Image: Byook.com
In Salon (@Salon), writer Laura Miller (@magiciansbook) discounts the idea that fiction ebooks must be produced with more and more enhancements to attract and keep readers. In fact, she says those enhancements are distractions to the enjoyment of a well-written book.
Attempts to invigorate books with video and other digital bells and whistles keep bumping up against this fundamental problem: You can’t really pay much attention to anything else while you’re reading, so in order to play with any of these new features, you have to stop reading. If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, then the attentional tug of all these peripheral doodads is vaguely annoying, and if you’re not engaged by the story, they aren’t enough on their own to win you over….
Narrative constructs this alternate reality in your imagination, and narrative sustains it. What matters is not the story on the page — or the screen — but the story in your head. Interactive baubles pull a reader’s attention back to the screen, serving as a reminder of the thing you want to go on forgetting: the fact that all of this is just made up, words on a page. Some enhanced ebook publishers have cottoned onto this problem and as a result they’ve moved away from inserting video or clickable illustrations into their books, and in new directions….
For the most part...fictional narratives, when they work, don’t really need digital enhancements.
For a counterpoint to this article, see our blogpost “How to Build the Pixar of the iPad Age.”
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