Could you really get through Craig Mod’s precious, overwrought, flowery prose elucidating his so-called subcompact publishing (not capitalized)? That style is his claim to fame and that is in fact what it’s brought him, presumably alongside healthy consulting contracts. Craig Mod is a smart lad and his grandiloquent manner assures you never forget that. It plays particularly well with the ladies, I expect. (My blind item about Japan was all about him. I still want to know.)
He’s also being disingenuous when he claims he never really was defining a new publishing model. He was. And, à la Clay Shirky, he’ll ride that model all the way to the bank. (I asked about his overwrought style and disingenuousness. But Mod left me with an autoresponder message about the E-sabbatical he’s allegedly taking, one easily disproved by his blog posts and Twits.)
Marco Arment isn’t being any less disingenuous when he insists he too has not really defined a new publishing style. Of course he has. (It’s a style that, like everything he produces, ends up with “typesetting” like a Microsoft Word document, a default blog template, or an O’Reilly book. Arment, afflicted with developer type autism [not hyphenated], obsesses about “dyslexic” fonts with no proven worth yet cannot be persuaded that body copy must not be set with blank lines between unindented paragraphs.)
These informed, intelligent observers are young and green enough to be surprised by what will now happen like clockwork. Whenever a new publishing style comes along that is immediately apprehensible and so simple it can be copied even by an amateur, such copying then occurs. (Simplicity: It’s hard to create but easy to clone.) The antecedents here are Butt and FANTASTIC MAN (list), neither of which these fellows will have read or whose histories they’ll know. (UPDATE: Perhaps Jeremy Leslie could fill them in.)