INTERVIEW:
Question 1
How did you develop an interest in electronic publishing, and in particular in CD ROMs?
Answer
I started about 17 or 18 years ago because I came from a publishing world that was very
excited about the possibility of authors being able to express themselves using not just
text and pictures but also audio and video and to mix those altogether, the audio and the
video. What interests me is that with a book you have to rely on words to express
everything. But if you want to show something that takes place over time, for example how
an aeroplane flies, or if you want to talk about a piece of music it is very difficult in
words alone. So if you could add motion pictures and sound it would make a book much more
powerful in many ways.
Question 2
So what do you think are the important characteristics that a good CD ROM should have?
Answer
There are many different kinds of CD ROMs and there are many different kinds of books. For
example, the good characteristics of a cookbook are different from the good
characteristics of a novel. The most important thing in any medium is to respect the
reader. The author has to develop something which has an intrinsic understanding of how
the reader will move through the material and allow the reader as much freedom to move
through the material in ways that correspond to the interests of that reader.
Authors have always understood that their work requires a reader in order to be
completed; the reading of any work, whether a book or a movie, is different because the
mind of the reader or of the viewer comes into play. I think that all good authors
understand that and they must take that into account either consciously or subconsciously.
Question 3
In your work, have you studied hypertext in literature? What new things do you think you
have come up?
Answer
For me the most interesting thing about putting literature onto a computer is not so much
the possibility of hypertext, of jumping from one place to another and linking, but the
possibility of letting the reader navigate through the material in unusual ways. For
example, I remember the very first non-fiction book I read on-line was a book about what's
happening to women in the 1980s in the United States. I started reading the book and I
wondered what she had to say about a particular person and I did a search for that, and
suddenly I was reading and following her train of thought about that person in a way that
I never could have done with a regular book. Or, for example, I was reading a mystery book
once and I got to page 300 and it mentioned a character I hadn't seen for 100 pages and I
was interested in that character, so I did a search for that character in the book and
went right back to the first place he was mentioned, and I could follow the clues better.
I think that learning to navigate inside of a book by using the ability to search is very,
very interesting and for many readers makes you a more active reader. You can get more
engaged with the content. So one of the main interests for me is in making the material,
the content, more accessible to the reader in new ways.
Question 4
In your article you talk about the analogue book and the digital book. What is the
difference?
Answer
What I was saying in that article was that people keep talking about digital books but
nobody ever talks about what an analogue book is. What is interesting is that people don't
necessarily go to the trouble of really thinking about what a book is or what the essence
of a book is. For me a book is really the first successful interactive medium in the sense
that the author has written something that gets frozen on the page. But then the reader is
free to read the paragraph ten times till she understands it or free to skip forward ten
pages or backward ten pages. A book is the one medium where the reader is in complete
control of the sequence in which they access the content and the pace in which they do it.
It's completely different from a movie where you just sit in a chair and have it happen to
you for two hours. With a book the use is much more in control. So I started calling books
interactive in that sense.
Question 5
Do you think that in the future we will have an interactive films?
Answer
I don't know. I think that people love stories and I'm confident that we will have films
which are layered, where you're watching a film that has a storyline and you have an idea
about one of the characters and you go off on a tangent to go look at the character's
history and then come back to the storyline. So layers are available above and below the
linear structure. Whether or not you'll have truly interactive stories where the reader
can change the outcome or whether that will be a satisfactory medium I don't know. Right
now I think we have many, many years of experimentation to do to get close to something
satisfactory.
Question 6
Internet, CD ROMs, and books. Is there a difference between these tools?
Answer
What I like to do with each medium is to try and understand what it is especially good
for. Books are great if all you're dealing with are texts and pictures, but if you want
audio and video you're got to have something that is electronic. And CD ROMs work quite
well for that. The Internet right now seems to be particularly useful if you want to
browse a tremendously large amount of material. It is like a gigantic library and
tremendously valuable in that sense. On the other hand, the material that we got was
poorly organised, wasn't graphically very attractive, it didn't have the beautiful
aesthetics that you are able to have with a book or a CD ROM. So I think there's a
trade-off in each medium and you have to learn for each one what its essential nature is
and what it is especially good at.
Question 7
Do you think that the contents on the Internet should be controlled?
Answer
I think that you will continuously see the development of filters, where if I trust you as
an editor, I might go onto the Internet and seek things that you had said make sense for
me to look at. Perhaps you will begin to trust your newspaper as your filter to the
Internet. So I think we'll see professional filters and agents develop that will help us
understand what's good and what's bad information on the Internet. However, I hate
censorship everywhere.
Question 8
What is the new tool that you are presenting with Night Kitchen?
Answer
We are trying to make tools that make it possible to assemble complex multimedia documents
without a programmer. Right now for many projects the central figure in the project is the
programmer, which is wrong. The central figure should be the author and the editor. Also
there are a lot of people - high school teachers, college professors - who would like to
make multimedia but who don't have the tools to do it. We're trying to give them tools
where they can make things that are both beautiful and also functional without
programmers; and that's really the goal of Night Kitchen.
Question 9
I imagine that you as a publisher give great importance to instruction. What do
you think will be the role of multimedia in the sector of instruction?
Answer
I think that multimedia has the ability to engage people in learning more successfully
than books, let's say, because multimedia programs can be organised in such a way that
somebody who is learning is able to follow their own path through the material, and
whatever can be self-motivated in learning is always more successful. There's also the
possibility with multimedia of making simulations and making it necessary for the learner
to test out their learning in a way that they get feedback which they would never get from
a book. So it can be a very powerful learning tool, but I think we have a lot to learn
about how to organise material so that it is optimised for learning.
Question 10
Do you think that with multimedia you can also have a new artistic language?
Answer
I think we have artists who are increasingly taking up the challenge of creating things in
the new technologies, but it is extremely difficult to learn a new vocabulary of artistic
expression. I think it will take some time before we see important classic works developed
in this medium.
Question 11
Someone who buys a book has a physical relation with the material he is buying. When you
buy a CD ROM, it's different. What do you think about this aspect?
Answer
The sensual relationship you have with the object is wonderful with a book, that
kinaesthetic feedback you always get from holding it in your hand. You're going to lose
that with electronic media, and that's too bad. In many cases, however, the increased
facility of searching, browsing, navigating, makes up for the loss of the physical
connection.
Question 12
What do you think about virtual communities?
Answer
I wish right now there were more emphasis on real communities.
Question 13
What do you think will be the future of CD ROMs, because people are speaking more and more
about DVD for computer?
Answer
I think the real question is fixed media versus the Internet, because CD ROM and DVD are
really just different forms of the same thing. DVD-ROM is just a bigger CD ROM. I think
there's a future for fixed media. I think that for a long time people will want to own an
object to put up on their shelf. Even if it's a CD ROM and not as beautiful as a book,
they're still going to want to put it up in the box on their shelf. Not only for the
furniture factor, as I can call it, but also because sometimes what's on a CD ROM or on a
DVD-ROM could take twenty or thirty hours to go through and it's not practical to have
something that's that deep on the Internet and to access it for thirty hours on the
Internet.
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