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How J.J. Abrams Created a Reading Experience Unlike Any Other
- EpicEng 9y agoFancy site... too bad it takes 30 seconds to load. I almost jumped ship.
- sp332 9y agoFor me, I could only read the first paragraph. No other text showed up. If I scrolled back up, the first paragraph was gone too.
- kodfodrasz 9y agoI experienced the same thing. Then after reopening the page the content showed up, but I was no longer interested in the content, only wanted to see the page source to see how can a page be so broken, and it was no longer broken. So if you are still interested in the content, you should try opening the page again. It may work.
- AkirIkasu 9y agoThe only solution that worked for me was to scroll down a page and reload.
- lvoudour 9y agoI didn't believe it so I timed it. Took 15s for me, which is still absurd given the fact that civ 5 takes about the same time to generate a new game. Fancy or not it's just a website. I'm not an expert on the subject (web dev) so could someone explain why more and more websites have significant load times when all they do is load a few images and text? Is it a server issue, a dev issue or a browser issue?(pretty sure it's not a bandwidth issue) On the subject, the whole concept reminds me of House of Leaves, only the later is definitely more weird
- munchbunny 9y agoBack in the day this would happen because somebody needed to load a whole Flash applet. Web 2.0 was supposed to take us away from that. 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.
- lvoudour 9y agoSince mobile browsing is so prevalent, you would expect websites to be more optimised for mobile cpus/bandwidth and therefore very fast on ethernet connected desktops. But more and more I find sites that take so much time to load I feel I'm back to dial-up days. This blog doesn't even have ads. It's absurd considering the fact we can stream full HD content in several devices on the same connection
- throwanem 9y agoPeople develop on localhost or local servers, and don't think about what happens when the RTT exceeds a millisecond.
- cocktailpeanuts 9y agoThere are many reasons that are understandable, such as most media companies having to use multiple trackers to squeeze as much money out of their inventory as possible (ad javascripts take most of the loading time). I think these are shitty but still understandable. 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.
- mondaybot 9y agohell, slow to load and what ? ELI5 or ELIdrunk
- Arzh 9y agoThis website has a reading experience unlike any other, by that I mean it has none since it work load.
- munchbunny 9y agoI thought it was just a video buffering, but then I scrolled down and the loading wheel followed me. Why can't the text just load first?
- Safety1stClyde 9y ago> Why can't the text just load first? Because that wouldn't involve several layers of unnecessary Javascript.
- spc476 9y agoBecause there is no text. I used Firefox's "View->Page Style->None" and there is literally no text from the article on the page. I did, however, find this: SECURITY WARNING: Please treat the URL above as you would your password and do not share it with anyone. See the Facebook Help Center for more information.
- gboudrias 9y agoProbably for the best, the layout and intentional visual "pop-ins" are unbearable.
- WillPostForFood 9y agoWhat happened to progressive enhancement? Not cool anymore?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- criddell 9y agoI've just started reading this book. As an object, it's pretty neat. My big complaint is that all of the stuff they've put into the pages can fall out and that ruins the experience quite a bit. I wish they had an index for all the cards and other things so that I could put the book back together. 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.
- wanderingstan 9y agoThankfully someone did make an index for the all cards and inserts in the book and where they belong: http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/1589916-insert-inventory http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/1589916-insert-inventory 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.
- criddell 9y agoThank you for posting this.
- empath75 9y agoYeah, it's beautiful, but boring, imo. And it's really just a blown out version of the old infocom box inserts.
- combatentropy 9y agoIt amazes me that they could make it in bulk for $20 (https://www.amazon.com/Ship-Theseus-J-Abrams/dp/0316201642 https://www.amazon.com/Ship-Theseus-J-Abrams/dp/0316201642). Among the pages are cards and other items that the two fictional readers shared or saved.
- aidenn0 9y agoThe Cover price is $40; typically publishers charge half of the cover to retailers; amazon either cut a deal or is taking razor thin margins on that.
- morsch 9y agoHow well does the Kindle adaptation work, I wonder. (Also, thinking this would make a nice parent for my father, but the German edition was a limited run; $130 used, $180 new, jeez.)
- tim333 9y agoThere doesn't seem to be a Kindle version.
- braindouche 9y agoThere isn't a kindle version. There is an iPad App version that I can recommend highly.
- Xoros 9y agoHad anyone read The House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski ? A book in a book in a book. I feel some similarities with this one.
- forgotmysn 9y agoThe Shadow of the Wind did the same, iirc
- brandur 9y agoI've read it. I liked the premise for The House of Leaves and really _wanted_ to like the book, but to be honest, the whole experience felt a little gimmicky to me. I got to parts that were obnoxiously annoying to read (e.g. the shrinking tunnel), and the story didn't really feel worth it. 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.
- finnh 9y agoBy "the shrinking tunnel" do you mean the section where fewer & fewer words appear on each page (and the rest of page is blank)? 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.
- Xoros 9y agoWell it's a little bit hard at moments when you have to read notes that are longer then the current page, and when you already read stuff form Stephen King or P.K.Dick, the story is not very original, but I really liked the concept. I haven't yet read S, I'll give it a try.
- ashurbanipal 9y agoLike Bats of the Republic, similar idea.
- briga 9y ago'Unlike any other' might be a stretch. Writers have been playing these sorts of meta-narrative games for decades now. Nabokov's Pale Fire comes to mind. House of Leaves is another example.
- oh_sigh 9y agoWould you read an article titled 'J.J. Abrams wrote a book similar to some other books'?
- H4CK3RM4N 9y agoI would if it didn't have a horrible UI.
- josinalvo 9y agoIt is funny, how we started to use comparisons to mean just adjectives. E.g., 'like no other' -> 'really good'. Funny, and semantics breaking. How could we write a title that just said 'the book is really good' and still felt compelling?
- willismichael 9y agoA distinctive reading experience?
- dzdt 9y agoGriffin and Sabine (Nick Bantock) is also somewhat similar. There the entirety of the story is cards and letters written between the title characters. It has the same idea of having these as inserts within the book. It was well done; the "found object" nature of it has a nice quality.
- cwyers 9y agoThe webcomic Schlock Mercenary has done a tie-in where they did a hardcover version of "The Seventy Maxims Of Maximally-Effective Mercenaries," an in-universe self-help book that characters constantly refer to, with annotations written into the book by the characters.
- jansho 9y agoThis looks super interesting. Like putting mini books in the margins of a big book, plus the novelty factor of the book design itself. 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."
- scandox 9y agoI saw a copy of this sitting on a table in a bookshop in Dublin a couple of years ago and picked up and read it for a while. I would have liked to have loved it and maybe as a teenager I still would have been able to invest it with the a little bit of the real magic it seemed to lack for all its technical accomplishment...but I guess I've exchanged those powers for something else - or just lost them. 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.
- weeksie 9y agoRelated: if you like meta-narratives, I would highly recommend House of Leaves.
- adamwk 9y agoOr Lolita ;)
- emn13 9y agoUnzoomably HUGE font. I don't think I've ever seen a title as large as this body text. Unreadable.
- eru 9y agoResizing the window was the only thing that worked for me. (Without resorting to hackery.) Really weird.
- throwaway7645 9y agoShip of Theseus was a lot of fun...i got busy though....need to start it back up!
- cocktailpeanuts 9y agoIs it just me or did anyone feel like this website was trying too hard to "create a reading experience unlike any other" of their own? It's like a no-name comedian introducing a world-star comedian for tonight's show, and trying to one-up him (and miserably failing) 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.
- LukeShu 9y ago> "They had one job: convey the story of how ..." 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.
- wwalser 9y agoThis is content marketing for ceros.com. Their job was to build a compelling experience so that other people telling stories online want to use Ceros.
- tim333 9y ago> I would rather read this through some other website when it resurfaces Wired does an OK job: https://www.wired.com/2013/11/j-j-abrams-s-book-review/ https://www.wired.com/2013/11/j-j-abrams-s-book-review/
- johnchristopher 9y agoI first opened it on my smartphone and didn't get why you mentioned motion sickness but reading it later on laptop I could feel why it would give out such an impression. It felt a bit constrained on my 1366*768 device though and the experience was better on mobile. I like gimmicks like that in books when it's executed well. I think I'll try ordering it.
- Overtonwindow 9y agoIt's a beautiful project and extremely intriguing, but I found the book to be incredibly boring, and everything else a bit difficult to follow and read. Definitely requires a lot of patience.
- colordrops 9y agoJ.J. Abrams is self-important and overrated. His works are predictable and uninspiring. He has become a name to attach to anything slightly fantasy or sci-fi oriented in Hollywood regardless of how much actual work he has put into the project. He's trying to be the next Spielberg but he's just a pale shadow. I don't like being so negative but he's pulled the wool over too many eyes.
- jclulow 9y agoIs it possible, just maybe, that at least _some_ people who enjoy his work are adults who can decide for themselves what they like, and aren't the victims of some elaborate confidence trick?
- colordrops 9y agoIt's possible but I am just expressing my opinion as one among many.
- mcguire 9y ago1. A blog with a loading spinner? 2. Well, J. J. Abrams and some writer. 3. Is J.J. flipping us the bird in that picture?
- plink 9y agoDoes the book conclude with the revelation that the reader endured purgatory while reading it?
- hinkley 9y agoToo soon.
- omaranto 9y agoI take it this website did display text for other people. I wonder what it said... I only got a series of alternating dark and light grey rectangles to scroll through, without any text. Thinking maybe there was a problem with the CSS and the text was there but not visible, I pressed ctrl-A ctrl-C to copy all the text and pasted it into an editor: I only got the header and footer, there really was no article!
- joshuaheard 9y agoJ.J. Abrams's TED talk on the mystery box is worth a listen. https://www.ted.com/talks/j_j_abrams_mystery_box https://www.ted.com/talks/j_j_abrams_mystery_box
- deanCommie 9y agoIt's great when someone describes to you their entire philosophy and you realize "I should never pay money for anything you ever create, because I clearly will be disappointed." 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.
- earlyriser 9y agoIs this like a grown up version of "Cathy's Book? https://www.amazon.com/Cathys-Book-Found-Call-650-266-8233/dp/076242656X https://www.amazon.com/Cathys-Book-Found-Call-650-266-8233/d...
- mercer 9y ago> He’s no stranger to mysterious and complicated plots—planned from the very beginning, and designed from the ground up, to keep viewers guessing. 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!