New media spreads like wildfire in publishing, business, entertainment

It’s getting hot out there. After many years of waiting for the concepts of digital media to ignite in the larger worlds of publishing and entertainment, almost every major publishing house has appointed a new director or vice president of “new media.” Cable companies are starting new businesses for CD-ROM products. Phone companies are working with television and film studios. Computer and consumer electronics vendors are criss-crossing the globe, wooing any and all who might be interested in publishing some kind of product on their platform.

Wildfire often destroys what’s in its path, and that may be what happens with new media and traditional publishers. The chaotic nature of what’s happening in publishing and entertainment today will almost certainly leave behind some charred stumps, but nothing will stop the excitement and energy of today’s cutting-edge artists from thinking about and working toward the future. That kind of heat can germinate a whole new generation.

APPLE PUBLISHERS FORUM:AN EXCELLENT START

Everyone was surprised by the turnout at the Apple Publishers Forum in New York in mid-September. No one, not even Apple itself, expected more than 300 representatives from the nation’s top publishing houses to spend a day out of their offices learning about what Apple is calling “new media publishing,” but that’s what happened.

The agenda for the day segmented itself into a morning full of presentations and demonstrations of interactive books by publishers already involved in new media, as well as targeted presentations by chairman John Sculley and conference organizer/publishing community liaison Linda Stone Neumann.

They both calmly addressed all the scary questions that have kept publishers out of new media, the scariest of all being, “Will new media kill off the book market?” To quiet that particular terror, Sculley said the best analogy for electronic books was that growth in the film business has stayed fairly constant, but that the video industry has grown from nothing to $8 billion in a very short time — and its growth did not cut into the film industry at all.

In the same way, electronic delivery of text, he said, will not replace books. It’s simply a way to distribute a new kind of product. He also reminded those present that their industry was only eking out two percent annual growth — and that new media publishing might start those numbers going north again.

That said, the rest of the day was devoted to showing off new media products and telling publishers that Apple had no interest in owning or controlling their intellectual property. Apple’s primary concern, Sculley said, was for publishers to realize the potential of new media for their businesses — and, of course, it couldn’t hurt for them to know as much about Apple’s offerings as possible so that they might choose Apple as a development or distribution platform, or both.

Use what you’ve got. “Take baby steps, and learn how to produce low-cost products and leverage the intellectual property you’ve already got,” Sculley said.

Somewhat comforted, the audience next got a demonstration of how unique electronic books could be. Though old hat for people who’ve been around the multimedia world for a while, it was clear that the products on stage would not be confused with any books the rest of the audience ever published.

Among those demonstrated were children’s author Mark Brown’s fabulous upcoming Brøderbund title Arthur’s Teacher Trouble, the CD-ROM version of Douglas Adams’ book Last Chance to See, Rick Smolan’s pioneering From Alice to Ocean, which bundles an interactive CD-ROM with a coffee-table book of his Australian adventures, Random House’s first Modern Library Expanded Book release, Oscar Wilde’s A Picture of Dorian Gray, which includes a hilarious and moving audio note by the late Bennett Cerf about the founding of Random House, and Voyager’s brilliant Poetry in Motion.

The best emissary Apple had at the forum was Bob Stein, cofounder of Voyager. Although Stein has become one of the Usual Suspects at multimedia conferences, he was not preaching to the choir in this group and gave a deeply personal perspective on what it’s like to publish literature in a new artistic medium.

He encouraged publishers not to be intimidated by technology, because technology companies now needed the publishing industry as much as — or perhaps more than — publishing needed them. The handling of intellectual property “from author to marketplace” is what book publishers do best, he said. “Editorial expertise is more important than rights.”

Stein also exhorted publishers only to license digital rights to intellectual properties as a way to make short-term money to fund their own internal development. He told them to get some software developers on staff. And mostly, he stressed patience: “Everything will be different in five years. There will be no standards until there are better products. A new medium takes a long time to develop. Don’t look too carefully at what happens on a daily basis. The market could be decades away.”

Stein said he “desperately wants to compete” with book publishers. “I want to compete on ideas, not with Microsoft and Sony.” In the perfect world that Stein wishes to create, the publishing community’s first commitment would be to the art, not the commerce, of new media.

WATCH YOURSELF; THE EYES OF THE WORLD ARE UPON YOU

Of course, unless you’re independently wealthy or have a patron with deep pockets, that’s not the way the world works and book publishers know that better than anyone.

Thus, a couple of questions rise from the rosy scenario that Apple painted in New York, and they both have to do with the company’s true intentions.

At Digital World ‘92, John Sculley said clearly that Apple had its eye on becoming a publisher itself. Because new media publishing models are still so unclear, and because Sculley wouldn’t elaborate on the statement, we have no way of knowing exactly what form that might take.

But we have some ideas, and we’d like to warn Apple away from them now before they ruin the priceless trust and credibility they’ve worked so hard to establish in the publishing community.

The first temptation for Apple might be to start the outright acquisition of “properties” from publishing companies, or at least to acquire exclusive digital rights in perpetuity from either the naive, or from companies in need of cash to fund new media development.

AVOID THE ‘PARIAH’ LABEL

It would behoove Apple to remember what happened both to Interactive Home Systems and to Philips in similar circumstances. IHS, you’ll recall, is the “other” company that Bill Gates chairs (see Vol. 1, No. 2, p. 19). Interested primarily in putting together large databases of digital images, when the company was first formed, Gates cut a bloody swath through the museum community with heavy-handed proposals that demanded exclusive rights (see Vol. 1, No. 1, p. 19).

The company immediately engendered intense distrust and was immediately rejected by much of the art community, building a wall that IHS president Steve Arnold has had to work very hard to dismantle. Despite his repeated assurances to collection owners, the miasma of IHS’s former behavior lingers.

Similarly, if Apple assumes the predator mode, “publishers will go back into their shells like hermit crabs,” said one. This new genre of publishing is still unformed, and any company that owns and/or controls the intellectual property of artists — publishing houses, film or television studios, record labels — stands a good chance of being robbed. No vendor wants to be in the position of being accused of exploiting developers (see Bobbi Mark’s piece on licensing, p. 5.).

DO NOT REPEAT CD-I’S MISTAKES

Philips faced a similar problem with its approach to new CD-I developers. The publishing arm of Philips, even by the accounts of those who took its money and developed titles, “alienated everyone” with its die-hard position that Philips must either own titles outright or license all rights in perpetuity (see Vol. 1, No. 2, p. 3).

They couldn’t get away with such contractual clauses with well-known and highly visible companies like National Geographic, which would never let anyone control rights to their images. The small, passionate, starving developer of interactive products is who gave up the most. As many have said, “Philips was the only one signing checks,” thus this was often the only way that small developers could realize their products.

They faced two risks by signing away their titles. One was that CD-I would be a great success and they’d never see a dime of royalties from the company. The other, now being realized, is that CD-I would not take off and they’d have forfeited their ability to move their CD-I projects onto another, better selling platform.

To be fair to Philips, these developers matched its hunger by using large amounts of the company’s money to fund their own learning curve on interactive technologies. But some said they’d never sign a contract with Philips again; whether that’s to become axiomatic is probably not a lesson Apple — or any other vendor, no matter how big — wants to learn right now.

ENDING PLATFORM WARS IS THE NEXT BIG STEP

The second most important problem facing potential publishers is that of Warring Multimedia Platforms. If the interactive media industry is to move forward, vendors must begin to have some small consideration for the few brave, slightly mad yet endearing multimedia consumers — a handful of enthusiasts who have actually thrown caution to the winds and bought some player or computer or another in the midst of this chaos.

No matter how fabulous are some of the developments in the world of electronic media and publishing, the industry is digging itself deeper and deeper into a series of confusing, unconnected trenches that are already delaying public acceptance.

At least Kaleida, the multimedia joint venture of Apple and IBM, is developing a way to allow all interactive CDs to work in all players by using its special ScriptX language, independent of operating systems. So far the only other “consenting adult” is Toshiba. Of course, the big “if” is whether companies like Microsoft and Sony will embrace ScriptX, and whether developers will find enough value to use it.

Why is compatibility so important? Many major publishers won’t waste time developing for a platform with an installed base of even 50,000 — a hallucinatory figure for a multimedia platform today. This brings to mind Jonathan Seybold’s old rule of thumb for tracking the potential success of a new computer platform. In order to create a viable mass market for shrink-wrapped software, he says that developers have to at least believe in the prospect of an installed base of 250,000 computers. If that rule doesn’t apply to players today, it will: today’s title developers will not go on forever losing money on a fractious market.

ATTENTION, VENDORS: PUBLISHERS ARE WAITING

Although it’s hard to believe that anyone could actually resist the charms of interactive technology, vendors need to wise up — and fast — to the fact that big publishers, with big projects on the drawing boards, are also waiting to see what happens in the platform war before they commit to new media.

Who can blame them? Who in their right minds would want to dive into the middle of this muddy pond? There are CD-I, CDTV, CD-ROM for Mac, DOS, Unix and Windows; CD-ROM XA for Mac, DOS, Unix and Windows. There’s Sony’s new MMCD player, which is CD-ROM XA for DOS, but in order to play it in a DOS PC, there has to be a new screen driver included on the disc. There’s Tandy’s VIS system, which uses Windows as a development tool and operating system, but today’s MPC discs have to be retrofitted to work with VIS. There’s Sony’s Sega CD system, and a similar CD-based Nintendo. Then there are the warring data formats for everything from digital video to digital audio, text, still images, you name it.

Since it’s safe to say that no one is going to come up with either a killer multimedia player or application in the next couple of years that will become a de facto standard, the only thing that makes sense is to settle on a foundation technology.

SONY’S MMCD GETS REAL CLOSE

Sony announced its portable CD-ROM player, the MMCD, in mid-September to a crowd of trade press, analysts and business reporters. Sony executives were a little miffed when we told the Associated Press we thought the company had to be crazy to think people would pay $1,000 for a portable multimedia CD player that couldn’t play anyone else’s multimedia discs. Despite protestations to the contrary, this is an important issue if for no other reason than people who buy products think it’s an important issue.

But Sony has done some things very right with the MMCD player. First of all, it is a CD-ROM XA player, which means that audio, text and graphical data can be pulled off the disc as part of a single data stream, unlike CD-ROM, which requires that each file be loaded into memory, then displayed.

Takashi Sugiyama, the product manager for the MMCD player, says Sony engineers in Tokyo invented the XA format in 1987 specifically for a future portable CD-ROM player. By eliminating the need to load files into memory, they also eliminated the need for expensive memory chips.

Other benefits are that XA is much faster than standard CD-ROM, and its audio quality is much higher. As a result, XA is being embraced by most CD-ROM developers.

The problem, still, is that XA discs are not universally compatible because of differences in operating systems and because most developers of CD products for computers load hulking megabytes of data onto hard disks that the VIS or MMCD, for example, don’t have. The MMCD discs can be played back using a DOS computer as long as the DOS machine has an XA-compatible drive and the title developer has included a screen driver for a PC monitor on the disc.

But MMCD compatibility with Macintosh discs, for example, would require a chip in the MMCD player that contained the Macintosh operating system. This is technically a no-brainer, but it requires cooperation by both Apple and Sony. How much would a chip like that cost, if Apple would even agree to such a thing? Excellent two-part question.

Then would it be worth it for Sony to stick one inside — along with chips for MPC and Unix and maybe even CD-I compatibility — and still bring the cost of the whole thing down below $500 to get the market moving? Of course we would think so, having seen the consumer electronics industry make even more radical moves than that in the past, but it doesn’t seem likely in the short term.

LOOKS GOOD, FEELS GOOD

Moving away from the sticky compatibility issue, the MMCD is a well-designed product that feels good, looks good and is intuitive to use — the antithesis of the ill-conceived DataDiscman that Sony is still trying to sell in the U.S. (and that does not conform to the XA format).

And somewhat surprisingly — since the display is not color, not backlit, nor is it particularly high resolution — graphics and text look pretty darn good on it, and rudimentary animation is okay too. It’s not a suitable medium for either digital video or a Voyager Expanded Book, for example, since the resolution is too low (and not color), but the basic types of titles that have been designed for it look just fine.

Most of them are designed for business users, which is another plus on Sony’s tally sheet. What most people in the multimedia world forget today is an axiom we first heard spoken at the first Digital World in 1990 by David Liddle (then of Metaphor and now of Interval Research) who claims that so far there’s been no consumer technology that was not first proven in the business market. (Television, and arguably radio, don’t fit this pattern.)

Two of the examples he cites are cars and 35mm cameras, both of which moved slowly out of the professional world into consumer products. It takes business users, he says, who actually need the productivity gains that certain products provide, to hammer out the bumps and help set the standards that allow a professional tool to move into the mass market.

They’re willing to put up with some of the more irritating inconsistencies to get the product’s benefit, and they do complain — thus helping vendors streamline products into useful configurations, which then move more gracefully into the consumer world. This sentiment was echoed by Andy Grove of Intel at Digital World this year.

To help get MMCD into businesses, Sony says it will be working with resellers and corporations such as Northern Telecom, tool makers such as Mammoth Micro Productions, and service bureaus to develop custom business applications.

And in tacit acknowledgment of the importance of the business market, Sony for the first time in its history is selling the MMCD player into three channels at once: consumer electronics, business and professional, and computer dealer sales channels.

THE ARTISTS WILL MAKE IT HAPPEN

It’s easy to pick apart why so much has gone wrong with interactive media to date. Even though some very clever, creative minds have delivered the technology, it always takes the artists to make something happen.

What’s exciting now is that artists and authors are starting to come out of the woodwork saying they have been waiting for technology to catch up with their vision.

One is Garry Hare of Fathom Pictures in Sausalito, CA, who’s been involved in interactive entertainment, especially film, for more than a decade. Another is Allee Willis, a Grammy-winning songwriter whose presentations at Digital World in June sparked a firestorm of support that has kept her working 20-hour days ever since (and no, she won’t tell us exactly what she’s doing).

In the publishing world, there’s author Eric Kraft, who has garnered a cult following for his books Herb ‘n’ Lorna, Reservations Recommended and most recently, Little Follies: The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy (so far), eight novellas published by Crown that were originally issued beginning in 1982. The fictional Peter Leroy is a character that has been plaguing Kraft in various ways since he was a sophomore at Harvard in 1962.

At the Apple Publishers Forum, Kraft admitted that Voyager’s Expanded Books Toolkit was what he’d been waiting for to make Peter Leroy’s stories work the way he’d always wanted them to.

He’d always written and published Peter’s story in pieces, and he and his readers think it seems to work best that way. “It’s a work in many parts. It’s a work with many parts,” he says. “The parts are distinct but they all work together.”

In 1975, he wrote a manifesto for this kind of “interconnected fiction,” as he calls it, titled “Large and Unsolicited Fiction.” If a reader of Little Follies wants to know how a character became fond of onion sandwiches, the answer is in Herb ‘n’ Lorna, and of course can be reached by clicking on it. He also plans a “front door” and a “back door” to the work, possibly with a kind of navigational map by a third (fictional, perhaps) person for the front door, and an annotated “hyperindex.”

Kraft started programming computers in 1987, first with an Apple II, then with a Macintosh and HyperCard. That’s when he discovered that tools existed to create the world he’d imagined for Peter Leroy.

He’s written a rather lengthy explanation of the project, called “What I’m Up To,” and is obviously quite delighted that he can finally manifest what’s been in his head all these years.

Similarly, Todd Rundgren — a highly regarded rock musician, songwriter, producer and digital video producer — recently announced plans to release the first “interactive album,” where listeners will actually be able to create their own music from pieces he’s provided them. They can also listen to “Todd’s Mix” just like a linear recording, but they can also pick, choose, recombine and listen to the same thing over and over again.

Millions of possibilities. “Everything I do now goes into a musical database,” he says. “Music is recorded and formatted in a particular way to make it assemble-able into extemporaneous versions of the record. There are millions of possible compositions.”

The rules for creating the database, he says, are to be aware of places where music is “glued together” and help that process along — especially in lyrics and singing. In addition, lyrics cannot be interdependent. You can’t tell a long elaborate story, or at least not in the same way.

“It’s more like interactive books where it says, ‘If you think this should happen, go to page 22; if it’s this, page 187′,” he says. “A story for that book form has to be written in a certain way, the same way that music has to be recorded in a certain way.”

Rundgren chose CD-I as the first platform for the interactive album because “there’s not another platform that has a standard for near-CD quality sound,” he says, though that’s certain to change.

Rundgren says he definitely plans to do more interactive albums. A long-time producer and nurturer of other talents — he’s been key to the careers of many excellent artists over the years — Rundgren says he’s talking to others who might be interested in trying the new genre as well.

Though CD-I players hook up to a TV set, Rundgren says there are no visuals connected with the interactive album except for on-screen menus — an interesting approach in the MTV age. “One of the things I’ve done is eliminated graphics from the equation,” he says. “It’s interactive music, not interactive graphics. All of the space and bandwidth will be used up with music.”

WHAT WILL HAPPEN WHILE IT’S ALL HAPPENING?

One of the most exciting things about the work that both Kraft and Rundgren are doing is that they have obviously considered that people will want to use their works over and over again.

This, to date, doesn’t seem to have been a big priority for consumer multimedia products. In fact, field reports reveal something quite scary — that these enthusiasts, these mad and endearing pioneers upon which vendors are relying to drive interactivity into the mainstream — are actually returning titles to retailers, saying they aren’t good enough to warrant the cost.

“Consumers know the ‘I’ word means you’re supposed to be able to use it more than once,” says Fathom’s Garry Hare. Apparently reusability is not a feature that many CD-based titles other than reference works (and sometimes, not even these) can boast. Perhaps the truism that “software drives the market,” which has been bandied about since multimedia titles were first agleam in a developer’s eye, is a bit disingenuous in the present state of the industry.

So suffice it to say that at this point, interactive media is equal parts promise and ignorance on the part of nearly all concerned — a perfect recipe for the chaos we’re seeing throughout the industry to date.

There is a way to make chaos work. As students of metaphysics know, confusion is one of the highest forms of consciousness — it is a mental petri dish in which solutions and ideas can grow.

To best channel today’s confusion, companies interested in new media must focus their efforts toward providing a safe place for confusion to live. They must have standards of behavior and parameters that allow the largest number of people — artists, vendors, publishers, rights holders, developers — to profit, both literally and figuratively, from the future as it presents itself.

Denise Caruso