Spam: The other white meat

Russel Beattie is suggesting that book content delivery could be done via RSS. By serializing or "chunkifying" a book (or large piece of content) into installments, RSS could be an easy form for delivery. Given that more and more kinds of content are being delivered via RSS, encouraging people to use aggregators, having larger textual content in the same sphere makes some sense. The question is is it useful?

As much as I have distained podcasting previously, what I do like about it is that it makes content delivery easy. Since it can be tied into software that people already use (audio players and rss readers), it makes finding and getting new content easy. Photo services like Flickr do a similar kind of thing- it makes it easy to find and retrieve content while using existing tools.

What seems different about syndicating book content is that while people use their RSS readers to read content on line, I'm not sure that they use it to read large texts on line. Certainly there are people who do, but frankly, give me a book in my hand. Neither my laptop nor my desktop are happy reading companions and in my limited research, most people feel similarly. Given that there aren't devices to which one might download book content that are reasonable (sure, there are devices, but who really uses them), the idea that this might take off the way that podcasting has doesn't really seem to square.

Perhaps the kinds of books I like to read are different than what might be done on an RSS feed, but my hunch is that to do this kind of content delivery either there needs to be a semi-ubiquitous device that many many people have and use every day to read content (like mp3 players for podcasting), or the kinds of content that might be suitable for this begin to appear- ala the 2 minute mystery.

I like using RSS to collect data, but I find where it is most useful is where it either becomes an aggregation of a search for content (ie, a compilation of all the news that I have to search out on the web), or a way to get data automatically into another form which I don't want to do by hand.