The Restless Mind

I have a story to tell you. Well, two stories. But let’s start with the rabbit.

Rudy, a two-foot tall yellow rabbit, ran out of carrots on the day he planned to make soup for his neighbor. Panicking, he ransacked his house and tore up the backyard—but he couldn’t find any carrots. Luckily, though, two smart kids befriended him and together, working as a team, they managed to scrounge some carrots up in time for dinner. Crisis averted.

Now, this story probably won’t win the Caldecott, nor will it be much use to drive traffic to my blog. But in my family, Rudy the Rabbit is more powerful than anything Pixar could have dreamed up. It’s a story that my wife started for our (then) young son based on one of his stuffed animals. We convinced him that Rudy the Rabbit was, in fact, quite real—and had magical (albeit plain) adventures while he was at school. For a few years, Rudy became a staple of bedtime stories about life, love, hardship, and determination.

Little did I know that a decade later Rudy would become the inspiration for my own adventure. But more on that in a minute.

For families—and I could extrapolate this to society—stories are the bedrock of communication. Kids use them to contextualize and understand the world. Parents depend on them to frame issues, pass on family values, and entertain. Stories are a currency, passing back and forth among us, trading in an idea for something tangible, permanent, and valuable.

Most of us think about books and movies when we hear the word “story.” Curling up with your kids to read Where The Wild Things Are or tossing popcorn at each other while watching re-runs of Mary Poppins are staples of growing up in Western culture. But stories are traded in less obvious ways throughout the day: over dinner or on the phone, while playing a board game or taking a drive to see Grandma. We’re constantly narrating our lives to each other, largely to ensure we stay connected.

Connection, and how stories act as glue between us, is something that fascinates me. And it fascinates me precisely because that glue runs a little thin these days. With a divorce rate hovering around 50%, many of us live apart. A mobile society has meant we travel more, so calls from a hotel room or airport have become routine for kids trying to hear mummy or daddy’s voice. And when we’re lucky enough to be together, rituals like a bedtime story or nighttime walk get shooed away as we hurry to prepare for the next day.

Amidst this pace and chaos, networks like YouTube, Flickr, and Facebook have mushroomed largely because they help us grapple with fragmentation. They give us a chance to glue together our relationships and keep some context in our lives. And, intriguingly, they’re also new forms of storytelling. Blogs are our diaries, Flickr is the new documentary, and Facebook is the new sitcom.

For families, though, these new services and storytelling mediums don’t quite have the right form factor to provide the intimacy, context, and power of reading, making, or sharing stories together. You can upload or forward a funny clip to your kid through YouTube, but it’s microbroadcasting at best and doesn’t enable the subtle back and forth nature of shared stories. (And that’s if the kid actually noticed the email link in the first place. They’ve likely got their head stuck in Club Penguin, Habbo, or Gaia—the new Saturday morning cartoons.)

I was thinking about all this—stories, connection, and emerging digital services—when Rudy the Rabbit popped into my head. You see, a couple of years into the Rudy phenomena, my son and I created a book about our yellow-colored lapin for my wife’s birthday. I wrote, he illustrated, and we printed, bound, and wrapped it in all of it’s slim glory. Naturally, she loved it. It was her story, after all, coming back to her in a different shade, full of energy and love.

For us, though, the best part was in the making. Working together as a team, adjusting the story to suit his artistic ability (he was seven), keeping the story short enough to manage—all of the back and forth was something that made the process something close to magic. Now, not only was Rudy a way for us to frame life for our son, but it became a way to create something out of nothing. Creation culture as opposed to consumption culture.

That’s when Storybird popped into my head, a new service that my friends and I are unveiling soon. Storybird is the same process I described above, made digital, pushed into the cloud, and aimed at families and friends. We call it “collaborative storytelling.”

Storybird has a simple premise: you and I play around with some words and pictures and voila! We have a story we can share over the grid or print into a book we can keep forever.

The making of Storybird, and our goals for it, is something less simple. It’s a longer story, and an unfolding story, and something I plan to share with all of you in the months ahead.

It’s the beginning of my awfully big adventure.

Farhad Manjoo at Slate thinks we should “Fear the Kindle” and suggests Amazon will hamstring publishing the way Apple did the music industry.

We can only hope.

New markets or categories are always created by one player. It’s a feature, not a bug.

One player MUST initially dominate the new category to carve the way and make sense of it to consumers. Kodak, IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Netflix, Amazon, Miramax, and Threadless didn’t emerge as leaders so much by designing new products as they did by contextualizing new ideas. By creating understanding during times of change—in some kind of marketable form factor—they were rewarded by patronage.

Where was non-professional photography before Kodak? Multiplex art-house films before Miramax? Or crowdsourced t-shirts before Threadless? Nowhere.

Each category-in-waiting, like every idea, needs an author to shape and sell it. Once they do, consumers can understand and buy it.

And like authorship, only one person can write the story. (How many of your favorite novels were written by committee?) That’s essential to your enjoyment, but it’s also essential to the author.

Founders, like writers, must wrestle with ambiguous ideas and make sense of them, trimming unnecessary features while retaining the core. In the process, they reveal to themselves the hidden themes that make the concept valuable. It’s that clarity that helps them position their product to solve our problem.

When Bill Gates realized he could syndicate his OS, he was able to articulate his vision for “a computer on every desk in every home” and the personal computing era bloomed. In turn, WE made Microsoft a monopoly as thanks for ushering-in the digital age.

When Harvey Weinstein tinkered with foreign-film aesthetics by adding Hollywood casting and multiplex distribution, he created the modern indie and trumped Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute who had been laboring on the idea for years. As a result, Miramax defined—and dominated—film during the 90s and ushered in an era of storytelling so skilled that it was dubbed the “new realism.”

When Steve Jobs linked the player, the store, and the jukebox, he joined the ranks of Philip K. Dick and Arthur C. Clarke by demonstrating the future and articulating something we all sensed but couldn’t define. As a result, iPod’s musical ecosystem and Apple were rewarded with a monopoly.

(Hint: monopolies, like Barack Obama, are voted into power to make change when the presiding regime no longer works.)

So when Manjoo quotes Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild, as saying “Everyone is worried that Amazon will end up becoming to books what Apple is to music,” hum a silent prayer this comes true. Traditional publishing is broken. Digital publishing is a mess. We should be so lucky to have someone fix it.

The Kindle + store + wireless is preceded by Sony’s Reader by years and several other “well positioned” players. What happened? Their story made no sense. They revealed no purpose. They generated no clarity. (They’re the Jonathan Franzen of their category: byzantine and commercially unviable.)

If Amazon DOES come to dominate the market, it will be because Bezos’ unlocked the mystery of digital publishing and penned a story we could all understand (and threw in one-click convenience!)

Fear the reaper. Fear another Franzen novel. But not the Kindle.