The Pickle: A Conversation About Making Digital Books
12: Territory of the Book
Yeah, there was plenty of weirdness that got lost along the way. But not really because it was too weird, more because it was only weird. Like that geometric menu Russell included, or various elaborate attempts at personalized serialization. A lot of these ideas were interesting or fun in themselves, but they didn’t always make sense within the project as a whole. We were constantly banging these elements up against others, like turning a puzzle piece this way and that way, or trying to arrange furniture in a room. Eventually you just have to accept: that’s a nice end-table, but… (I think I’ll end this metaphor before it gets even more strained).
Robin began this conversation by asking what makes The Pickle Index a book. We definitely thought we were making a book — does that count for anything? And I definitely consider The Silent History and The New World to be books, for whatever reason. To use an earlier definition, Pickle does have edges — slightly permeable edges, but they’re there. And it is made of sentences — at least mostly. Some of the stuff we’re excited about, though, are the ways the form allowed us to use non-textual elements as storytelling devices — for example, the way the interface itself can indirectly convey plot developments. (I phrased that for maximum dryness and incomprehensibility to avoid minor spoilers.) You could easily argue that those kinds of things are pushing it into non-book territory — or maybe the territory of the book is actually broader than we give it credit for? For as long as there have been books, haven’t those boundaries been nudged and nudged? Sometimes this is due to evolving technologies, but more often it’s just individual writers and artists fooling around and finding new ways to tell their stories.
And mostly I expect that’s how it’ll continue. I just wonder if there are structural forces — in technology or in publishing — that are implicitly impeding this process, or at least not helping.
Note to readers: This is (going to be) a long, loopy conversation. The Pickle Index is crisp and compact. Consider sampling its tangy delights.
- Opening Salvo [Robin Sloan]
- Blank Slates! [Craig Mod]
- Opportunity Cost [Robin Sloan]
- The Struggle (Sorry) [Russell Quinn]
- Self Selection & The Jaws of Venture Valley [Craig Mod]
- The Many Futures of Storytelling [Eli Horowitz]
- Recruitment [Robin Sloan]
- Blarp [Eli Horowitz]
- That Oracular Feeling [Robin Sloan]
- Benevolent Leaders of the Frothy Kingdom [Craig Mod]
- The Left-on-the-Floor Weirdness [Russell Quinn]
- ➡︎ Territory of the Book [Eli Horowitz]
- At This Moment [Robin Sloan]
- Make a Book, Even Just One [Craig Mod]
