Despite the oddly we-love-you-but-we-don’t-respect-you tone towards designers and our button-making, there’s some frankness here. In order to make really great lit/book/narrative storytelling thingamajawn apps, we need a new type of writer.
No more Word documents would be a nice start.
But I do wonder about the costs for this. An obvious place to start making a book more than words is visuals, a story told in pictures and words, and I’ve had so many ordinary art book projects sunk over photo rights costs. What’s free on the internet costs hundreds of dollars in a book. Is it the same for a new narrative forms? Or, will it seem free at the beginning when it is cool and new and people are willing to donate their rights? And then, get costly and gummed up as soon as the new narrative forms replace the books and/or become profitable? I am all for copyright law, and people getting paid for their work, but sometimes it does seem perverse.
Or am I just too much of a Word doc person to understand where this new extra-book content will be coming from?
