Nonlinearity

There has been plenty of chatter in the last few weeks about ebooks and ebook readers, technologies which might or might not dramatically transform how we buy and read books. But there has also been the odd item here and there speculating on the future of reading, examining how internet usage might affect how people actually look for and absorb information.

There is a school of thought that says that Gutenberg's invention of the printing press - leading to the demise of the illuminated manuscript and the transfer of knowledge by linear type - actually affected the way that people absorbed ideas and information and that Western Rationalism might not have taken hold without the orderly presentation of text. So it is not implausible to imagine that as more and more knowledge and information is transfered via the internet, with popup windows, embedded video, infographic boxes and all the other eye-catching frippery competing for attention, we might witness significant changes in the way we read, and perhaps in the way we actually think.

This is probably already happening - in The Observer John Naughton quotes a report which described information seeking behaviour as 'horizontal, bouncing, checking and viewing in nature.' Teenagers, I was told today, start reading at the centre of a website moving outwards from the middle when something captures their digitally native eyes.

Of course not all books are linear - our sister company, Dorling Kindersley for example produces the most wonderfully designed and illustrated guides and reference books, but for fiction, generally, linearity is the rule. Beginnings, middles and ends. Words following words.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying that in a few weeks Penguin will be embarking on an experiment in storytelling (yes, another one, I hear you sigh). We've teamed up with some interesting folk and challenged some of our top authors to write brand new stories that take full advantage of the functionalities that the internet has to offer - this will be great writing, but writing in a form that would not have been possible 200, 20 or even 2 years ago. If you want to be alerted when this project launches sign up here - all will be revealed in March.

Jeremy Ettinghausen, Digital Publisher

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Comments

[Dr James Smythe]

This is a fascinating experiment: it'll be interesting to see what authors do with the genre when there's no remediation involved, when they are literally faced with the challenge of creating something for the web from the get-go. I'm a great believer that these texts don't actually have to be non-linear - in fact, I think that's where the concept of internet-specific writing falls down - but, instead, should be focussed around the more hidden frameworks that sit behind them: the indices, the allusions to internet textual forms and so forth.

I've also recently done some research into branching texts, and it'll be interesting to see how these authors approach those branches. Almost uniformly, readers seem to dislike being asked to make the choice for where the text goes, being torn out of the text that way: any choices need to be hidden, without the classic Ian Livingstone-style question of "You are, do you''.

I hope - sincerely hope - that this isn't just being approached as another experiment after the Million Penguins project. The future of reading might not be here quite yet, but it will be soon enough, and authors can start preparing the frameworks now for their texts to make that transition easily, so this will be fascinating to see how this all pans out.

[Morbus Iff]

For other inspirations of web-based hypertexts from nothing, see my Ghyll, which is a Lexicon:

http://www.gamegrene.com/wiki/Main_Page
http://www.gamegrene.com/wiki/Category:Lexicon

It's an encyclopedia, created from scratch, by various authors all constrained to a simple set of rules: everything you write is fact, and you must refer to at least two other encyclopedia entries (whether they exist). Ghyll blossomed into a 300+ page behemoth, with a large timeline and hundreds of characters:

http://www.gamegrene.com/wiki/Encyclopedant_Calendar
http://www.gamegrene.com/wiki/WhoIsWho

I'm looking forward to Penguin's project.

[Jazz&Gigi]

It sounds interesting!

[John Grant]

we played around with some of the same possibilities at st luke's in the mid 1990s when we were creating content for an early trial of interactive television; suddenly you have the potential to give people the option of their own way through parallel story threads & so on

the thing I am looking forward to in non fiction is the straightforward ability to search my library for 'that stat' or source, or quote I remember reading x years ago, would be a great way to browse future purchases too, eg if I could search amazon biz books for a case study on a particular brand

[Dean]

We know inductively that without humanism there would have been no Renaissance. Similarly, as we see in the failure of Wycliff and Hus, both the Reformation and the humanist project were enabled in a serious sense by the existence of cheap, portable and diversified texts. A like claim has often been made for the Internet, especially in such countries as Malaysia and China. Sceptics should look into the recent Malaysiasn election in tadem with online censorship issues in the run-up to it. It's a salutary lesson in how citizen action in a broad cultural forum can predict political change.