The Pickle: A Conversation About Making Digital Books

13: At This Moment

I think one of the impedances Eli’s talking about is the lack of “critical infrastructure,” for lack of a nicer phrase, around app-books. There are sections and whole sites devoted to the discussion of new books, and sections and whole sites devoted to the review of new apps, but no sections or sites for new app-books/book-apps/pickle indices. As a result, such projects have to make their way in the world without the support of simple-but-powerful promotional mechanisms like year-end best-of lists, best seller rankings, and even genre awards, and, more subtly, without a corps of critics/reviewers. (Laura Miller and Maud Newton did take a swing at it in the early days of the iPad with their great blog The Chimerist, which I still miss.)

That’s all to say, conversations like this are, at this moment in the development of the medium, extremely useful — not just interesting (which this one was, very) but potentially productive and generative.

Note to readers: This is (going to be) a long, loopy conversation. The Pickle Index is crisp and compact. Consider sampling its tangy delights.

The Indexed Pickle

1. Opening Salvo [Robin Sloan]
2. Blank Slates! [Craig Mod]
3. Opportunity Cost [Robin Sloan]
4. The Struggle (Sorry) [Russell Quinn]
5. Self Selection & The Jaws of Venture Valley [Craig Mod]
6. The Many Futures of Storytelling [Eli Horowitz]
7. Recruitment [Robin Sloan]
8. Blarp [Eli Horowitz]
9. That Oracular Feeling [Robin Sloan]
10. Benevolent Leaders of the Frothy Kingdom [Craig Mod]
11. The Left-on-the-Floor Weirdness [Russell Quinn]
12. Territory of the Book [Eli Horowitz]
13. ➡ At This Moment [Robin Sloan]
14. Make a Book, Even Just One [Craig Mod]