Is this the answer?

Yesterday Amazon announced that it is bringing “real page numbers” to Kindle books, corresponding directly to a book’s print edition. My initial reaction was one of dismay – another example of crow-barring into ebooks a print convention that makes no sense on screen1. But the more I thought about the idea, the more I realised it not only had merit, but could also be the surprising yet obvious key to the problem of notes and citations discussed in my last two posts2, and being addressed by the Open Bookmarks project.

The beauty of the page

Fixed page numbers make no sense in reflowable text. And yet, there is a beautiful simplicity to them that is only partly due to the familiarity built up over years of print.

Referencing by page number works for 2 reasons:

1) Consistency: if you and I have the same edition, my page 42 is the same as yours and I can find the passage you quote fairly quickly.

2) I can find it quickly because a) the pages are numbered sequentially, so I can make an instant estimate of where to open the book, and know which way to flick the pages from there to find the desired page; and b) the page is generally of a manageable size, and contains few enough words that I can scan quickly for the passage I’m looking for.

Although these features arose directly from the physical constraints of books, their utility does not diminish when the text becomes digital.

Pagination solves two key problems:

1) Compatibility. Imagine a book group or classroom where some people are reading paperbacks, others Kindle editions and others iBooks. Page references could work across all three.

2) Positioning. One of the questions raised by Open Bookmarks is how to format a universal position indicator for an ebook. Formatting discrepancies between platforms make word or paragraph counts unreliable. A combination of text string and percentage of progress through the text looks like a good solution, but text string plus page number would do that job equally well. It would also have the considerable added benefit of being compatible between digital and physical; not only could you use a citation taken from an ebook and look it up in the print edition, I could use a written citation to look up the same passage in the ebook simply by keying in the page number. The system would support automated linking, but would not be wholly reliant on it to work.

Shortcut to concensus

Page numbering is easily implementable by different ereading platforms3 and publishers without recourse to a working committee. A new common standard for ebook citations would be more complicated to engineer, would require technical and political accord between Amazon and Apple (and every other ereading platform) – and would make no sense to readers of a print edition.

Transposing pagination to the screen presents options unavailable in print but compatible with print: what if it were possible to map more than one pagination scheme – hardback and paperback for example – to a single ebook, and allow the reader to choose depending on which edition her friends are reading? Or imagine a Project Gutenberg ebook of Wuthering Heights that offered the pagination of several editions past and present – a boon for scholars dealing with a range of secondary sources that each cite a different edition.4

When is a page not a page?

Pagination is not without its challenges. There is of course a dissonance between the experience of pagination in print and on screen that readers will have to get used to. Moving from one screen page to the next will not always cause the page number to change, or it may change in increments of more than one, depending on the device being used and the type size. However, I don’t think this will prove insurmountably baffling, and there are numerous options for visual cues to keep the reader comfortably oriented.

What about ebooks with no print edition? Could we see the artificial allocation of ‘page’ numbers to books that have never been typeset onto actual pages? How would that work? Actually typesetting as a book just to discover page numbers would be ludicrous, so how about an agreed standard – a new page begins every 300 words?5 If artificial pagination is implemented, what happens if the publisher subsequently decides to issue a print version? The ebook pagination could be updated to match that of the print edition, but what then happens to citations made with the original scheme? Again, the ability to embed more than one pagination scheme in an ebook could be the answer.

Amazon says its move is a response to the demands of readers. Could it be that, in eschewing the trappings of print and trying to figure out solutions exclusively for ebooks, we have overlooked the obvious, common-sense solution that has been under our noses the whole time?

1. The utility-defying page edge metaphor in iBooks for example
2. Some Notes on Notes Part One & Part Two
3. Assuming, that is, that Amazon hasn’t found some ingenious way to patent electronic use a centuries-old print convention.
4. How would this affect classics publishers like Penguin, who often enjoy the status of edition of choice for set texts in classrooms? Could they claim copy protection on pagination?
5. Electronic word counters are notoriously inconsistent – for this to work, it would have to be a calculation made by the publisher, with particular words being identified as the first (or last) on a given ‘page’ – that way, the artificial pagination could be consistent across different file formats an ereading platforms. Also, by defining the page breaks at publisher level, a rigid common standard for per-page word count would not be strictly necessary, though it would make the system more intuitive for readers to use.

Living on an island

Rather than sign up to an open bookmarking standard, the likes of Amazon may prefer to stick to proprietary systems in the hope of making their platform (in this case Kindle) more attractive than the competition. In a world where some platforms don’t support annotation at all, a good proprietary solution is indeed a selling point, another reason for readers to spend their time and money on one island in the digital ecosystem rather than another.

This could work for publishers too. Imagine a classics platform with a robust, capable and easy to use notes and citations system built in. That’s the kind of added value that could help Penguin, for example, retain its academic market despite the availability of many classics as free digital editions.

The hope here is twofold: first, that notes and bookmarking of any sort become so commonplace that their proprietary value is eroded; second, that there is enough momentum behind Open Bookmarks or something similar that proprietary systems that don’t play nicely with the common standard will become a disadvantage.1

A Pirates’ Charter?

The ability to take text from a book and use it externally will no doubt worry some publishers. That’s why copy and paste functionality is disabled so often in ebooks. A couple of points on this:

1.  Telling publishers that DRM is counterproductive and piracy can be good for business isn’t the answer. That’s a philosophical argument that will run and run. The main practical consideration should be: Does this make copying your book any easier, or make it appear more legitimate?2 By imposing a reasonable restriction on the size of an individual clipping, it should be easy to answer no to this question, without seriously impeding legitimate annotation activity. If there’s a less laborious method open to the determined or casual copyright infringer (and there always will be) piracy should not be an issue here.

2. Shared notes are an opportunity rather than a threat. Clicking on a passage shared by another reader should take me to that passage in my own copy of the text – if I don’t already own a copy, the link could give me options for purchasing one.3

Editions and addition

For that to work, there has to be compatibility between different editions. If you bought a book on iBooks and I own it on Kindle, we should still be able to use each other’s notes with our own editions and, as far as possible, neither of us should be presented with links to purchase a book for one platform that we already own on another.

For citations, this ability to locate a referenced passage in different iterations of the same book would be an improvement on the current ISBN and page-number system, which only works for a single print edition.

Since page numbers are already meaningless in reflowing text, it ought to be (relatively) straightforward to devise a common system for pinpointing a passage in what essentially are differently-wrapped packages of the same text – something like the paragraph-linking system used by the New York Times for example.

Things get more tricky when the text changes though. In print, this happens only with a new edition, which comes with its own ISBN and pagination, and would be cited independently of previous editions. But digital offers the possibility of a more fluid approach to changing the text, with updates and corrections feeding through as and when author and publisher want to make them. In that scenario, place identifiers based solely on numbers – either a paragraph/sentence number or a percentage of the text – would quickly break down. A system that combined a text search with a percentage, with an algorithm that allowed some leeway, would be more robust, but would eventually break under the weight of heavy revision. Many books will never be heavily revised of course, but it isn’t hard to see the possibility of some taking on a mutable, evolving nature akin to a Wikipedia article. James Bridle has written about the historiographic importance of the edit history in Wikipedia and it strikes me that a similar system would prove valuable for ebooks. Clearly such a project presents many potential challenges and benefits beyond the scope of this essay, but one thing it would offer is a way for notes and citations not only to remain intact as a book gets updated, but also for them to be viewed within the context of that process of change.

1. That’s not to say that there will be no room for proprietary systems. To be effective, a good common standard should be as simple as possible, and would therefore leave room for additional features to be built on top of it.
2. As Mike Shatzkin points out, publishers use DRM to deter casual sharing, rather than believing it prevents piracy altogethr. Anything the publisher or retailer does to facilitate casual sharing will legitimise it, and is therefore a cause for concern. The ability to copy and paste the the entire text in one go would fall into that category.
3. This would likely be via a third-party extension of some sort, rather than baked into the core bookmarking system.

I have a collection of battered Penguin Classics from my student days. They are full of underlinings and jottings in the margin where I’ve identified passages pertinent to a particular essay question. For a long time, I also kept envelopes stuffed with small pieces of paper, on which I had transcribed the relevant passages, along with similar notes from other sources and my own thoughts. I used these makeshift index cards to structure my essays, the writing of which would require transcribing once again any quotations I wanted to include.

In a world of digital text, there really ought to be an easier way. A better way.

And yet, not all ebook platforms support annotation. And those that do, tend to do so in ways that are incompatible with each other, or keep the notes restricted to the confines of their walled gardens. Gathering, storing, using and sharing notes from multiple sources remains far too laborious.

James Bridle has put a flag in the ground with his fledgling Open Bookmarks project. His essay offers a thoughtful perspective on the book as a temporal object, and how annotation can bring this function into the digital realm. Here I’m going to add my own thoughts on the utility of a digital annotation system – how it might be used and how it might work.

The Web leads the way

Like many of the technical problems that trouble ebooks, the question of notes has already been substantially addressed by the web. Social bookmarking sites like Diigo and Delicious make it very easy to capture, annotate and archive material from around the web. For a long time, my favourite online tool was Google Notebook, the now tragically discontinued notes and clippings service. This isn’t the place to wax lyrical about GNote’s many benefits, or the brain-twisting time I’ve had trying to replace it. Suffice it to say that among it’s many charms was a quick and simple web clipper. With minimal fuss, a passage of text or an image on a website could be highlighted and clipped to a Notebook. A link back to the original page was included automatically, and additional notes and tags could be added.

This is very much the kind of thing I’d like to see for ebooks – in fact, I’d like to see the same tool work for both ebooks and the web, because in this as in many other contexts, there is no meaningful distinction between them.1

What is a note?

In the physical world, a note may be a section of text highlighted or underlined, and/or an annotation added in the margin, or at the back of a book, or captured somewhere external to the book (for instance, in a commonplace book, on an index card, or in a file (physical or electronic). These annotations may refer specifically to a word or passage, or more generally to a chapter, section or the entire book. In the electronic world, we should be able to make, store, use and share notes containing excerpted text (or pictures, video or audio for that matter), our own annotations, and a reliable reference back to the source.

At its most basic, this requires the ability to highlight and copy text, and automatically embed metadata about the source.

For academic use, a proper citation will be required, and the metadata contained within a note should be robust enough to serve that need. It should include title, author, publisher and edition, along with an indicator of the position within the text (the equivalent of a page reference). For citations in electronically published works, a hyperlink would best serve the latter purpose. A short URL service could form the basis of a convention for citing ebooks in print.2 For editions with a print equivalent, an actual page reference could also be included, though this would be more of an optional extra than a core requirement, since there will not always be an equivalent publication in print.

The best of both worlds

With pbooks, annotation can be a divisive subject. Some people highlight, underline, dog-ear and scrawl on the pages while others can’t bear the idea of defacing their books, and make their notes somewhere external.3 There are pros and cons to both approaches. Directly annotated books provide a useful reminder when rereading, but can get in the way if you want to experience the text afresh; those battered Penguins of mine are a great window back to my years of study, but if I ever want to read Tess of the D’Urbevilles for pleasure, the last thing I want is a text filtered through a list of essay questions.4 External notes require passages to be transcribed, and the notes themselves need filing, but can be used more flexibly and in combination with notes relating to other books or sources. A digital notes system ought to be able to combine the best elements of both. Notes and highlights (ones own or those shared by others) could be displayed on top of the text, or hidden; Each note should, without the need for duplication of effort on the part of the reader making the note, also exist as a discrete external entity that can be viewed and used alongside notes from multiple sources.

I wrote this post in much the same way as I did my student essays – with each point on a separate card, which I then rearranged into (I hope) a coherent argument. The difference is that I did all that on screen, using Scrivener.5

A notes system that covered the basics (text clipping and metadata to identify the source) could be made into a truly rich resource by third party products. An app like Scrivener could potentially allow me to import quotes from ebooks, and add properly-formatted citations as end notes. Tools could be developed to clip sections of audio and video along with metadata identifying the source. All my notes from myriad electronic media could be stored alongside each other, organised with cross-referencing hyperlinks and a flexible tagging system. The possibilities for note-sharing and collaborative work are immense. Once extracted from (but forever linked to) their point of origin, notes could be used in many more imaginative ways than I can think of. We just need the tools to set them free. Open Bookmarks may well provide those tools.

In  Part 2, I’ll look at some of the barriers to an open notes and bookmarks system, and how they might be overcome.

1. I’m not talking about technical differences, which are many, vexatious, and largely artificial. I’m talking about the common sense view that any digital text may contain a nugget of information I want to clip, save and use elsewhere.
2. There is some legitimate concern around the longevity of URL-shortening services, so this would have to be something robust; with the backing of publishers and academic institutions, this ought to be easily achievable.
3. Again, James Bridle has some interesting thoughts on this.
4. With this problem in mind, I made most of my notes in pencil, with the intention of erasing them at a later date. That’ll definitely happen.
5. A lovely writing project management tool for Mac and – soon – Windows.

Inprint Books is picking a fight. “Books vs Ebooks” it proclaims on its website. It’s the kind of battle cry calculated to get some attention by the new kid in a crowded playground, and it works.

Three videos, including the one below, and three radio spots pit “Walter”, a book voiced in reassuring Scottish tones3 against the “E-Text 5000 Pro”, an ereader with a dodgy speech synthesiser.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The message is clear. Ebooks are cold and robotic. “Real” books on the other hand are cosy, tactile and trustworthy.

“We don’t do ebooks”, Imprint proudly proclaims. What they do do, is gorgeously crafted “real” books. The covers aren’t printed, but assembled by hand from laser-cut layers of coloured card, while the endpapers are screenprinted, again by hand.

A desirable product and a great marketing campaign, built around some ingenious misdirection – “We don’t do ebooks” is a much snappier slogan than “we do nicer, more expensive editions of existing books.”

The ebook they present as an opponent is something of a straw man, capable of only simple black and white text and devoid of any capacity for pleasing visual design. But that’s not really the point. Inprint aren’t really on an anti-ebook crusade. They’re not trying to convince confirmed ebookers, or the curious but undecided. They’re not really even preaching to the converted. They’re simply hitching their wagon to the horse most people are talking about, using humour and a little mild controversy.

There are five titles in the first series: Great expectations, 1984, To Kill a Mockingbird, Papillon and Trainspotting. At £25 each or £100 for the set, they’re clearly a luxury purchase. Which, in the context of the marketing, raises an interesting question: between the ereader and Inprint’s luxuriousy hand-assembled tomes, which would you be most likely to actually read?

Inprint is appealing for title suggestions for its next series. Readers are invited to fill in the blank: “My favourite book is __________ and I would love Inprint publish their own version of it.” These are editions aimed – explicitly – at people who have already read them. People who, I expect, will keep them pristine on the shelf, and return to their trusty, well-thumbed paperback if they want to read them again.

I love books, particularly those that strive to be beautiful objects – I’ve even had a hand in some myself.4. A shelf full of Inprint editions would be fine thing. And yet… and yet… something about this fetishism makes me uneasy. It’s like too much icing and not enough cake. There isn’t a single photo of the inside of one of these books on the site, nor any mention of the typesetting5 – they’re books to be looked at, not read. They’d look great on the shelf, but I’d be reluctant to crack the spine, let alone read one in the bath or on a lilo – the very places the ads chastise ebooks as unsuitable for.

The Inprint campaign worked: it made me aware of, and covet, their books.6 But it also made part of me want to get back to the basics, to the words between the covers. Rather than setting me against ebooks, it actually fuelled an excitement for them – and not the enhanced variety either, but the utilitarian, nothing but the text kind. A desire to forget about arranging the shelves and just read something.

1. by clicking on the purchase link, which brings up the information I’d missed. A humbling lesson in the importance of research
2. Which answers the nagging questions I had about how hand-made books could be viable at this price point, especially with in-copyright titles.
3. Surveys have shown Scottish accents are considered trustworthy, a phenomenon long known to advertisers and call centre companies
4. See my illustration website if you’re interested
5. UPDATE – according to Philippa’s comment below, Matthew has typeset the insides of these books…now that’s attention to detail.
6. Ok, so they’re not actually for sale. But the campaign really worked, in that it brought Matthew Young to my attention – I think he’ll go far.

The same goes for the evolution of the book. We can talk in general terms about how changing conditions will produce new species of book1 but we can’t make detailed predictions with any certainty because the evolutionary steps cannot be circumvented.

Not that people aren’t trying, of course. Penguin bills its “amplified edition” of Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth as “a whole new way of interacting with the story.” This seems largely to revolve around interrupting your reading to watch adverts for clips of a new TV adaptation. It’s the equivalent of stitching wings onto the back of a monkey; not only is the unfortunate creature unable to fly, it is encumbered by useless appendages that impede its existing abilities, and neither state of affairs will be helped by pushing it optimistically from a tenth floor window.2

“Continue the research, Smithers”3

More interesting and more effective are the small, iterative steps that might seem to advance the form only a short distance, but actually make all the difference. Ebooks and audiobooks have been around for years – Enhanced Editions put them together and created a little bit of magic. The key here being that, given the right environment (the iPhone) these two forms are a good match, with the reader being able to move fairly seamlessly back and forth between the two. Another audio-related development – Bardowl – is launching soon. I met founder Chris Book at the recent Futurebook drinks, and it sounds like an intriguing proposition; a library of audiobooks streamed to mobile devices, available via a monthly subscription. Neither the content nor the delivery mechanism is new, but as far as I’m aware, this combination of them is.

One thing Enhanced Editions and Bardowl have in common is an awareness of the importance of analytics4. Evoulution in the digital world doesn’t have to rely only on binary, life or death, feedback of sales numbers. By monitoring usage patterns, companies can build a rich picture of the strengths and weaknesses of their product, and fine tune them accordingly5. This increases the rate at which small steps can be taken and speeds up the process of evolution. I may never see a flying monkey, but the book equivalent (whatever that turns out to be) is a much closer prospect.

1. A new species that will not supplant the book as we know it, but thrive alongside it. See “Evolution, not extinction” for more on this.
2. A word in Penguin’s defence here. Even if this bombs (and it very well may not), at least they’re getting their hands dirty and experimenting; after all, failure is the best route to success. Plus, at least one of the app’s features – character biographies that update as you progress through the book, avoiding spoilers – is pretty clever.
3. I’d dearly like to embed a Simpsons clip here, but Fox seem to be doing a good job of keeping them off Youtube.
4. see this talk given by Enhanced Editions’ Peter Collingridge at the Tools of Change conference
5. This process may, of course, reveal Penguin’s approach with Pillars to be a huge hit with consumers. I think it’s horrible, but as Jeff Bezos says, data trumps intuition every time

Let’s look at some of print’s innate properties that give it an edge, and see how ebooks can evolve to tip the balance in their favour.

Typography

Print is fixed, and as such can be fixed in ways that are beautiful and, more importantly, maximise readability. Electronic text can be resized and reflowed on the go; an invaluable asset to readers with visual impairments. But the results are often crude and ugly, detracting from function as well as aesthetics. Smarter text flowing software coupled with greater processing power can go a long way to tackling this problem, provided there is serious recognition among publishers and readers that it is a problem that needs tackling, and not just something for design geeks to get hot under the collar about.

Right now, if you can comfortably read a book at the size it is set, print wins this one hands down. When typographic rigour can be brought to fluid text on a screen, even if it never quite matches the precision of a skilled human typesetter, the added flexibility will make ebooks the net winner in this category.

Disposable Longevity

A book is something you can keep for a hundred years, or lose on the beach without filing an insurance claim.1 Conversely, ebooks combine ephemeral files that be unusable in a decade, with expensive technology you’d think twice about taking into certain environments.

Whether you want an object to cherish to years to come, or one you can take anywhere without worrying about the cost, pbooks win hands down at the moment.

So how can the gap be narrowed?

Technology tends to fall in price, and it’s certainly conceivable that basic ereaders will become so cheap as to be effectively disposable.2 Cloud-based storage and retrieval systems could address the problems of lost files and obsolete devices. For now though, ebooks with the same disposable longevity as pbooks seem a long way off.

An indivisible whole

Unlike music or films, when you buy a book, you don’t need a separate appliance in order to consume the content. A book is the equivalent of a CD or DVD that plays itself.

Not so with the ebook. An epub, a PDF or any other electronic format is useless without an expensive device on which to display it. This separation of device and content changes our relationship with the book, dividing our response to it in two. This presents a problem for publishers. Faced with the shortcomings of ebooks compared with their printed cousins, consumers are apt to blame the file, and the company that supplied it. But when considering the benefits – such as the ability to store and transport many books, to search the text and look up words – they may well ascribe that value to the shiny new device they spent a large sum of money on.

The net result? Despite being sold on the benefits of ebooks, the consumer feels that as purchases, they are worth less than their printed counterparts.

This is not the first time content and device have been separated – audiobooks have been around for years, and consumers have accepted them as a higher priced alternative to print. So what are the lessons here?

First, most people already have music playing equipment of some kind, so although audiobooks require a delivery device, in most cases they don’t require a big-ticket purchase in order to try one for the first time. With ebooks, it is the multifunctional devices we own, or will own, anyway – mobile phones, tablet computers – rather than dedicated ereaders, that provide the simplest introduction to electronic reading.

Secondly, audiobooks provide an experience that is sufficiently distinct from reading from the page to justify the expense. It’s not only the ability to ‘read’ while driving, running, or ironing. A good reader adds something to a book that simply isn’t available in any other format.

That’s what ebooks will evolve into: an experience unique to its format and unavailable in any other.

Expanding the scope of ebooks

Ebooks can, and should, go further in replicating some of the properties of print – improvements in typography and some mechanism for assuring longevity would be huge steps – but there will always be a portion of the print experience that remains unique to print. However, ebooks are already developing capabilities unavailable in print, and there remains huge scope for further expansion in this direction.

1. Granted, the latter may not apply if you do the former first.
2. What I’m looking at here is the way we use books and how far new technology can replicate that; the obvious environmental concerns are a subject for another post.

First up, The British Library has made Lewis Carroll’s original manuscript (titled Alice’s Adventures Underground) available to view in its entirety online as part of its virtual books project.

The content is fantastic: scans of all 91 hand-written pages, complete with Carroll’s own illustrations, along with a transcription and audio recording. It’s a great research tool, but the presentation – and therefore the reading experience – leaves something to be desired. The Adobe Shockwave plugin allows viewing with a rather awkward page-turning animation. The alternative is to view each page as an individual jpeg. Unfortunately the site layout means that one cannot click directly from one to the next at legible size.

Next we have the Vook edition. Vook’s stock in trade is ebooks with multimedia enhancements. In this case, we have the text of the published version (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland), including John Tenniel’s illustrations, along with some supplementary video segments.

I’m not a huge fan of the Vook approach – the illustrations are poorly presented, the video feels intrusive and the text is littered with distracting underlined links pointing to word definitions at various different external sites1. A good reminder that evolution does not necessarily mean improvement.

A far more inventive and enticing multimedia edition is this one from Atomic Antelope. Bringing colour and movement to Tenniel’s illustrations, the app also uses the interactive capabilities of the iPad to create an experience unique to that platform.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Speaking of editions that make the most of their form, this entry in Penguin’s clothbound classics range is a fine example of the continued vitality of the printed book. Coralie Bickford-Smith’s design is a celebration of the book as physical object2.

So, we have variety of products, at a variety of prices. The British Library scans are free to view. The Vook costs $1.99 for iPad and iPhone (£1.29 and £1.79 respectively in the UK app store), and $2.99 for an online version. Atomic Antelope’s Alice for the iPad is £5.49/$9, and has a free ‘lite’ version. Penguin’s clothbound classic is priced at £12.99/$20.00.

And all this some 146 years after Carroll first committed his story to paper.

1. In fairness, I should say this assessment is based on the free preview at vook.com. It may be that the actual app differs, but on the basis of this promotional material, I wasn’t inclined to pay to find out
2. Disclosure: I worked on this series as a cover artworker

We all know what immersive reading feels like. It’s what happens when you look up from the page and realise the weather has changed outside, or you’ve gone three stops too far on the train, missed a meal, or stayed up so late it’s hardly worth going to bed. It’s that feeling of being taken fully inside the world of the story and held there, utterly absorbed. That’s the feeling that has to be bottled if enahnced ebooks and the devices they run on are ever to be truly embraced as a part of mainstream reading.

Separating fact from fiction

When ebook skeptics talk about the feel of a book in their hands, or the smell of the pages, I doubt they have a car manual1 or a physics textbook in mind. There’s an easy case to be made for enhanced, electronic versions of purely functional, extractive reference material. It doesn’t take up shelf space, and a short video demonstration is going to make changing the spark plugs on your cherished VW Camper a much more strightforward task. We look to these books for a particular piece of information, and generally count them successful if they give us what we’re looking for in as short a time as possible. In print, they are already enhanced with diagrams anyway – motion graphics and an audio commentary are a natural extension of this utility.2

Narrative is a different matter.

We don’t dive into a novel looking for the answer to a particular question, unless the question is “what happens next.”3 The same goes for narrative non-fiction. Our interest in a biography, history or popular science book may be piquied by the desire to learn something, but it’s the narrative engagement that provides the pleasure and the impetus to keep reading if we don’t absolutely have to. That’s the experience that, by association, creates the emotional and physical attachment to the book as a physical object.

Focus on the story

So what makes a novel immersive? there are three factors that I think contribute to immersiveness.

• The quality of the storytelling
• The ability of the reader to focus attention on the story
• The extent to which the reader can respond imaginatively to the story

The first is clearly the most important, and is itself a combination of many factors. But this is what writers and publishers focus on already, so let’s take it as read and concentrate on the other two. In short, we want to be able to focus on the story without distraction, and to have our imaginative response range freely. Here’s a diagram to show what I mean.

Yes, I know. It’s horribly reductive to present the sublime experience of reading in a format that belongs in a physics text book. But bear with me.

At the most basic level, the situation depicted above requires nothing more than the text, well presented on a device that’s comfortable to hold and to read, and which doesn’t intrude on the reading experience. For my money, the mass market paperback is a pretty high benchmark here. Even if the physical ergonomics can be taken care of by device manufacturers, publishers still need to deliver text in a way that will display both clearly and accurately. Every OCR error, every typographic anomaly, is an irritation and a barrier that breaks the immersive spell between reader and story.

Driven to distraction

Throw into the mix multimedia enhancements, hyperlinks, social networking opportunities and the like, and the number of potential distractions grows exponentially. Multifunctional devices put all these distractions within easy tapping distance, but that’s no reason to bring them right onto the page alongside the text. We already have media like that; they are called websites, and while they are wonderful for all kinds of things, immersive narrative is not one of them. The web is immersive in its own way, as anyone knows who has spent an entire afternoon playing follow the link, only to end up with scores of tabs open in their browser, mounting stress levels and only a faint recollection of what it was they were looking for in the first place.

In the lower part of our diagram, at the very least we want the additional features to keep out of the way and not distract us from the text. Anything that is not a part of telling the story should reside far enough below the surface of the book to be unobtrusive, yet close enough to be summoned quickly and intuitively when required.

Some features can be used to assist our concentration. Subtly integrated notes for example would allow the reader to call up additional information when needed and dismiss it, without leaving the page. This would be less of a distraction than pbook endnotes, which require flipping back and forth between pages. Synchronising text to audiobook is a brilliantly simple, powerful feature of some Enhanced Editions iPhone appbooks. It improves immersiveness by overcoming an obstacle commuters face every day: namely, having to read in short bursts. Now, you can read from the screen while sat on the tube, and switch to audio to continue the book seamlessly while changing trains or walking the rest of the way to your destination. You can tell they’ve really thought about the device, how it is used, and how to put its capabilities to use in service of the story and the reader.

Returning to the diagram, features like these act as a  lens, focusing the readers attention even more on the story.

In the upper portion of the diagram, what we want to avoid is anything that trammels our imaginative response to the text. Take an embedded video clip, for example. One notion I’ve seen mentioned would be to package Sense and Sensibility with snippets from the film version. This strikes me as a terrible idea. Not only would it be likely to fail the first test and distract attention away from the text, it also fails the second, by imposing Colin Firth’s interpretation of Mr Darcy onto the reader’s imagination. All without any of the compensations of a full film viewing experience.

The worst case scenario is a reading experience cluttered with visual distractions that disperse rather than focus the attention, coupled with content which confines the imaginative response to the text.One of the strengths of the iPad is that the software has been designed from the ground up for the touch screen interface, with the aim of providing a capable, intuitive and fun user experience. Software designed for keyboard and mouse just doesn’t play nicely when you’re trying to interact with your fingers on a screen. Instead of bringing you closer to whatever you’re working with, it adds an extra layer of frustration. Ultimately, I think we’ll see a similar development with books, with  content conceived with tablets in mind as their primary or even only delivery mechanism. These will find ways of integrating different media in a much more intuitive and seamless way. Immersive transmedia stories are a real possibility, and an exciting one at that. I just wonder to what extent they can be successfully created around long-form prose primarily intended to be read from start to finish.

1. Though there are some lovely examples
2. This 2004 paper by Alex Humphreys is an interesting analysis of the different properties of immersive and extractive books, and the implications for ebooks.
3. Unless we’re students of course. I spent three years of an English degree reading great works of literature through the filter of essay questions and it took me a long time to recover the ability to read immersively, purely for pleasure.

The thing is, evolution doesn’t really work like that, and this image is no more apt for publishing than it is for biology. Instead, think of books as Darwin’s finches, taking off from the mainland of ink on paper, and populating an archipelago of electronic devices. Each island has its own unique terrain and ecosystem. Screen size, the availability of colour, of motion graphics, of touch screen or keyboard input, the presence or absence of network connections, GPS, accelerometers, all the contours and constraints of hardware an software; these are the cliff faces, the watering holes, the high and low branches with which the migrants have to contend and to which, like the finches of the Galapagos, they must adapt.

Arriving on these new shores, books will encounter other species and, unbound by biological constraints, they will mate. Strange inter-species couplings like something from J.G. Ballard will occur;  books combining with video, with audio and with software; vast orgies of books and entire social networks. The progeny of these unions will be many and varied. Some clumsy and ungainly at first, others brilliant and revolutionary. Some will perish quickly while others thrive, passing on their succesful characteristics to future generations.

Already new species are emerging, with a rather awkward nomenclature – enhanced ebooks, vooks and so on. As the evolutionary process progresses, we will need new names and new ways of talking about the species that emerge. The real divergence will come with content created specifically for these new habitats, rather than simply as alternate versions of projects conceived primarily for print. In some cases these species may deviate so far from what we know as a book that any allusion to that word in their name will be inappropriate. The book will have evolved to such a degree that it no longer makes sense to call it a book.

What a dismal prospect it would be, this brave new world in which the book disappears, supplanted for all time by its upstart descendants. The thing to remember though is that evolution is not a linear progression, but a process of creating new branches on an ever-growing tree; the emergence of a new species does not necessarily mean the demise of its predecessor. Yes, some species do disappear, either through extinction or incremental change. Evolution can be a messy business, replete with false starts and dead ends. Even vigorously healthy and successful branches can wither or be cut short. But the overall result of evolution is variety and abundance.

Generations of adapting to new environments changed those Galapagos birds into something very different from their ancestors, but back on the mainland, the earlier version remained handsomely adapted to its surroundings and continued to flourish. Similarly, the emergence of ebooks and their as yet unknown and unnamed descendants, should not necessarily herald the demise of the book as we know it, which remains eminently suited to its ink-on-paper habitat. And just because something is possible in an electronic habitat does not mean it is a requirement in every case. As long as people retain the desire to tell one another stories in words, the book and its close electronic cousins will continue as part of a richer and more diverse ecosystem.

The real engine of evolution is competition for resources, and here the Galapagos analogy breaks down somewhat. Unlike the geographically isolated bird species, pbooks and ebooks are in direct competition for the same resources – the time, attention and in many cases money of the reader, (not to mention those of the creator and the publisher). This competition will drive the evolution of print books as well as their electronic counterparts. The most succesful species will be those that excel in a given area, whether that is quality of presentation, content or price. And the reader will benefit. At one end printed books will have to work a little harder to justify their place on the shelf, while ebooks will offer increasingly valuable experiences and utility.

Lest this sound entirely utopian, it should be noted that survival does not connote any objective merit, merely a level of success within the constraints of a given time and place. Some great ideas will fall by the wayside, and some less than great ones will prosper. This is nothing new, as a visit to any high street bookshop or a flick through the TV guide will attest. But, there are many and varied paths to success, and with the capability of electronic distribution to support long tail demand, the level of success required to survive is lower. What we will get is experiments, innovation and above all variety. Fantastic, joyous, thrilling and boundless variety.