Bookworms: Dying out??

I've been what's commonly referred to as a "bookworm" since I was about 3.  

But I've never seen a real one :-)  I've enjoyed imagining what they look like though.

It's a lovely term for an avid and passionate reader. I've almost missed flights as I've had my nose stuck in a compelling book. I've lost sleep over books, elastic promises of "just one more chapter before I turn off the light". I've missed my station or bus stop because a story has been so compelling I've been lost to the real world around me.

Somehow reading then ended up being a large part of what I do for work. Yet like most people, most of what I read these days is on a screen. Big screen, small screen, in-between sized screen. I fret that bookworm is a term threatened by the onward march of technology. Up there with cassette as a term that generations below will wrinkle their brows and look puzzled over. Worms in tech terms fill me with fear and dread of the blue screen of death.

Yet for all my digital immigrant book nostalgia I welcome the ways that technology can amplify and add depth to narrative, making it compelling in new ways.  Stories exist in so many forms. Stories swapped over coffee or a beer amongst friends, choose your own adventure stories - in paper or game format, stories translated into videos and pictures, stories reviewed and recommended in new ways and by new people.  Multi-player / media online games are just another way people share and interact in or with stories.

My two recent favourites (back to wearing my work hat) are:

1) the Touching Stories App on the iPad - choose your own ending multi-media adventure & very funny in places. Just nice to see touch being explored as an interface.

2) The Tipp-Ex YouTube takeover / commercial from a few weeks back that gave you the ability to interact and be playful or silly and also dictate your own ending. I particularly liked that for the retro product using new channels.

You could then throw in good ole' Huck Finn which I've been reading on my iTouch for a while now. Old story, new distribution platform. New preferences of when and why I choose to engage with them. I'm also looking forward to having a play with the Story Patch app later. It's designed for kids but I'm imagining it will be like me learning to use Keynote (Mac Powerpoint equivalent) on the iPad -writing presentations when you are much more reliant on tactile manipulation makes you think about how you convey the key point in different ways. Challenge is good sometimes.

Smartphone, tablet, laptop, hardback, paperback - I just now have a whole series of reading choices in my repertoire. Some I'll learn to have different expectations of over time. I'm now a repertoire reader in more senses than one. It used to be just having a few different books on the go at once, maybe one in several languages for pleasure and a business related one for inspiration or challenge. Now it's about what I'm reading on what device. No doubt before long I'll be keeping it all in the cloud not locally and just pulling it down on whichever device is to hand.   

I'm not sure if I'll become known as a content-craving consumer or a starving scanner or by some other nomenclature in the future but I'm pretty sure that it won't have the charm of identifying myself as a bookworm. I'm also sure the world won't stop wanting to swap stories.  So here's a nice video from the IDEO gang on how they see the future of books... I think they just misjudged the title - it's the future of storytelling and information sharing.  Books are merely a specific format.


The Future of the Book. from IDEO on Vimeo.

It seems to be timecapsule project week...

Only two days ago I was writing about the One Day on Earth project, and then yesterday I trip over Google/YouTube's equivalent project, "Life in a day", the premis being almost identical - people contribute footage of their lives, the interesting, the mundane, the fleeting, the ugly, the beautiful, it doesn't matter as long as it happens on a given day, in this case,  the 24th July 2010. The trump card for this project is not the noble  "doing good / charity" angle of One Day on Earth but the rather more shallow Gen Y-appealing celebrity & fame perspective, as the submissions will be edited by Ridley Scott (and a large team of helpers me thinks) & debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2011.



The life in a day  project  is "made possible by LG" the electronics firm, so we'll give marks to LG for buying big thinking and the power of harnessing and focussing collaboration and content production. We won't give them any marks though for having a really rubbish LG.com site with a lousy flash-y country selector that I had to alter the size of my browser for to even find the United Kingdom from the drop down list of European countries, and then it didn't click through anyway. FAIL!  LG= Life's Good. Not on your website it's not, I can only hope your products deliver the promise rather better.

Whilst I'm on the LG theme though, they also recently announced that they'd be launching a tablet device this year based on the Android operating system.

The future's touchy feely :-)

I'm a sucker for a good story

Who isn't? That's why we love spending time with friends telling and listening to them, money on going to the cinema or renting films to watch from the comfort of our sofas, and some of us even still read books.
Heavens!

Usual Fiona Fail for not seeing this utterly brilliant TV ad for John Lewis (a UK Department Store that's so much part of the fabric of middle English society, goodness knows what would happen if they ever disappeared).  But  thank goodness for the interweb and the fact that it's online as I think I've had to watch it twice a day since I came across it a few days ago. It pulls heart strings, teases the emotions and generally leaves you with a smile on your face.  A very John Lewis genteel delight. Truly charming.

The accompanying soundtrack version of "she's always a woman" is back in the charts and getting lots of radio air play too. Music is a brilliant anchor, and now each time I hear it I'm back to that story & John Lewis.  Ownable memory anchors are the pillars of storytelling :-)

Nice that it manages oh so subtly to get all the product plugs in without you really even noticing: they cover nursery furniture, garden furniture, kitchen appliances, sofas, kitchen equipment, tableware, kids clothes,  mens clothes, ladies clothes, casual clothes, maternity clothes, work clothes.... , not to mention a fair few super-subtle references to their supermarket arm (Waitrose) for yummy birthday cakes, entertainment catering services and I could go on....  Lots of cues that re-inforce what every John Lewis and Waitrose shopper already knows and makes you feel great about shopping there. 



Simple. Fabulous.

Oh go on, express yourself. Kleenex get Sir Bob & Sven to let it out...

Thanks to my lovely colleague Lucia, I've just found this new Kleenex tissue ad, which is well worth a minute of your time.  I love the emotion, I love the story telling, I love the fact that whilst everyone else in the tissue category is focussed on anti-bacterials and Catch It, Kill it, Bin It and hand hygiene messaging (admittedly all important given the amount of sneezing going on on the tube in the morning but....), Kleenex via JWT have expanded the remit to all those other times when tissues come in handy.