The Connected Book: what are the possibilities?

Now that we’ve accepted the ereader, it’s time to look at some of the creative possibilities afforded by digital texts. Publisher of Booksquare.com, Kassia Krozser; author of digital fiction Inanimate Alice and Flight Paths, Kate Pullinger; founder of audio digital library LibriVox, Hugh McGuire; and if:book’s Simon Groth this evening discussed what multilayered media, text enriched with images, sound and interactive features might soon do to revolutionise a bookshelf near you.

What exactly do digital texts offer? Screen-based formats allow for so much more than just reflowable text, Groth said in his introduction, which alone is a huge leap from the print workflow; even the humble hyperlink has the potential to change reading. And then there’s ‘networking to other texts, augmentation through images and other media: a book is not a petri dish, it’s a living thing connected to a wider community’. But how do we capture all the facets of this connection?

To answer this question, Groth asked another. How did Pullinger’s networked novels first come about? In thinking about new forms of writing online, she spent a year thinking about what it meant to put a story on a screen – what that opened up for storytelling. She’s continued to write traditional forms such as short stories, but although Inanimate Alice and Flight Paths both have text at their hearts, they also use music, images and games to tell stories. But is this still a ‘reading’ experience? Groth agreed that it was reading, but perhaps enhanced reading – not gaming, or any other activity.

And how exactly do you publish these digital texts? McGuire started LibriVox in 2005. The website brings readers and listeners together from around the world to publish user-recorded audio of public domain books. In doing this, McGuire said, he’d created a publishing entity that ‘broke every rule’ – they’ve got no quality control process, for example. But it’s extremely productive: around 100 books a month. After that project he thought about how you would create a text publisher that suited the online climate, and he came up with Pressbooks, which is still in its testing phase. Pressbooks uses a blogging platform, WordPress. What was the logic behind this? ‘There’s no technical difference between blogging and writing a book, though the thought process is obviously very different.’

The discussion of these new platforms and user-created content raised the question of what is publishing, and who are publishers? For Kroszer, this depends on how you define a book; a blog, for example, is more like a newspaper or a magazine than a book. Bloggers and readers of blogs might agree that some blog pieces aren’t crafted enough to warrant the process of publishing, marketing, reproducing and distributing. Kroszer though that perhaps pulling some blog posts out and creating a compendium of them would be worth doing if the particular pieces would stand the test of time.

The connected book, though, might be more than just the object or location of text online. Authors can connect with readers in a much more immediate way through social media, Pullinger has found. For example, smartphones can allow you to interact with a story in new ways depending on your location.

McGuire thought that though the core text of what we call a book today might still exist in a particular place on the web – ebooks still look like books, after all – but we will see layers of response to this text, through comments and other reader-generated interactions. The book will be central, core thing, but engagement will compile around and on top of that.

Kroszer was excited by this: ‘You’re making me question the definition of a book!’ She thought that this is a question that everyone in publishing is struggling with. Think of a cookbook: though you might love the idea of a print book with beautiful pictures of the end product, you might want to take an ingredient list to the supermarket. On top of this, readers might want to rate recipes – connect to others’ interpretations of the content.

There were many considered questions from the audience, including one pertaining to new terms for a ‘book’ and even for ‘reading’ – are these nouns appropriate for connected interaction with content? McGuire cheerily joked that even the word ‘content’ was fraught – in some quarters, people ‘will kill you if you describe it as “content” rather than as some kind of sacred text.’

But what do you think? Is ‘book’ going to continue to be a useful term? What about ‘reading’?