The New Literacy of the Book-App

The form of literacy required to engage with a well-authored book-app may be distinct from the skills and techniques utilized to decipher a traditionally bound book. It follows that different literacies may be necessary both to author as well as to read a well-developed book-app.

If this is true, it may be that neither the traditional novel, nor the traditional novelist, is best suited for the book-app. Rather, storytellers who tell stories freed from the archetypical plotline, engaging instead with a new kind of “story”, will create the book-apps that successfully pioneer the emerging media.

Arcadia, a new book-app by Iain Pears, may be one of the earliest narrative book-apps to step in the right direction in creating content to fit the medium. The book-app tells of ten characters’ in three different but connected worlds through a series of inter-related vignettes. It still utilizes a text-based narrative thread, but it does this with a supplemental geographic/temporal “map” of the story. This menu allows viewers to see the way multiple plotlines intersect.

The book aims to be a novel in the author’s words, “minimal graphics, no music and no animations. The reader does not choose outcomes or influence decisions, and there are no prizes or levels.” But the reader does make choices, and the text still feels heavily demanding of the user. Even if the prose entices, the urge to reference the map and “figure out” where one is on the storyline detracts from the invitation to fall into the alternative prose as brilliant novels – even structurally complex pieces of writing – will do. Rather, both right and left brain must be engaged as one navigates and pieces together the various aspects of the plot.

In evaluating this book-app, I thought about how it would be to read it as a paperbound book. Indeed, it may become quite frustrating to flip back and forth between vignette and map. More than likely, a reader would simply read the vignettes straight through, even if encouraged by the author to make their own path as they discover junctions in the various narratives of the story. The app in some ways forces a more engaged reader, if simply by making the act of engaging as simple as a swipe or a click.

Yet in my initial reading, I felt perplexed and rushed as I worked my way through the vignettes (that ever-present pressure to scroll and flip which screens induce) rather than enriched with a new way of seeing the world whole.

And I believe this is what story can do at its best. By making the particular seem universal and finding the personal in what is generally perceived in ambiguities, stories stir in us a momentary sense of the interconnection and completeness within which humans go about their lives. In order to keep this spirit alive, I believe the book-app will need to more acutely separate itself from traditional beginning-middle-end plot lines. Those stories will live on, but they will live on in their traditional form. A story fully written and read in the language and literacy of the book-app will be more innovative – and far less complicated – than the interwoven threads of Arcadia.

Post for 9/25