(2008-12-12) Interstitial Publishing

Joseph Esposito on the idea of writing for brief chunks of reading time. You also need (and this ultimately may be the harder part) content crafted with the interstices in mind. Reformatting "Moby-Dick" (EBook) for interstitial publishing simply won't do, as the structure of the text, even the syntax of the sentences, militates against draughts of only 5 minutes. This is not a matter of immersive vs. non-immersive reading: it's entirely possible to get immersed in 5 minutes. But it is an issue of what you get immersed in.

The key to this new form of publishing, however, is that it views the short period of each entry not as a watered-down version of the "real thing," a long text, but as something built perfectly for the space and time it occupies. This is what Marshall McLuhan meant by "understanding media": it's not about the content in itself but the content as it accommodates itself to the shape of the surface, which in turn is created and supported by the underlying technology. (New Media)

Interstitial publishing can be fiction or nonfiction, but it is unlikely to be a single isolated five-minute item, as it would be hard to market or to find such an item. More likely short items will be strung together in an anthology; the thesis of the anthology ("brief bursts about the new administration"; "101 short poems about transistors and current") will suffuse each item with a sense of being part of a whole.

Narratives for interstitial media may very will be linear within each five-minute episode, but it is improbable that item A will lead serially to item B, to item C, and so forth. It would simply be hard to gather the narrative in our minds if it were written in this way. More likely each episode will have a beginning and an end--and then cut to another episode, which may be built around a different time or place or another character.