to find, but I really don't think we're there yet in America on the mobile phone front. The iPhone provides the best user experience, but there are no supported options for reading ebooks or long works yet. Other smartphones allow you to install stuff like Plucker and Mobipocket reader, but finding and/or converting work for them is still hard, and usually not done over the air.
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The iPhone is a handheld computer and a stunning platform. We're looking at the very beginning of the story there-- wait six months to see what the first way of developers make for it. In the meantime, a simplified html page makes for a pretty sweet reading experience in the built-in html browser.
The Kindle: started reading about what it supports. PalmDoc isn't hard to do, if I recall correctly. I haven't seen one in the wild yet, but the people who own them seem to be huge fans. I've seen some Japanese-only epaper devices that had amazingly readable displays. I think the future converges them. One device in the pocket.
And fandom will, from my point of view, be behind the adoption curve on all of it. But then, I love my gadgets.
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This is why I try to save a copy of everything in HTML if possible. Pdfs are pretty, but it is tongue-gnawingly hard to get readable content out of them even if they're tagged and OCRed and all the rest of it. HTML is editable with text editors and printable if you have a web browser and some CSS knowhow, and it can already show up in most browsers.
I got sick of relinking in-sequence files by hand, and I am supremely lazy
God, the AMOUNT OF WORK that goes into ebooks :(. I forsee only treasured fics making the conversion leap through my hands at first-- I was lucky that the fic I tried my hands at was in Markdown already, and thus easily convertible into standards-compliant html. Mobipocket creator doesn't explicitly choke on bad html, it just ends up looking like shit, in subtle ways that my OCD brain cannot tolerate. And then there are all the special characters that neglect to be in Unicode when I download the html files *sighs*. I'm just glad I still had Parallels on hand to use to double-boot WinXP; most of the best tools for conversion are Windows-only.
The Kindle
*flashis her Kindle at you over the interwebs* This IS the future, I swear it. It has its flaws, but there e-ink and a sensible distribution system on Amazon's end and being able to plug it in anywhere that will take USB kinda trumps every one of them. I can't wait to see what e-ink is capable of in ten years-- I may then have one device to rule them all, FINALLY :D.
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- simple to write
- can be pasted directly into email
- is easily turned into simple, clean html that's 1000x better than what Word produces
- is directly supported by a number of good, cheap text editors (I use BBEdit, but TextMate is great here too)
"Coding" a story to post is something that takes me about 2 seconds.
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Another reason I bothered with Textmate and markdown is that I was writing very long pieces at the time, and "coding" them by hand would have been a full-blown nightmare. I don't know how anyone that writes longer pieces manages by hand *shivers*
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I was just thinking the opposite! In terms of social networking, fandom jumped way ahead of the curve and embraced comments in ways that blogging is only now moving toward. Fans bought e-readers before they were any good, and now that we're finally getting e-readers like Kindle and iPhone*, we're moving on to podfic. Yes, of course, there are levels and not every fan is at the bleeding edge, but I see a trend.
I see a day coming soon where we'll be able to put skins on SIMS and make them act out our stories. Just wait...
*and my Treo, which has been serving me portable fic for years.
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