How J.J. Abrams Created a Reading Experience Unlike Any Other
ceros.com
ceros.com
They had one job: convey the story of how "J.J abrams created a reading experience unlike any other"? They failed, because I got motion sick and just closed the browser. I would rather read this through some other website when it resurfaces.
These hipster UIs for the sake of themselves need to stop. I thought this was only trendy for a year when NYTimes did it and died off, but apparently some are still doing it.
It seems to me that that wasn't actually their job; that their job really was: Convince marketers that they are doing a good job of conveying the story of how J.J. Abrams created...
Ceros is "Interactive Content Marketing Software." Whether or not they actually do a good job of marketing "S." is irrelevant; they just need to convince would-be marketers that Ceros did a good job of marketing "S.", and that the marketers should pay for a similar treatment of their own product.
When convincing someone that you are doing something well, it helps to actually do it well, but it isn't a prerequisite.
Wired does an OK job: https://www.wired.com/2013/11/j-j-abrams-s-book-review/
I like gimmicks like that in books when it's executed well. I think I'll try ordering it.
Among the pages are cards and other items that the two fictional readers shared or saved.
(Also, thinking this would make a nice parent for my father, but the German edition was a limited run; $130 used, $180 new, jeez.)
S. has some of this too (the handwriting in the columns takes time to make out), but because the quality of narrative and the overall refinement of the product were so high, I didn't mind. Given a choice between the two books, I'd certainly start with this one.
If so, that's funny - that's one of my favorite parts of the book, and something I refer to often when talking about the book. The reason I like it so much is that it's at a very tense/dangerous moment, and normally in those situations it's impossible to actually read the content in exactly the order written - instead, my eyes will saccade forward and give my little subconscious "hints" at how the tension is resolved.
By placing only a few words per page (by the end, just one word per page), House of Leaves kept me in a state of fairly breathless anticipation for the whole time I was reading that part. Danielewski managed to get a film-like control over the pacing, which I thought was brilliant.
I haven't yet read S, I'll give it a try.
S. is a fun conversation piece, but… it's not a great book. The "base" book is amusing enough, mostly as an exercise in the sort of adventure novel that peaked with Heart of Darkness and mid-century magical realism vis a vis Borges. The metafictional in-the-margins story is just a mess.
While cramming stuff into multiple-page-long footnotes and footnotes with footnotes felt a bit gimmicky at first, a few experiences stand out:
1. getting so drawn into a long footnote that I forgot it was a footnote. The confusion upon getting back to the main story felt right for that point in the story (or the book in general) 2. a large number of footnotes that were mildly interesting at first and turned out to be hugely valuable later on (but not crucial to enjoying the book). 3. footnotes that were funny precisely because they were footnotes and somewhat self-aware of it.
If you like Wallace' essays or the themes he kept going back to (depression, self-analysis, addiction, irony, media), I can highly recommend going through the effort of reading the book. It took me multiple tries over a period of maybe a decade to finally finish. Once I got past 200 pages it became difficult to put the (massive) book down and now, weeks later, I'm still thinking about it regularly. Few books have had that effect on me.
Funny, and semantics breaking.
How could we write a title that just said 'the book is really good' and still felt compelling?
Edit: if the site doesn't link for you, go to Amazon and search for Ship of Theseus. That's the book the article is about.
To my knowledge, the "meta book" is named "S". That's the name on the book cover. OTOH, inside the cover is "Ship of Theseus" which is the made-up book that the made-up meta characters are writing in the margins of. It looks like Amazon now allows you to search for either.
So if you are still interested in the content, you should try opening the page again. It may work.
On the subject, the whole concept reminds me of House of Leaves, only the later is definitely more weird
I suspect the main reason people do it is because progressive loading has the potential to leave your page half-rendered, which looks bad. So you block the whole thing until you can present it in its entirety.
But it's the web. We're used to pages half-loading, and we're used to starting to read text before everything has been loaded. The right way to fix that problem is to make your design more lean, not to stick everything behind a 15-30s loading spinner.
But in this case, this is just a hipster website. The slow loading time is purely coming from the content. When NYT first did "Snowfall", people were trying to grasp onto anything that "might be the future of journalism", so that "rich format" took off for a while, but now people know better, these rich format articles have terrible ROI because creating them is really hard and not scalable, and in many cases it wastes a lot of traffic, and last and most importantly, readers couldn't care less about this "rich format" journalism. It's just the journalism people circle jerking about how "beautiful" it is.
Which is why this format mostly disappeared. That said, I have never seen anything THIS bad. I am leaving all these comments here because I am genuinely annoyed that they messed up the reading experience on a topic I was actually interested in reading, so bad that I decided not to read it.
If anything this is the main problem I have with Abrams: his 'mysterious and complicated plots' become a lot less fun once you realize that their only goal is to keep you guessing without much of a pay-off.
This doesn't have to be a problem, provided that the plot offers enough in itself. But when a substantial part of the plot revolves around the mystery, there better be a reward!
I've been enjoying The Leftovers, which was created by the other dude who worked on Lost. At this point, nearing the end of the show, I could still live with never having an answer to the central mystery. But this is primarily because 1) the showrunner repeatedly said that it's not about the mystery, and 2) even though the show is walking a fine line, the mystery is still secondary to the individual characters' journeys.
<spoilers!>
The first (and perhaps second?) season of Lost are still among my favorite seasons of any show ever. But I feel they're tarnished by the convoluted, mystery-in-a-box, answers-that-lead-to-more-questions, ever-more-ridiculous later seasons, and a finale that we were explicitly told wouldn't be the case way back in the first season!
Unreadable.
Really weird.
But would it have the same delicious effect that Mr Abrams had when he first found said book that inspired his project?
> "It made me smile, this optimistic romantic idea that you could leave a book with a message for someone."
The thing that still amazes me is how words themselves - without any other props - can still engender the kind of mystery and sense of romance which they were aiming for. Even when we're used to entertainments with far more sensory power.
I don't like being so negative but he's pulled the wool over too many eyes.
Alias - fool me once. Lost - fool me twice. Fringe - fool me thrice.
(Each one - questions answered by new questions)
And yet I totally just bought this book. Sounds cool.
2. Well, J. J. Abrams and some writer.
3. Is J.J. flipping us the bird in that picture?
Why can't the text just load first?
Because that wouldn't involve several layers of unnecessary Javascript.
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