Editions at Play is the new Google bookstore, and it is a brand new idea of bringing pages to life, of adding interactive elements and of bringing old-fashioned books into the 21st century. Stop us if you've heard that before. As with ebooks before them, as with Choose Your Own Adventure books before that, this new Editions at Play idea puts the reader at the center of the action. It's meant to solve the problem of people not reading much, by meaning they don't have to read much.
Each of these technologies have appealing elements, except perhaps for Choose Your Own Adventure paperbacks, which were just rubbish. With Editions at Play, the attraction boils down to how it looks quite nice on an iOS screen (there is a note alongside some of the few titles currently available which says "This book doesn't like every device, please look before buying"). Other than that, the books are short pieces of text that you nip quickly between. That's it.
Consequently, right underneath the come-on description "We sell books that cannot be printed," Editions at Play lists books with title, author, a five- or six-word description, and how long it will take you to read. That's how we pick books: forget whether they're interesting.
That's not to say that the two titles are in any way bad, nor is it to say that you need quantity to be good. Production issues mean that physical books need to be over a certain length, and we've all read material that was mercilessly padded, so often enough short is good. Actually, let a story be the length it needs to be, to be the length it earns, rather than impose constraints: that's what we've really got with digital, yet maybe it's too dull a benefit to promote. Editions at Play strongly promotes how long it's going to take you to read a book, and of course that's definitely our criteria.
From a non-US perspective, the listing of how it's going to take you 30 minutes to read
The Truth about Cats & Dogs is like the line we see on some American forms. When you're flying into the States, you may get a Visa Waiver Form if you're coming from a eligible country, and somewhere on it there is a note about how long it should take you to fill it out. You have to fill it out, or you aren't getting off the plane, so telling us how long it will take is worthless information. It's not like we're going to have to pump iron for a bit to get fit to fill out a form. In the same way, the fact that it's going to take an entire hour to read
Entrances & Exits by Reif Larsen is pretty much worthless information. Certainly it doesn't belong up there before a description of what it's about.
There is just this assumption that people aren't reading much these days, and so the way to get them is say look, look, it's easy and it won't take you long, honest. By emphasizing how easy it is and putting that first, Editions at Play is really supporting the notion that reading is hard, and that you need to be cajoled into it -- like eating your vegetables or getting fit. It all sounds good, and these books look well-designed, but they're trying to tell people who don't read books that they should read books -- and they're trying to tell them this within an online bookstore. People who don't read books don't go into online bookstores.
If you are someone who does, if you are a reader, then ironically there is little here to capture your attention. Whether you're a reader or not, if you do go into the catalog, you will see how few books there are on this. Doubtlessly that will change, but for now there are two. Two entire books. Two more are coming later this spring, and the online store also lists six "Ideas for Books" which comprise a couple of pages -- or "napkins" -- about them. Not one of those ideas says anything whatsoever about the stories they might tell in fiction, or the subjects they might cover in non-fiction. Instead, they talk about how good it would be if you could tap a word and it would create another story.
Or how maybe the book could be embedded in your cerebral cortex and, presumably, cut out this entire tiresome business of reading altogether. That's how we pick books: forget whether the thriller is thrilling, we want pages that monitor our heart rate.
Digital has true advantages -- it is thrilling to be able to hear, say, Virginia Woolf's own voice when you're reading a biography of this 19th century writer -- but the benefits are in exploiting new areas and new possibilities. They are not in taking the core issue of reading and reducing that down to chunks that are easily digestible in every sense.
We're
MacNN, we're a technology news service, but we know tech is a deeply important part of our world, we just recognize that it's a part. It isn't necessarily superior, it isn't necessarily worse, it is a part. Giving someone a technology-driven book that they won't look at because it's called a book, and readers won't look at because it's more a pamphlet, doesn't seem to us to achieve anything.
If someone doesn't want to read, tough. Nobody's making them, it's their loss. Rather than telling them they should, or telling readers that technology is of course best, write better books. That's the way to reach people, that's the way to keep a reader's attention. Not to give them a link to a video, and a vow that the horrible reading will all be over soon.
-- William Gallagher (
@WGallagher)
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