On 10 Mar 2026 03:31:33 GMT, Ted Nolan <tednolan> wrote:

I don't really do phones. I take a lot of still pictues for my site
with a regular camera, and while I can take video as well, I never
really think about combining the two.

I was a bit intrigued a few years ago when one of my cousins was showing
me pose pictures of his kids with the fish they had caught on a family deep-sea outing, and I noticed the pictures were doing a kind of Harry
Potter newspaper thing where what would normally be just a picture of a
kid holding a fish would move around for a second. It was interesting,
but I didn't think much more about it.

I read a lot of ebooks, and the covers can be pretty awful. I figured
that since a lot of it's indie authors, and since the covers aren't
sitting on a bookstore shelf trying to catch your eye, it didn't matter
much and probably the situation would not improve (although with AI art, lately I was starting to think I might be wrong).

Then I got a newsletter from an author I follow today with a cover
reveal, and following the link, I get this:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/lQrIaZtcENY

and it makes me think that this is something idealy suited to the smart
phone as a book platform. Is this the future of covers? Along with the
move to "everything is audio", the reading experience is fundamentally changing.

The New York Times has added video cliplets like that to the
head of many of its news stories. They're OK if you're ready to
be drawn in to long yarn, I guess. Not so good if you come to
news in text form specifically to escape news on TV. They remind
me of that scene in "Jurassic Park" where the disgruntled computer
guy has left everybody locked out of the system with his sneering
diatribe cycling endlessly on the monitors.

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.12
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

ted@loft.tnolan.com (Ted Nolan <tednolan>) writes:

Then I got a newsletter from an author I follow today with a cover
reveal, and following the link, I get this:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/lQrIaZtcENY

and it makes me think that this is something idealy suited to the smart
phone as a book platform. Is this the future of covers? Along with
the move to "everything is audio", the reading experience is fundamentally changing.

Robert Reich, in his new book (yes, book, on paper) recounts how a
relative (son? I forget) asks him how many books he's written. He
comes up with an approximate (and large) number. His interlocutor
points out that people of his generation get their input from video,
the more "short-form" the more likely seen/heard.

So on his Substack blog, Reich is increasingly posting video. Paul
Krugman and Heather Cox Richardson are doing the same.

This may work to the extent that it will get some attention from
people whose eyes glaze over when confronted with more than a
paragraph of text. But personally, I find it impossible to recall
more than the occasional one-liner squib from a video. I think it's
well documented (although I can't cite references) that TV/video puts
the viewer's brain into a sort of trance-like state, one that connects
poorly or is even orthogonal to the cognitive mechanisms involved in
critical thinking and learning.

Yes, sometimes Krugman (but not Reich) appends a transcript. And
Substack pages have buttons to ask for a transcript. But these latter
depend on your browser correctly handling the javascript and that
often fails totally. I'd post comments on these authors' pages urging
manually posted transcripts only the broken javascript prevents it.

If you have something serious to say and want people to think about
it, video gets their attention and then neurally turns off the ability
to think about what you've seen/heard.

--
Mike Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.13
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)