Future of Publishing video will amuse and delight

Here's an adorable, tricky and clever video on the future of publishing, courtesy of the Penguin folks, who produced it for an internal presentation and then released it into the wild after everyone loved it. Be sure to watch to at least halfway, when the clever gets visible.

The Future of Publishing - created by DK (UK) (Thanks, Miguel!)

Previously:

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

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Anonymous

I still have tears in my eyes.
aguynamededdy

Adorable, tricky and clever? More like lame, tired and copied.
Anonymous

the notion of “liking the way a book feels in your hand” seems at odds with the content vs. packaging statement and environmental sustainability. this fear of the “facebook generation” is inflationist and hyperbolic (just like that awful adbusters article on hipsters).
Anonymous

This is a palindromic video, if you want to watch other palindromic video, go there :
http://www.webinapage.com/2010/03/all-the-best-palindromic-videos-in-one-page/
Miss Cellania

Previous:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42E2fAWM6rA
VitaminCM

Brilliant!!! I wonder how long it took to put this together.
Chris
oo

…and prior to this and “Lost Generation,” the device was used for an Argentinian political campaign: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFz5jbUfJbk
Anonymous

What marvelous things words are. It actually started to bring tears to my eyes to see the ugly become beautiful just by reversing orientation… there’s a wonderful life lesson somewhere in there… thanks for making my morning
wanderingstan

Obligatory link to Hofstadter’s “Crab Canon” from the book “GÃ¶del, Escher, Bach”: http://www.evl.uic.edu/swami/crabcanon
GTMoogle

The truth about originality, I suppose. If the Argentinian one came before, the later ones did it better. (And of course, I’m sure this is a much older trope. Palindromes are nothing new.)

The Argentinian one doesn’t present a very consistent narrative in reverse. It sounds much more like it was written the first way. The publishing one posted here is the most consistent in reverse and has a pretty good impact. Lost Generation is a little awkward both ways.
Shay Guy

Clever, even with the “of” cheat. Still needs to be accompanied by practical strategy.
Etcetera

Love it!
noctrnl

I look forward to the actionable items they have in the pipeline. It is inspiring to see someone might have an idea.
Anonymous

Shades of the “Crab Canon” from “Godel, Escher, Bach”… Great stuff!
LX

If the publishers (not only book publishers, but other media as well) would accept this advice, this would actually be a great ad. I on the other hand will wait until they live up to it before cheering.
yri

This is nice, but the earlier “Lost Generation” video I found to be deeply moving.
spocko

Wow. What a bunch of gloomy Guses and cynical Sarahs.
I thought it was fun.
TooGoodToCheck

I was pretty excited to see this, but mostly because I initially thought it was DK – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darren_Knott but it is in fact DK – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorling_Kindersley
miguelesquirol

I didn’t know it was a copy, but I still think it makes a point here. Books are changing not only how we present them but also how we read them. I think is video is not only about how we see the audiences, but also how we see the texts itself.

By the way, the link to my page has a mistake :(
http://elforastero.blogalia.com
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  Fixed.
Sheepshank

Yes, very clever. I didn’t see it coming at all. I wonder if anyone did?
Anonymous

Anyone think the voice sounds like “Lila” the actress that played on the TV Show Dexter in Season 2 of the show?
JayConverse

Could that be called a type of palindrome?
omnivore

@GTMoogle : Well, I’m not an expert, but my understanding is that Argentina is a spanish-speaking country, and that its political campaigns are largely conducted in spanish. Perhaps before judging which is best, you should seek out the spanish version.

As far as a judgement on originality, that’s pretty clear.

Kottke.org posted this : http://kottke.org/10/03/the-new-rules-for-reviewing-media a few days ago, that basically defended the notion that form takes priority over content for the shiny new generation that lives on the web; more or less the opposite of the assertion of the charmingly accented reader in the ad.
littlebone

A nit to pick:
Going forward, near the end, it reads “customers/for your/products”. Going in reverse she says “you’ll think/ OF products/for your/customers”

Slight cheat there.

“A man, a plan, a canalone…”
wylkyn

Hey, wow…a rip off of an already tired device that says a bunch of idealistic stuff without really doing anything. And who says that packaging is more important than content?

I’d be more interested in an actual plan by the publishers to engage this generation of readers than this bit of self-promoting pie-in-the-sky fluff. But hey, if it gets you excited…rah, rah, rah.
- Anonymous
  
  I did an online survey recently that was about iced tea, from one of the big consumer survey front-ends. All it asked about was the packaging and my thoughts about the brand (young? exciting? healthy?). Not once did the survey ask about the actual tea.
- Anonymous
  
  Re: “And who says that packaging is more important than content?”
  
  I’d say Apple has been pushing that agenda for 25 years.
- Felix Mitchell
  
  “Hey, wow…a rip off of an already tired device that says a bunch of idealistic stuff without really doing anything. And who says that packaging is more important than content?
  
  I’d be more interested in an actual plan by the publishers to engage this generation of readers than this bit of self-promoting pie-in-the-sky fluff. But hey, if it gets you excited…rah, rah, rah.”
  
  Exactly.
  
  And what are Penguin doing taking lessons from Dorling Kinderly?
  - BookGuy
    
    Penguin and DK are both imprints of the same company. Pearson bought Penguin in 1970, I believe, and they bought DK sometime around 2000.
    
    I don’t quite understand the hate this is generating. It’s orders of magnitude better than most internal corporate presentations I’ve seen at the publishing companies I’ve worked at, even Pearson themselves, whom I worked for several years ago.
- weatherman
  
  Exactly. Clever presentation, ultimately vapid.
webmonkees

I did something like that for a class;

basically it twas rubbish -|- with two separate statements
using a confusing format -|- expressing two opinions
that was difficult to read -|- but a third one was integrated.
Anonymous

Really dull and boring. If this is what they come up with, no wonder the publishing industry is in big trouble!
lux_aurumque

@ #3
…and prior to this and “Lost Generation,” and the Argentinian political campaign; of course, Bach did this a lot: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUHQ2ybTejU which has abp previously on boingboing. ;D
Anonymous

There is a real problem with attention span. Even for a 2 minute 26 second video Cory had to write, “Be sure to watch to at least halfway…”

I’m losing faith in the youtube/facebook generation (for a lot of reasons).

– old curmudgeon
Anonymous

“I’d be more interested in an actual plan by the publishers to engage this generation of readers…”

What the hell does this even mean?

More people are reading today than ever before, and more books are being published than ever before. Books are available in more formats than ever before. Now publishers are supposed to come up with a “plan” to engage some new “generation of readers” (as if the thing that creates a reader is something that fundamentally changes from generation to generation). It sounds like you want more fluff than less.