Add a Soundtrack to Your Reading Experience with Booktrack →
Meg Rayford viaTech Cocktail
Your favorite movies have their own unique soundtracks, and now your favorite books can, too. Founded by Paul Cameron, Booktrack is a startup that is changing reading – and the publishing industry – forever.
Booktrack creates synchronized soundtracks for ebooks to enhance the reader’s imagination and engagement. Combining music, sound effects and ambient sound, Booktrack’s technology automatically paces itself to an individual’s reading speed.
I mentioned the idea of a ‘booktrack’ to some friends last night, and it elicited a surprisingly heated response from several, who seemed almost angry at the audacity of those that would ordain what music should accompany the reading of a book. But, I wondered, don’t you accept the idea that there is a soundtrack in a movie? But my friends went on grumbling, even after agreeing that there was a certain authoritarianism in a movie soundtrack as well, but they maintained that book reading was a soliltary activity, and a s a result, no one should get in between the words and your mind.
Wow. I have a feeling this may not catch on with everyone.
This reminds me of websites with music— 99% of the time, I navigate away or turn the distracting music off. If I want music while I’m reading, I’ll select it myself, end of story, especially since I doubt anyone will really be able to correctly determine the right speed to play soundtracks at while their readers are reading. Movie soundtracks work because everyone watches a movie at the same pace; you can’t say the same for ebooks. And you have to wonder how it would handle skipping back and forth for information.
That said, I’m kind of surprised how much this idea annoys me. I know I would rage if I ever found a book that made me have it on, and I’d definitely turn it off by default if I could.
Well.
Resurrecting this, hopefully as the cooler, calmer me, half because I truly love the flow of this place, and half because for once I actually got my name locked down on here.
n+1: The Intellectual Situation →
I don’t really agree with this article, but it’s interesting, especially the parts about advertising and video games (as regarding art and participation)
it’s definitely got some interesting stuff in it, if drowned out by the overdramatized hand-wringing on the part of the author.
I mean, seriously, get a load of this quote:
Today we Google ourselves to see what the world knows about us; tomorrow we’ll just watch the ads. The outlines of this can already be discerned in Gmail’s sometimes tactless data mining of your emails: write a friend that your cat has died and you learn, cruelly, of discounts on litter.
On one hand, it is true that ad personalization will get “better” (more tied to knowledge the advertisers have gleaned about you). However, this sort of mirror-record is not the same as the one Google assembles. Ads are personalized to the viewer in a way that the Google results for the viewer’s name really are not, not even with the experimental changes Google is making re: search personalization. Google results are public; the kind of ads shown to a specific individual in the hyper-customized future are not. Put simply, what the author says here makes no goddamn sense if you think about it for just a second.
This is where Tumblr comes in. It’s the future of social networking if your image of the future features intelligent discourse. I love reading other Tumblr users replies, because they’re thoughtful by virtue of the fact that if they’re not, they’ll bring the intellectual property value of their own blog down, and that’s a commodity on Tumblr.
John Mayer: Twitter Isn’t “Over”, I’m Over It.
After three years at this, I can’t begin to describe the feeling of having this philosophy — the reason Tumblr will never feature a legacy comment system — described so perfectly.
I love you, John.
(via david)
Huh, so THIS is the rationale behind it. I see…
(via charmian)
I can’t help but reblog and lol at john fucking mayer deigning to be profound about twitter participation. Wevs dude.
That said, while I respect the philosophy behind having no from-the-ground support for comments, I also can’t help but see that as why big discussions are so unwieldy to follow on tumblr. If a post has been quoted more than twice, it is like pulling teeth to find the original source, so I often just skim over anything that looks that involved. I also don’t like how reblogged quotes end up looking (I know you can change the look, but the default is ugly and is what people tend to use). Overall, blogging and replying to people on tumblr is way too cumbersome for me, so I just read my dashboard and move on these days.
More details about the Apple Ipad's 3G options →
For all the misgivings I have about the iPad, I keep coming back to the fact that it has prepaid, sensibly priced 3G. WANT.
Apple updates the iBooks page →
Interesting that VoiceOver will work in the iBooks app. I wonder if this is something Apple negotiated with the participating publishers, or if it is a feature that will only work on free books or books without DRM.
Speaking of DRM, there doesn’t seem to be a mention of it at all. I guess we’ll have to wait till someone can actually review the device and settle that question once and for all.
Same Sex Marriage becomes legal in Washington →
Some happy to take my mind off a crappy day.
Nearly everything about this article makes me want to chew on walls or, better still, on the author’s face. As I read, I am just thinking no, no, no, no you bloody well don’t.
The byline alone makes me want to hit someone. “It is becoming both easier and more difficult to experience the thrill of being an outsider”, the article says, confidingly, as if I should understand.
Okay, I’m not stupid. I know I’m not the audience here. The audience for this article is privileged white people who occasionally condescend to bless the natives of India, Thailand, Kenya or Argentina with their presence and their foreign money.
That phrase alone, “foreign money”, means so much to me: pale hands, crisp money. Good money. Lots of it. It pays for this idiot of a man to gallivant around the world being strange and feeling thrilled at his strangeness, at the novelty of it. To seriously say that it is easier to be a foreigner in African countries because there are people there that have never seen a different face.
I know what he means by a “different” face. He means himself. And I want to laugh, honestly; does he imagine that white people are not shown on TV in Namibia? And I want to cry, because he means to dine on the shock of someone marvelling at the paleness of his skin. This is what happens when you are privileged: the everyday reality of others is your delicacy, to be cultivated, to be savoured.
I want to say something to this man. I want to sit him down and slap him in the face and say, get the fuck over yourself. You are not foreign. You will never be foreign anywhere. No matter how “different” you feel, there is a sizeable chance that everyone you meet has seen someone white like you, on the TV, in a crowd, from a distance. This is what your heritage has gifted you, you fool.
In America, I am foreign. My hands are brown. I come from somewhere with just as many factions and divisions as exist here, only compressed into a smaller land mass, then magnified by the lack of resources. In Lagos, I am foreign, if also familiar. There are a lot of Igbo people living in Lagos, Igbo people just like me, with their actual homeland a couple hours away. They are foreign, as am I; I was raised never to forget that Lagos is on Yoruba land, and I never will. Not because it is history, not because it is a truth, but because there are still people who would rather give the jobs they have control over to people from the same tribe, the same township.
And of course, when I come here, the only reason people don’t ask me where I’m ‘from’ on first seeing me is because Africans that look like me were enslaved here for years. This is the comfort my skin color buys me; let me assure you that it does not buy much else.
