The Future of Transmedia Publishing: An Interview with Erin Lale, Publisher of Time Yarns

Erin Lale is the publisher and editor of Time Yarns (https://sites.google.com/site/timeyarns/home), a small press specializing in science fiction. Lale says, “As a transmedia publisher, there are technological limitations to what I can do with ebooks, limitations that don’t make sense because the technology to overcome these limits already exists.”

The Punch series, a seven ebook series published in 2011, was designed as a transmedia experience, with pictures, sound, and video illustrating the story. The Time Yarns multi-author anthologies to be published in 2012 include art as well as short stories.

Lale says, “My biggest technological limitation with transmedia publishing is the memory limitations of ebook platforms. Eventually, authors should be able to embed as much video, pictures, graphics, music, animation, and hyperlinks in a book as you see on websites like Facebook. But ebook platforms are not there yet. It’s not just the devices, with their inherent limits as physical objects on memory storage and battery life. Smashwords makes books available in the Nook format in the same full versions that Amazon does, but the PubIt! System, which is the publishing platform of the Nook’s parent business, Barnes & Noble, limits file sizes for book content and for the “cover” art to a far greater extent than Amazon or Smashwords does. When I published my art and poetry chapbook, Renaissance Woman, which is stuffed full of pictures, I actually had to create a stripped-down version for the Barnes & Noble site, with much less art, to fit within the PubIt! system’s file size limits. Some of my books have different cover art on the Barnes & Noble site than everywhere else on the net because the PubIt! system has such a narrow range of acceptable file sizes and pixel lengths and widths. The Nook device itself is not the issue; Nook readers can download the full version from smashwords, which carries many different formats. It is frustrating to have to have different versions of my book in circulation, but I can’t just ignore the Barnes & Noble site; it’s huge, second only to Amazon as a source for ebooks. So I have to be on it. The Nook device has a color version, so it would theoretically be a better device to read an art book on, because it can show color pictures. The platform really needs to improve to enable the full potential of the device.”

Lale says the experience of publishing the art and poetry book affected her decisions about how to publish the Punch series. “Punch is intended to be a transmedia experience, and I’m cramming as many pictures in the Punch books as I can without tripping up on the PubIt! memory limits, because I really want to have Punch be the same across all platforms, so I have to design to the most limiting one. There are two major decisions about Punch that I’ve made because of the memory limits. Firstly, when I put in a video, I don’t embed it into the text, I put in a hyperlink. This is not how I’d prefer to have it, but embedding long videos runs headlong into the memory limits. Even Amazon has memory limits, though, they are just bigger than PubIt!’s. The most important decision the memory limits have caused is that I’m publishing Punch as a serial, in a total of 7 books. I could not possibly fit all the transmedia elements I want into Punch if I published it all in one file. I’d hit the limits so hard that if I tried to publish Punch as all one book, I’d have to take almost everything else out except the actual text of the book. And that would be just like a print edition except on your phone. eBooks should be better than print books; they have the capability of blurring the lines between what’s a book and what’s a film, music video, or graphic novel. eBooks should be giving us more, just like DVD Extras give us more than just the film.”

Lale prognosticates, “I predict that in the future, ebook platforms will accommodate huge files and ebooks will really come into their own as full transmedia experiences. I predict that in the future, if you watch a Marvel movie on your phone, you will be able to hover over a character like you do on Facebook to see tags, and a hyperlink will appear to take you to that character’s comic book. I predict that in the future, if you’re reading a book and a character mentions a song, even if the author didn’t put a link or embedded sound in the book you’ll still be able to click on the song and hear it play. I predict that in the future, content will be king; books, films, animation, music, games, and manga will all be supported on the same internet platform, and we will cease to call ourselves writers, musicians, filmmakers, and game designers, and everyone will be a transmedia artist. Internet and TV are already on their way to becoming fully integrated, with streaming video, broadcast TV news shows reading comments on the air from the show’s website forum, radio shows with integral chatrooms where listeners can ask questions of the show’s on-air guests live, and of course screen technology has finally progressed to the point where we can really watch TV and use a computer with the same screen, which the computer industry talked about for decades before the technology really got there.”

According to Lale, the internet is a game-changer. “One of the biggest changes in publishing with the internet is that it’s cut out the traditional channels of distribution like major record labels and traditional book publishing houses and bricks-and-mortar bookstores, just like blogs and social networks are cutting out traditional news sources. There was a time when self-published authors had no way to get the attention of the public except by physically schlepping their books around to bookstores across the country for booksignings, small indie publishers bought expensive print ads, indie bands had to go on tour to get noticed, and indie filmmakers had to travel the film festival circuit, but today authors, musicians, and filmmakers can upload their work to the net and reach people in places they’ve never heard of.”

Lale was so frustrated by the technical limitations of current ebook platforms that she took her problem to open technology developer TeknoX (www.txgroup.org) in search of a solution. Lale says, “TeknoX is creating a platform for Transmedia publishing in which there are no limits to how much video, sound effects, animation, music, graphics, and pictures can be embedded in an ebook because of hyperlinks and little limitations on file size limits. TeknoX will create a platform for content providers like Time Yarns which will enable the next revolution in publishing.”