************************************************************** * * * CYBERSPACE * * A biweekly column on net culture appearing * * in the Toronto Sunday Sun * * * * Copyright 2000 Karl Mamer * * Free for online distribution * * All Rights Reserved * * Direct comments and questions to: * * * * * ************************************************************** Whassup? I'm tired of whassup. That's whassup. So whassup with whassup? Since the debut of Budweiser's Super Bowl ad about a group of friends sitting around talking on the phone, their unique way of asking each other "what's up" has entered the popular lexicon. Of course due to CRTC regulations that require cable stations to substitute parallel Canadian programming on American channels, yet another historic Super Bowl ad was lost on the Canadian public. Budweiser made the ad available via its web site and, much like how people started passing around that link to Mahir's "I Kiss You!!!!" page, pretty much everyone in the English-speaking world became acquainted with "whassup" within a matter of weeks. It didn't stop there. Soon after two netizens created a parody using the soundtrack but substituted images from the Saturday cartoon Superfriends. Superman and Wonder Woman were calling each other on their batphones shouting "whazzup". It was clever enough. Clever things on the net, from web browsers to dancing hamster pages, spawn endless imitators. The quality (or lack thereof) of these parodies is less surprising than what actually gets parodied. A leisure suit wearing man in Turkey? Dancing hamsters? A Budweiser beer commercial? Who'd have thunk it! There's an archive of the various whassup take-offs at www.floridastuff.com/bud. For anyone thinking of making a whassup parody there's a list of well-considered do's and don'ts at www.ugo.com/channels/filmTv/whassup. Whatever you do, it's critical you don't copy the Monty Python style of animation by using still photos with moving cut out mouths. eBooks Stephen King is a somewhat famous horror novelist who tends to retell the same story about strange things happening to a nice New England family. Each new book uses an increasingly larger and larger number of pages to describe a family being slaughtered by vampires, family pets, mechanical psychic space spiders, or Jack Nicholson. The real horror here is the large parts of North American deforested to satisfy readers anxious for an "original" story from King. In March the author released a 66 page story specifically and solely for the emerging eBook format. It proved immensely popular. The official site's download page was clogged with people anxious to charge a measly $2.50 to their credit card to read King's thin yarn. Online book retailers like Amazon.com swallowed the $2.50 fee and used it as a loss-leader to generate traffic. In the computer world there's a saying that goes "it's the software stupid". Software drives hardware sales. A computer without great software is just a hunk of beige plastic. There have been a number of attempts to create dedicated electronic book devices but they've all been dismal failures despite the availability of great "software" (i.e., popular books released in electronic format). Clearly trying to get the public to accept an eBook is something more than having the right hardware and software. With King's successful release and with everyone running around these days with palmtop computers it seems the eBook concept is worth another look. I think, however, the eBook concept will always be doomed to a niche market . First, there's the dork factor. Years ago I used to download articles from Wired's web site to my Apple Newton and read them on the subway to work. I always felt like a dork doing it. You see more people obsessively tapping away on their palm computers these days but now you run up against the cool factor. If I'm on the subway and sitting across from me is a cute woman in smart eyewear and she's carrying a Kangol messenger bag, I want her to see I'm reading Love in the Time of Cholera. With an eBook and my looks, she's more than likely to think I'm reviewing notes on how to install new server hardware. Reading text on an LCD screen makes reading more difficult. Kurt Vonnegut believes you have to make reading as simple as possible. Everyone can appreciate an abstract artist like Picasso but few can ever appreciate an equally abstract book like Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. It takes society about twelve years to teach a human being to read and many never catch on. When Vonnegut formulated this idea, he didn't consider a third way. MP3Lit.com (www.mp3lit.com) marries the downloadable book idea, MP3 technology, and books-on-tape which are popular with idiots. You can download a number of free works of literature at the site. Right now there's not a lot of complete novels. Most of it is public domain short stories and poetry or excerpt from popular current works like Harry Potter.