Should Jonathan Stone do Twitter?
"Bradley Inman wants to create great fiction, dramatic online video and compelling Twitter stream[s]—and then roll them all into a multimedia hybrid that is tailored to the rapidly growing number of digital reading devices." - New York Times.
The TeleRead take: I’ve got mixed—very mixed—feelings about this.
In The Solomon Scandals, my reporter protagonist can’t bypass the in-house censors to get out an expose of an advertiser’s shoddy construction practices. Now what about the fiction of the future? Will the added costs of creating mediamedia fiction mean that novels become like Jon Stone’s newspaper—where the profit motive helps push aside truth and quality? Will multimedia fiction be more TVish in the worst ways? I’m fine with movie adaptations, since the original text still exists; but will multimedia novels drive away the quirky, old-fashioned variety?
I’m wildly in favor of multimedia nonfiction, especially for, say, textbooks, but will Inman-style novels kill off the kind I prefer? The Times correctly notes that "tradition-minded readers" will ask: "Would we have classics like The Great Gatsby if F. Scott Fitzgerald was distracted by the need to give Gatsby a Twitter account?" Inman responds: “I don’t think we are compromising the written word. People will to continue to read, just in new ways. Books are finally coming online. but they are very one-dimensional. I think we can experiment and do this better.” Maybe. But are we better off making books more like television? Inman’s Web address is Vook.tv. What does that tell you? Oh, and what’s this about books "finally" reaching the Net? Project Gutenberg has been around for decades. Don’t classics count? If not, that’s one more reason to think that Inman cares less about lit than tech.
The book promo angle: Already, I believe, some book promoters are having characters Twitter after the books are out. That’s a different matter from building Tweets into the books in the first place. What happens when "readers" interact with Tweetbots?
And the standards angle: The more complex you make books technically, the more chance of mucking them up with proprietary standards—and making fiction less durable.
Related: The Inman Twitter stream.
April 5th, 2009 at 6:29 am
Twitter, Vook and what will likely be an ever more crowded field have one goal in common.
Reaching people for whom the Net is TV-with-the-irritation-of-reading.
When Sara Nelson chirps to the Times, “Publishers are going to be confronted with the idea that either the words on the page have to be completely compelling on their own, or they have to figure out a way to create new sorts of subliminal draws in the new medium,” the rich irony of books that can’t cut it as books being shot up with the collagen of video and Twitter presents itself. Pucker up, bookywooky.
It’s sad to see publishing thrashing about so, like a triple-bypass Boomer trying to crunk dance. Attempting to retrofit an industry built on reading to a society bent on watching is going to produce some real monsters.
April 5th, 2009 at 7:08 am
Thank you, David, for insights and concerns well-expressed.
Experiments are good, and Mr. Inman’s work should spark some interest in new forms of publishing, in general. As Picasso reminded us: “The purpose of art is to create enthusiasm.”
But in promoting his experiment, Mr. Inman should be careful to distinguish literature from souped-up PowerPoint presentations. Claiming that the “vook” is an advance over “text-only” books is a claim that I will need to see before I believe it.
April 5th, 2009 at 12:39 pm
Years ago, I was a fan of adventure-style games. These were text-based adventures that required user imagination, spatial sense, puzzle-solving, and could contain a strong narrative line (although many did not). They could also be created by a single developer, working alone. I wonder when the last text-based adventure game was published.
I absolutely agree that massive multimedia is a mixed blessing when it comes to fiction. Even if it were free and easy (and not all authors are creative with media as they are with words), it still takes away from the essential nature of a novel. I know that movies can be better than books, but it sure isn’t the usual result.
Rob Preece
Publisher
April 5th, 2009 at 2:43 pm
I am somewhat in agreement with Richard, although I have to say that, like David, my feelings are massively mixed on this.
On the one hand, I can see that this is the way at least certain variant forms of literature are heading. In and of itself, I don’t think that’s a bad thing. The earliest “hypertext novels” I’ve seen were either abysmal failures of mere adult variations of Choose Your Own Adventure. But the boundaries have barely begun to be explored, and I think it’s well within the range of possibility that someone(s) will come a multimedia reading “experience” that will simply redefine the whole way we look at literature.
Having said that, the reason (good) novels, poems, short stories, etc., work, is because they adhere to certain conventions. In this case, that’s the use of text and text alone. (Notice I didn’t say anything about how that text was transmitted - on that point, I don’t think it matters.) With very few exceptions, that serve to prove the rule, I think. So while new forms of literature will almost certainly develop, there will remain a place for text-alone, e.g., books as we currently know them.
As to how popular the respective forms will be, who knows. But the kids, they are a-changin’. It may be easier to leap from MySpace to a multimedia “book”, and it may be hard to produce reasons why they should.