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Weblog:   Repeated Misconceptions About eBooks
Subject:   Repeated Misconceptions About Storytelling
Date:   2002-07-07 07:49:31
From:   pnh
I couldn't agree more with this column, save for one sentence which I think is disastrously wrong:


"...computer games, like the novel, are a delivery vehicle for certain types of storytelling."


This is true in about one and a half ways, and wrong in about a hundred. Like the statement that "modern dance, like bicycling, is a delivery vehicle for certain kinds of exercise," it gets at a trivial truth by ignoring everything important about computer games and novels, or ballet and bicycles. It's a reductionist view in which a commodity called "storytelling" is more or less the same whatever its "delivery vehicle."


This is the way the worst kind of Hollywood executives talk about stories and storytelling, and it's startling to hear someone as levelheaded as Tim O'Reilly lapse (albeit briefly) into it. Certainly, there are resemblances between computer games and novels, and it's interesting to discuss the ways they sometimes meet some of the same human desires and needs. But, Hollywood to the contrary, "storytelling" isn't some kind of unprocessed ore that can be strip-mined from one medium and poured intact into another. Novels and computer games are more than shells for "storytelling," and we can't talk about them and make sense if we adopt the commodifiers' reductionist and inaccurate model of what's going on.
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  • Tim O'Reilly photo Repeated Misconceptions About Storytelling
    2002-07-08 22:38:38  Tim O'Reilly | O'Reilly AuthorO'Reilly Blogger [Reply | View]

    Whoa! You're reading a lot into that one line that I didn't put there. I certainly agree that a stroy can't be "strip mined from one medium and poured intact into another." And in fact, you'll note that at the end of the piece I explicitly make the point that the form of the eBook will evolve, just as movies evolved from simple transfers of stage plays to film.

    My argument was rather that in an economic sense, you have to look at goods that are substituted for each other by consumers. And when you look in this market-driven sense (which of course was the context of the original article), you have to look at what is actually being replaced by an "eBook" -- is it the physical book, or the function of the book? And if the function of the book is the focus, then defining an "eBook" as something that closely resembles the physical book may lead you to miss the larger market that is developing.

    I maintain that books are not being replaced by eBooks, per se, but by online information delivered in other forms. For example, MapQuest is now likely the most widely used road atlas in America, and Google the most widely used encyclopedia. And of course, technical publishers know that we compete not just with each other but with online sites. The biggest competition for Java in a Nutshell is java.sun.com, not a book from another publisher; the biggest competitor for any publisher of books on Windows programming is MSDN, the Microsoft Developer Network. (And of course, that's why we're building Safari as an online service rather than an "eBook" per se. We're modeling ourselves on services that have already proven successful in the new medium. For all its flaws, MSDN generates more revenue than all the highly touted eBook initiatives put together.)

    While I will agree that the differences between a work of imaginative fiction and a computer game are probably greater than the differences between a computer book and a technical information web site, the parallels are instructive. It's no accident that people like Tom Clancy and George Lucas, each coming from a different storytelling medium, now simultaneously realize their stories in print, in film, and in computer games.

    Ultimately, I think we're in violent agreement. My complaint about the original article is that it assumes that the goal of eBooks is simply to reproduce in electronic form the features of the book, when in fact, it should be to discover the features that can better be delivered online, and thus lead us to new ways of communicating our knowledge and ideas.

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