- 16:39 - Fr., 13 Aug. 2010
Fünf Fragen an… Charles Stross
Der englische Science-Fiction-Autor Charles Stross (Accelerando, The Laundry-Serie) ist ein bekennender Gadget Freak. Um seine Leidenschaft etwas unter Kontrolle zu bringen, lautete sein Neujahrsvorsatz für 2010: “Keine Computer kaufen!”. Ein paar Schlupflöcher hat er sich allerdings gelassen, z.B. um das damals bereits angekündigte iPad nicht ignorieren zu müssen.
Seit Ende Mai hat er in seinem Blog, Charlie’s Diary, bereits mehrfach praxisnah über seine Erfahrungen mit dem neuen Gerät berichtet und es dabei vor allem von der Warte des Schriftstellers aus gesehen.
PADOLOGISCH: Obviously word processing is a primary use case for every writer owning an iPad. However, the out of the box options for serious writing are limited — which led you to some experiments with combinations of software and external keyboards. Have you come any closer to a satisfying solution in the last weeks?
Charlie Stross: Not yet. But that’s down to software release cycles. The next release of Documents-to-Go from DataViz should hopefully include full support for external keyboards. Meanwhile, it’s anybody’s guess when Apple will release an upgrade for Pages — which works fine with external keyboards, but doesn’t play nice with cloud-based storage solutions like DropBox or Google Docs, and omits some core word processing capabilities (such as a word count).
PADOLOGISCH: I’ve read about a user who soon perceived the mobility and the accessibility of the iPad as a strain, because moments of idleness — usually used for creative thinking — were increasingly rare. Is permanent availability of the working enviroment a blessing or a curse?
Charlie Stross: It depends who you are and how you work, unfortunately.
I find the iPad’s lack of multitasking to be paradoxically useful, because it lets me wall out distractions and focus on one task at a time. On the other hand, I’m not much of a gamer (my total gaming time on the machine is probably measured in minutes, despite having Plants v. Zombies and Civilization: Revolutions installed). Having to consciously block out my email or news-reading time is helpful — I can’t simply switch virtual desktops (a perpetual temptation on my Macbook, until I banished email and IM entirely to another machine).
In addition, given my lifestyle — self-employed writer — I don’t draw a hard line between work and personal life. I hope, however, that if I had a regular working-for-someone-else job and my boss tried to inflict an iPad on me I’d have the sense to fight them off. And ditto for the ubiquitous Blackberry.
PADOLOGISCH: I like your observation that, “[The iPad] is roughly where the Macintosh was in late 1984. Which is to say, a lot of people don’t get it, and think it’s a toy — and in truth, there’s a lot of stuff it doesn’t do properly yet. But it’s an astonishingly promising toy. And what it promises is an entirely new way of getting stuff done.” Are you surprised, that even tech-savvy people are sometimes quite resistant to paradigm shifts in technology?
Charlie Stross: Not in the slightest. People get invested in the current paradigm, and consequently shifting to a new model is extremely painful. Thomas Kuhn noted that paradigm shifts in the sciences usually involve the retirement or death through old age of the distinguished professors who are invested in the model being superseded. But these days we don’t have the time for that. Worse: we’re presented with purported paradigm shifts on a daily or weekly basis — how do you tell the real thing from the over-hyped marketing nonsense? Apple’s fans are, to some extent, guilty of over-hyping the product, and this makes bystanders suspicious.
PADOLOGISCH: What do you think about the iPad-exclusive release of a novel like A Singing Whale by Ryu Murakami? Is this a complementary path besides the traditional publishing industry that you might walk down?
Charlie Stross: I think, to borrow a phrase from Sir Humphrey Appleby, it’s “very daring”. Which is a polite way of saying: “After you! (In a couple of years, after due consideration …)”
I’ve been reading ebooks and watching the ebook scene since roughly 1997. And I believe there’s a lot of hype and nonsense (bordering on outright lies) coming from folks with a vested interest in pushing ebooks who hope to supplant the current publishing wholesale/retail supply chain as gatekeepers and rent-takers for the reading public.
Right now, ebook sales are around 2% of mass-market sales and perhaps 5-8% of hardcover sales. (I’ve been told, by the author, the sales figures for a recent Kindle Store bestseller; they were a bad joke, and the punch line is that the book in question went bestseller because it was being given away for free as a special promotion.)
This is not to say that ebooks aren’t building rapidly, and potentially offer a higher revenue return per unit shipped because they by-pass the conventional supply chain. However, contrary to public opinion, the production costs are barely any lower than the costs for paper books; paper is cheap, but the need for editing and proofreading and layout and marketing don’t go away just because you’re going online.
I believe that once everyone’s carrying a smartphone with a display at least as good as the iPhone 4’s retina display, then and only then ebooks will begin to eat seriously into the market share of the mass market paperback. It will take a generation to kill the MMPB, though, because there’s profound inertia among older folks who aren’t used to reading on a phone screen. And the high-quality hardcover will take an awful lot longer to die.
PADOLOGISCH: You said, the iPad doesn’t feel like a computer, more like a magic book, an ancestor to the Young Lady’s Primer in Neil Stephenson’s The Diamond Age. How do you like the idea of writing an interactive work — where text, moving pictures, music, online content form a greater whole and even the consumption device itself may become a story element?
Charlie Stross: Neal Stephenson, Greg Bear and others are doing it already, working with Subutai Corporation on The Mongoliad. So it’s definitely happening.
The problem for me is that I’m a writer. I’m not an artist, a film director, or a multimedia producer. To work on such a product implies collaboration and making compromises to the story line for compatibility with production constraints and the creative vision of the collaborators. If I wanted that I’d be scrabbling to get a Guild of Screenwriters card and move to Hollywood, or banging on Rock Star’s door. I write novels — not the world’s highest-paid job — because I enjoy the degree of creative autonomy it gives me.
Home Screen*
“Much of the time I use my iPad as an ebook reader: it’s a Kindle, but more importantly, it runs Stanza (the best reader for non-DRM’d ebooks I’ve yet found) and GoodReader (the killer app for reading PDFs). DropBox is a work hub for me, allowing me rapid online access to my work files. Currently for word processing I’m using Pages (despite all my gripes about it), and round-tripping files back to DropBox by way of an email-to-dropbox gateway service called Habilis. (When Documents to Go finally gets proper external keyboard support I’ll switch in a split second.) For web browsing I use Atomic Browser (tabs, basic ad blocking), and for RSS I use NetNewsWire, and for offline reading I’ve got Instapaper. I need to use my Evernote account more, but I’m not a big Getting-Things-Done methodology fan.”
* Ich möchte mein Fünf-Fragen-Format eigentlich nicht sprengen und außerdem wäre diese Frage bei allen Interview-Partnern gleich - daher führe ich diesen Extrablock ein, in dem die Befragten ihre aktuellen Lieblingsapps und Einsatzgebiete vorstellen können.
