This is a cut/paste from The Daily Rumpus's Stephen Elliot's daily email--which is often good and always worth at least a quick read. Today, however, if you subsitute "film" for "book" and "filmmaker" for "writer", he could have just as easily been talking about the new film world for independent filmmakers. Take a read:

"...I didn't read too far into The Four Fingers of Death on my phone. I could imagine when I would, during a long train ride, for example, if I didn't have anything printed on paper. But then I don't finish the vast majority of books I start. When people offer me their books I usually turn them down, or encourage them to contact our books editor. I need a recommendation from someone other than the author. Sometimes they're offended. One of my favorite cartoons was in the New Yorker years ago. A woman had an unwrapped present containing a book. She says, "Oh, homework." If I could find that comic I'd frame it.

When you'll really want a book on your phone is when it contains essential knowledge, things you need to know for your work or your home or your child. It's hard to imagine reading on the phone being relaxing, which is what I feel when I'm in love with a book. I relax into it.

But people are reading books this way, and you have to meet your audience. You can't change the book, the text remains the text, but you can change the readers experience. Whenever I publish a book I bring the publishers a cover before they bring me one. Then, if they don't like it, they're challenged to do something better. Why would that be any different if your book was an app? Why would you want your publisher to design the experience of reading your book on a phone? Apple, in this equation, is just a printer. You bring the printer your book, your cover, the specifications, and they print the book and send it to you in boxes on a truck. But that doesn't even explain it. Eli Horowitz designed a book that opened in four places and had a comb inside. Books have sizes and textures and kerning and fonts, all of which matter.

You can sell a book through kindle and the ibookstore, but why would you stop there when there's so much more you can do. Think of it like this, if the screen is the environment of the book then the app allows you to design the chair your reader sits in, and how much light comes through the window, and the vista.

I was talking with Nato Green about the rise of the community, web 2.0's response to web 1.0. He said it wasn't necessarily a good thing, that it could play to extremes. That I should look at how it was empowering the right. But to me that wasn't the point. You can't protest air..."

Stephen Elliot/The Daily Rumpus/August 30, 2010