Reading 2.0

Michael Dain, Wednesday, December 12, 2007 @ 9:08 am

This weekend three events got me thinking about books. First of all seeing the excellent adaptation of Pullman's The Golden Compass. I had read the books quite a while back, I think around the time of the beginning of the Potter mania. What surprised me was the previews before the film started. New movies of yet more fantastic adventures of boys and girls with magical creatures, etc, but all revolving around books. The two previews were for the Spiderwick Chronicles and something called Inkmore or some such thing. I suppose it is not a new theme that "a book takes you to another world". The Pullman series, much in the vein of fantasy or scifi, presents an alternate universe to mirror and critique our own. Once turned to a movie, however, the book's themes are washed out a bit due to the nature of editing and visualization. In these other films Spiderwick, and inksomething the writing and reading of particular books itself leads the characters into danger and drama. I suppose, thinking of last years blockbuster, if the wardrobe in the titular novel was instead a paperback, it would present the same theme. Pro-book sentiment is laudable, but something rings hollow in the visualization layer, all these movies tend to look alike. If it wasn't for the acting, the effects and costumes of Compass (and the other two from the preview) reminds you of just about every movie made since "Lord of the rings". So it is actually the book itself that has the most distinguishing characteristics, there is no way to confuse the prose of "Rings" with the language of "Compass", but the movies look the same (and have similar actors). So is the magic world so vividly imagined truly available only on the printed page since special effects have become so sophisticated, yet commonplace?

So while thinking of the written word, I notice Chicago is blanketed recently with ads on the CTA for the Sony Reader. Perhaps related to last months launch of Amazon's Kindle. While I am intrigued by the introduction of these devices, I have a good friend at www.manybooks.net who is a purveyor of online books, and who has been kind enough to let me play with and use these devices. I suppose a recent viewing of 2001 reminded me of what bothers me about them, the scene when the astronauts sit to eat their meal, they have a paper thin TV they carry with them. The TV has no outward controls, but can be manipulated somehow. If ebooks looked and acted like pieces of paper, wouldn't that be the ideal user interface? Seeing all the buttons on these readers causes me to wonder how people are expected to interact with their books. I think the turning of pages is clear enough, but what do the 21 vs 54 buttons achieve that 4, 5 or 0 could not? I can't look at these devices and not think of remote controls or cellphones or a variety of user experiences based on reading and understanding 100 page manuals. Is the ideal somehow like the iphone, you touch the page and it 'acts like paper'? Perhaps it is impossible to not have to manipulate the interface, and that leads to a lack of immersion in the story?

The third event I spoke of was reaching the climax of Moby Dick which has taken me the better part of a year to get through because I receive it as a daily email (250 installments) from dailylit.com. After recommending the Compass movie to a co-worker, they asked if they should read the book first. This struck me as a quite old-fashioned sentiment. Will you get more out of a movie if you have read it first? Personally, I find it impossible in the age of ubiquitous computing to make time to read a novel with blogposts (*ahem*) websites and other distractions. Dailylit cleverly proposes that if you have time to read all your emails, you have time to read a book, abeit chapter by chapter. Taken in small doses, you can tackle a large subject. Moby Dick, due to a somewhat schizophrenic narrative structure, made for a perfect daily short email, and I kept with the story for all these months, and can even think of picking up the actual book for a real read someday. Perhaps the business model is what is really in question, some books and movies make millions while other authors are embracing electronic distribution to try and build readership much like myspace does for new bands.

What are your thoughts on the written word? Are these films/devices only lip service to the wonders of reading? Can we consume the written word within the electronic one without being hopelessly distracted? Or having to read the manual?

user experience design

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1. 

   — “all these movies tend to look alike”

   I won’t touch that comment except to suggest that it’s due to the computer animation common to all these movies. The large groups of people required to build a scene just aren’t capable of the balletic sequencing of regular films, I’d guess.

   – “I think the turning of pages is clear enough, but what do the 21 vs 54 buttons achieve that 4, 5 or 0 could not?”

   Think of the first Sharp Wizard circa 1989 http://images.pcworld.com/news/graphics/123950-Gadget48-Sharp-Wizard_b.jpg and all of the buttons required to keep your schedule, compared to the ubiquitous (and probably dying) Palm circa 2007 http://www.bargainpda.com/assets/4272.jpg — button-mania vs. decent-restraint — I suspect that we’re looking at the early, poorly-thought-out Wizards of the ebook reader evolutionary path. With that said, I see these current devices as attempts to lock down the sales of electronic documents, or to cement the use of a particular DRM scheme, not as particularly well intentioned introductions to the delights of reading sans paper.

   Speaking of the Palm, I might nominate the Palm TX as the easiest device to read texts with — though the screen is small, it was easy to pick a title from a list, scroll through a document (or click), and the backlight was nice.

   And the iPhone might be good in a similar vein, though I’m surprised to find that the lack of physical buttons is actually kind of hard to get used to. The screen is better than a Palm TX, and it’s easier to carry around than a Kindle would be (pockets!), but I miss having an actual button that I can feel. Maybe someone will re-purpose the up-down volume button for paging when the iPhone SDK is released in February?

   – “Are these films/devices only lip service to the wonders of reading? Can we consume the written word within the electronic one without being hopelessly distracted?”

   I can certainly read without distraction on any of these devices, with a little practice… and it took some practice to be able to read a regular book, if I recall 1st grade accurately. But I think you’re right about the current devices only paying lip-service to reading — they’re really about selling files and locking down markets.

   – “Or having to read the manual?”

   Oh come on — the only things you don’t have to “read the manual” for are things that already exist, or are similar enough to things you’ve already mastered that they’re indistinguishable from that pre-existing device. That would mean they’d have no new capabilities!

   P.S. Real books won’t disappear. We’ll just have more to read!

   Comment by Matthew McClintock, Friday, December 14, 2007 @ 6:47 pm

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