Vooking
by Gary Phillips
In this past Sunday’s front page story in the L.A. Times, “Beyond the Words” by Alex Pham and David Sarno, there’s a passage more chilling than the chest burster ripping out of John Hurt in the first Alien.
“Digital technology is also transforming reading from a famously solitary experience into a social one.”
Damn, damn, damn. Except for using the can, and that’s easily monitored by fiber optic nanny cams, is there no place to be left alone and unconnected to read in this most wired of all eras? Can’t I just turn off the TV and the CD player and silence the Xbox, and sit and begin that obscure novel a friend told me about at a party? Well, yes, I can still just do that, but seems Vook has other ideas in that regard. Vook, not to be confused with Nook, the e-reader from Barnes and Noble, is a mash-up word combining video and book. This service offers readers the multimedia book experience on a given title.
Vook uses the tech tools of the day to trick out the reading thing as cool as the publisher’s or writer’s pocketbook can stand. As chronicled in the LAT article, for Anne Rice’s extended short story, “The Master of Rampling Gate” (originally published in Redbook magazine in 1984), the Vook folks added an interview with Rice and others about vampires, her influences and so forth. There’s hyperlinks in the text that cover the geography traveled in the story and historical data as well. Vook also does the book trailer a la movie teaser to hook potential readers.
From Cape Town with Love is a mystery-thriller written by husband and wife Tananarive Due and Steve Barnes (who are somewhat unique, with her being a black woman primarily writing in the horror genre, and he a black sci-fi writer—though I know he also cranked out episodes of Baywatch—yee-gads!) and actor Blair Underwood. This is the third novel featuring a troubleshooting edgy character named Tennyson Hardwick, who is Underwood’s alter ego. On the three covers of the books, Underwood is pictured (okay, Casanegra is of a man in a suit shot from the back but I’m betting it’s him) and the Vook book trailer of From Cape Town plays like a movie teaser with Underwood as Hardwick.
Previously I’ve written about the bells and whistles being used now to deliver books to an audience and said such was a good thing. Indeed, slowly but inevitably I’m inching toward publishing my backlist of out-of-print mystery novels on Kindle, iPad, and any other dadgum electronic format I know of and can figure out how to put my books on them. A writer friend of mine, Kent Harrington, who has produced well-written, compelling novels like Red Jungle and The Good Physician, but not corresponding stellar sales, has done his latest book, Satellite Circus, solely in downloadable format.
I’m not retracting what I’ve hyped for I too await the day the multimedia version of Violent Spring will be unveiled for all to marvel. The mystery, set about a year and a half after the ’92 riots, is the full-length debut of my private eye Ivan Monk and explores the social and racial landscape of the city about a year and a half out from that event. Archival TV news footage, audio from radio broadcasts, a motion comics segment (which incorporate voiceovers, music, pans, zooms and limited animation like moving lips—echoing back to the old Clutch Cargo and Space Angel cartoons that used human lips in drawn faces, a technique the animators termed, in a Philip K. Dickian way, Synchro-Vox), interviews of grassroots leaders and pols then and now, and links to Oki’s Dog and other hangouts I mention in the book will make it one sweet deal.
But it does occur to me I would prefer readers to read the text first, then, akin to accessing the extras on a DVD, go back through the book to utilize the enhancers that take you out of the main story. Or say when they’ve finished reading chapters at a given time and go back through what they’ve read to use those enhancers. Of course people are people and the younger the reader, the more there’s a chance they’ll be clicking and segueing through the tale as they go. I wonder though if there’s a way to create blocks on the links so that you had to have at least scrolled through a particular chapter before they’re “unlocked.”
University College London not too long ago completed a study of online research habits. Nick Carr wrote about the report in a 2008 article in The Atlantic, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”
They [the authors of the report] found that people using the sites exhibited “a form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited. They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would “bounce” out to another site.
He also quoted from the report directly:
It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.
There’s back and forth about the long-term effects the Internet is having on our brains in general. Some argue their research shows increased activity in the part of the brain concerning complex reasoning. Carr, in his recent book The Shallows, building on his article, examines the work neurologists are doing as they contrast the neural pathways traditional reading has dug in our brains versus how surfing the ’net literally shapes it.
No wonder then books are getting written in text message lengths. Japanese schoolgirls pioneered a style called keitai shousetsu, roughly mobile phone novel, some three years ago. Some of these serial novels went on to sell hundreds of thousands in hardcopy. Rick Riordan, a mid-list mystery writer before he struck gold with the Percy Jackson YA (young adult) series, tried his hand at writing a story on Twitter with little success. But now there’s Textnovel.com, accessed via cell phones or computers, and it has launched a star. The LAT piece highlighted former middle school teacher Shannon Reinbold-Gee who banged out her 85,000 word werewolf teens tome, 13 to Life, in five weeks. She wrote the book in an interactive fashion, asking readers on the site about certain plot points to get their feedback, determining where she’d go next in her story. Reinbold-Gee, who writes as Shannon Delany, won the site’s first annual contest and got a three-book deal with St. Martin’s.
E-book sales are up, but hardcopy fare remains king. Though this stat released on Monday from a press release from Amazon.com, creators of the Kindle e-reader, is sobering: “Over the past three months, for every 100 hardcover books Amazon.com has sold, it has sold 143 Kindle books. Over the past month, for every 100 hardcover books Amazon.com has sold, it has sold 180 Kindle books.”
The venerable publishing house Farrar, Straus and Giroux (these days part of the massive Holtzbrinck Group) combines the old and new. They still make books the old-fashioned way, but have pulled the curtain back and, via its fsgworksinprogreess.com site, has interviews with its authors, vids of them doing a reading, and chats with others at the publisher involved with getting a particular book to the shelves.
Taking its cue from Netflix has come BookSwim.com. This is a service like the DVD one, where you pay a subscription and rent X amount of books for an unlimited time with free shipping. According to the BookSwim honchos, 80% of their members are library users, mostly soccer moms, who read between 40 and 50 books a year and buy as many as 30 titles annually.
Okay. I shall retire now to my sanctum sanctorum, a snifter of brand and a maduro cigar close at hand, as I sit back in my plush chair and read from the yellowing pages of a book plucked at random from my library’s shelf. Comforted in the belief that what Gutenberg wrought over five hundred years ago isn’t dead yet—reading remains a fine and solitary pursuit.
Vook that.
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