In a departure from my usual posting about the historical past, I write today about the history being made in our present: The digital revolution and how it is transforming the way we read and experience narrative.
By the end of 2010, 10.5 million people owned an eReader of some form. An estimated 20+ million will read on an eReader or a tablet PC by the end of 2011. EReaders and tablets represent perhaps the fastest growing market in the history of capitalism, which has led many to ask: Is the book dying?
Well, yes, in a solid, physical sense anyway, the book may be dying. But the good news is that people are still reading and, as evidenced by the numbers above, they may be reading more than ever before.
The even better news? Story is alive and well.
I’m just back from two professional conferences dedicated to the dual experiences of creating and consuming story:
Digital Book World (DBW) and the
Society for Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI).
One conference focused on the various media through which story can now be experienced – computers, eReaders, mobile devices – but lacked any real discussion of what makes good creative content. The other was all about great content, but the discussion was perilously behind, even resistant to, the ways in which new media might be used to serve that content.
By example, everywhere I turned at SCBWI, people were talking about books. “Are you writing a book?” “Tell me about your next book.” “I just signed my third book.” When a participant asked a top editor of a major house, “to whom should I submit an idea for an app?”, the answer was “pitch your book through the usual channels and if we think it would make good app, we’ll take it from there”.
But in this age of choice between print or eBooks, apps or socially-networked gaming worlds, it is possible to create a story that won’t work as a book, that may be better suited, as in the case of the Time Traveler Tours interactive storyapps, to mobile device.
It’s time to stop talking about “books” and to focus on Story.
These days, it should be the story that determines the medium, not the other way around. And it’s imperative that members of the traditional publishing industry recognize this because until they do, they’ve lost their role as curators of content. Hence, as Rick Richter of Ruckus Media observes, there are 30,000 apps for kids but only 3,000 worth buying.
In this not-so-brave world of electronic reading devices and smart phones, the boundaries of Story and storytelling are being exploded like never before. Stories are no longer limited to the experience of reading on a page. They can now be read on a screen, or listened to, or played with. They can be expanded such that one can enter into whole story worlds with multiple plots, characters, and perspectives. Through transmedia and networked games, "readers" are transformed as well, no longer merely consuming stories, they experience and even participate in creating them.
Just as the oral tradition of passing on stories through the storyteller gave way to the development of writing systems, ink and parchment gave way to the printing press, paper and binding, so too have digital media given us new opportunities to share stories in myriad untapped ways.
We need to let go of the term “book” in order to shed the semantic connotation that that word implies. It’s time for digital media creators and story curators to hook up, collaborate and develop excellent content across all platforms, both digital and print.
It’s time to let Story speak for itself.
Coming soon: Beware Madame la Guillotine for iPhone and iPod Touch.
Paris History in the Palm of your Hand.
Friday, September 23, 2011 at 7:42AM Tweet 
