Publishing and E-Publishing

Why Do We Have Such A Creative Explosion on Mobile and DLC?

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(I'm still thinking about DLC and mobile content as of late.  Blame my new Android.)

I sort through the DLC on my console and am amazed at what's there (and at times appalled, but mostly amazed).  I look through the online store on my smartphone and am overwhelmed with choices.  When it comes to books the content available to me, especially via eBooks is stunning.

It seems that, media, software, and gamewise we're in a kind of explosion of creativity and productivity.  There's just a huge amount of stuff everywhere – often good stuff – that we can download, play, read, or listen too.

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Manga, Middlemen and Migration of Power

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As we mentioned last week 37 Japanese publishers are working together on the J Manga Portal,  a joint portal site for North American anime fans this year.  A way to get titles, and of course news.

This is something Bonnie and I have been talking about for months: that Japanese companies and any manga company is best off going to the web and going electronic to both reach people faster, provide content, and to provide competition to scanilations.  After all if they don't want people scanilating, then they need to get stuff out fast and cheap (or free).

However this goes beyond my predictions – it's a gigantic group effort by a large number of companies, some of whom I'm quite sure don't necessarily like each other.  This isn't one company here or one company there, this is basically major representatives of an entire industry making a universal shared content and news portal.  This is huge.

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Media Size and The Changing Media Environment

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(Last week I posted to a link on an article about rejected SF and Fantasy novels, and one of our regulars noted that Dune had been rejected for length at one point – and then noted how some series and books seem to be overlong.  That got me thinking and this column is the result).

What is the ideal length of a book?  A series?  A TV episode?  A movie?  A movie series?

You have an idea in mind.  Publishers, TV executives, authors, and everyone has an idea in mind.  I daresay you could, with little prompting start quite a conversation – or argument – about the ideal length/duration of any form of media.  We all have ideas about such things, some held quite passionately.

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