At The Guardian’s “The Observer” section, John Naughton looks at a couple of iPad apps that change the way reading works, and suggests that they (and others like them) may be changing the entire “concept” of a book.

One of these is the e-newspaper app of The Economist, the financial paper that has managed to find success behind a paywall. The app, for those who subscribe to the paper or web version, downloads the current edition once a week for offline reading. Naughton finds the iPad reading experience so “genuinely ‘immersive’” that he is left entirely without a use for his paper editions of The Economist, save to pass them along to friends or donate them to a school.

Another is an appbook by David Eagleman, a $7.99 iPad-only publication called Why the Net Matters. As with Stephen Fry’s recent appbook, Eagleman’s arranges the text in a different way than simply static text. It can be read non-sequentially, and has multimedia and hypertextual features to enhance the experience. Eagleman has a YouTube video explaining how it works:

To these examples, I might also add the Disney “e-book” apps that I mentioned the other day, and the other multimedia bells-and-whistles book-related apps that have come out over time. Funny to think that it was not so long ago that an “appbook” was simply an encapsulation of the text of a given e-book into a stand-alone reader so it could be sold in the App Store given the absence of any other way of doing it.

In my Tron post, I wondered just how much non-text you could add to an “e-book” app and still call it an e-book, but Naughton seems to be wondering the inverse of that: with “e-books” changing to include all these other things, how much longer will people still continue to demand plain-vanilla just-boring-words books?

Naughton thinks that “print publishers who wish to thrive in the new environment will not just have to learn new tricks but will also have to tool up. In particular, they will have to add serious in-house technological competencies to their publishing skills.” And I can see where he is coming from with that. The e-writing is certainly on the digital wall: electronic media are here to stay.

But at the same time, whenever someone talks about changing the entire “concept” of anything, my first impulse is to be skeptical. One swallow doesn’t make a summer. And as people in the follow-up comments note, for something like a novel you don’t want all those bells and whistles. Reader DavidGiant writes:

[There] are many many examples which would fail on this platform. Practically any novel. I mean… I don’t want an interactive novel. I tried that, they exist in paper form. I made a choice, turned to page 97 and the protagonist died. With the majority of text books you use your brain in some way to visualise what you are reading. If you do not want to do this you watch a film of the book, a documentary about some real event or a youtube/podcast series to learn something.

Perhaps “if you build it they will come,” but that doesn’t mean they’ll also stop going to the places other people built long before you even started.

7 COMMENTS

  1. These app books don’t sound like they’re any different than the old interactive CD books. That’s fine, if non-fiction is your thing, but bookworms mostly read books without pictures, sequentially. If we wanted pictures, we’d watch a movie instead, or read about something online.

    I happen to prefer “…plain-vanilla just-boring-words books”, my imagination provides a much better image than someone else could.

  2. The term “book” as a category of publication can be used to encompass both print and screen productions, but is it ultimately useful to have a term that is so expansive and yet so legacy inflected? Look at the problems we now have with “newspaper” or “magazine” or “journal” whenever these terms are used for both print and screen productions. And notice how “tweet” or “email” is distinguished from “letter”.

    My guess is that the media composite nature of longer form screen publication will eventually incite its own name. The future of the screen book, as renamed, will then be understood for what it is. Naming is itself an act of definition.

    An obstacle to naming longer form screen publication is the inclination to pose the act as an exercise in projection of the “future of the book. That’s a bad start. Screen delivery is very un-book like to begin with; very transient on a given screen, very mutable in revision, navigation and augmentation, and very disembodied via display application and access routine.

    I know a very good name for a screen book. That would be a teleread.

  3. I’m sorry- a book is something you READ. A video is something you WATCH. You can certainly do both, but watching a video is not reading a books.

    Different media, different genre’s etc. We need to re-think the terminology.

  4. Plain vanilla reading is what I want; but I think I’m becoming more and more of an antique.

    When I read, I want to let my imagination go–to immerse myself in the story. I don’t want someone else’s vision to interfer–to bombard me with distractions to my immersion. How “un-relaxing”!

    I think today’s children’s children will be the first to fully accept this mish mash of words and images as “reading” since we are already hitting their future parents over the head with book/video mixes. They’ll think of it as normal since we aren’t allowing them to develop a love of words and the worlds that words alone can create.

    First, computer games replaced physical playtime. Now publishers want to replace kids’ imaginations. Sad, really.

  5. I suppose I’m an old fuddy-duddy because I, too, just want the text. A few black and white photos in non-fiction are fine. But I don’t want color, audio, video, ads, interactive media, or any other kind of brain crutch. In fact, I’m truly beginning t loathe some novels, for lack of a technical term, written as novelizations to the movie in the author’s head. And as I’ve grown older, I’ve abandoned TV and movies as a form of entertainment because there just nothing left in visual media to capture my interest.

    I know that some readers in the digital book revolution have gotten rid of their paperbound books, but I think it will be wise to horde mine, just in case the future of ebooks goes down the roads of telereading and ads.

  6. I don’t see why. Yes, gone are page numbers but the words, chapters, plot and characters are all in place as static ‘text’ upon a movable ‘page’. They can even be read aloud if need be, just like paper books. It is not a re-definition of the book, but a micro-evolution.

    In my opinion the ‘OMG books are gone 4evar!’ op-ed pieces being to run together…

  7. The trouble with app-books is; who will write them in the first place? Almost anyone can handle the mechanics of typing a book, not everyone knows how to produce and imbed high quality images or videos. JK Rowling is a great storyteller, but I doubt she knows the first thing about android or iOS programming.

    So there may be a small number of works- both well-written and well-programmed, and produced by someone with a story worth telling, that will make good book applications. And of course there will be children’s books and academic books that are really about the illustrations first and the stories second.

    But, most of the best stories will still be told using just plain old text (at least until they make the movie). So that’s what we’ll continue to read.

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