Page 187 - AC/E's Digital Culture Annual Report 2015

AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report 2015187Over the course of 2014 After,12 a fanfiction series starring a member of the group One Direction, came out on Wattpad; altogether its episodes have been downloaded more than a billion times. The new author Anna Todd13 uses community feedback and Twitter and Instagram to share the backstage; the paper version was published in October 2014 and it is likely that a film will be made on the subject.14It should be stressed that in contrast to some– very few – astonishing successes, many titles have a very limited dissemination: self-pub- lishing is very appealing to anyone who wishes to publish, but as it cuts out the filter of the publisher, it ends up passing on to the reader the expenses and cost of making the selection. If there are more titles to choose from of inevitably lower quality, readers are more likely to find titles that are less satisfactory.Scribd,15 which started out as a repository (especially of PDF files), has become a platform for posting content in several formats, which is sold through a monthly subscription fee. It is also used by a few major publishers (Harper Collins was the first) as a sales channel.The “all you can...” model – i.e. access to a catalogue of titles in exchange for a monthlyfee – is surprisingly widespread in the music world, where Spotify has become establishedas an alternative to Apple’s iTunes, and in video, where Netflix has outperformed Amazon Instant Video. As for books, the Spanish company 24Symbols16 (in which Zed, a mul- tinational that creates content for the telecom- munications industry, recently bought a stake) has been a pioneer, together with the Germanfirm Skoobe17 (whose main shareholders arethe Bertelsmann group and Holtzbrinck), the Danish firm Mofibo18 and New York’s Oyster.19These models differ in some aspects, particularly the size of the catalogue to which they provide access: some guarantee unlimited access (suchas Oyster), but most however provide access to a limited number of titles at any one time (a model used by Amazon for the recent launch of Kindle Unlimited).Prominent among the book subscription platforms are the Spanish 24Symbols, the German Skoobe, the Danish Mofibo and Oyster of New York.Actually, as Andrew Rhomberg claimed some time ago,20 there is a big difference betweenthe same models when applied to different industries and no guarantee that the same model will function everywhere.Lastly, platforms with distinct goals are de facto spaces for the production of stories: Kickstarter,21 Indiegogo22 and other crowd- funding platforms, perhaps even more than funding instruments, are places where every project becomes a story. And sites that bring together petitions, such as change.org23 or the Benetton foundation’s Unhatenews,24 are also storytelling platforms: stories are a great way of inviting others to support a cause.In short, what is needed to publish a story in the digital context?Marco Ferrario