Aug. 30th, 2012

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LeVar Burton is an awesome human being. (I've linked to the middle of a three-part interview, but the other two parts are also worth checking out.)

Two things about this. One - I love the way he relates to fans. He did Reading Rainbow to try to connect with kids through the medium they preferred and bring them back to literature. (He says "literature" throughout rather than books, it seems deliberately to make it about the written word and not the object.) So when he talks about the ownership fans of the show feel towards it, it's with pride. He wanted to reach people; he did. The fact that people are engaged enough with something he was a part of to be filming youtube tributes is exciting to him, rather than being threatening, the way it is to so many creators.

Two - Reading Rainbow is now an app. He talks in this clip about how that happened, but the reason why, when he bought the brand, he made it an app and not a TV show is because he recognizes that today's kids engage with digital devices, not TV. TV was the medium of the eighties. An iPad app is the medium of now. You want to reach kids, you have to go to where they are.

But the really groundbreaking thing about this app is-- I've mentioned the subscription model of books before, and how publishers are aware of the possibility and are frightened of it because it means the death of their business model. The subscription model is no longer a nebulous future. It's here. That's what the Reading Rainbow app is. It's subscription based, it has videos, both new and "classic," but it also has, within the app, several hundred children's books in entirety. It's a subscription to a curated collection of children's books. That's incredible.

I used to watch Reading Rainbow with a notebook, then go to the library to check out all the books they talked about. (I found the pages and pages of lists years later.) Now, the books are right there, part of the experience. I don't know if this will work, but I hope it does, because it seems visionary in a way publishing has not been. He's trying to bring people to literature by integrating it into all the other sorts of media people consume.

The other thing is, publishers are terrified of a subscription model; they'd never start one for their own catalogues. But Reading Rainbow is a brand with such recognition and staying power that of course publishers would want their books to be part of it, even though it's not a model they like. Burton doesn't talk about the negotiations of rights (I mean, why would you on a general interview), but I'm so curious. Once he started talking about it, I thought yes--this is the sort of venture that could break into a whole new business model. A start-up wouldn't get the time of day from big publishers. But Reading Rainbow? Hell yes.
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So I am watching a PBS documentary series called We Shall Remain about Native American history. The first part was the Mayflower through the Pequot War and King Phillip's War. Then was Tecumseh, which I had to stop in the middle to take a break and has made me hate William Henry Harrison forever. And I just watched the part on the Trail of Tears.

Excuse me while I go cry for a bit. God. The more you learn, THE WORSE IT GETS.

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