A plot twist in the user experience of reading

For someone who used to lead one of Canada’s leading book publishers — the kind of firm that has been criticized for failing to keep up with the times — Cynthia Good sounds pretty knowledgeable about what the next chapter of reading and writing looks like.

I had an opportunity to hear Good, former president of Penguin Canada who now leads the Creative Book Publishing program at Humber College, recently discuss “the evolution of story” to a group of editors and marketing professionals. The early days were simple enough. It consisted of a one-way conversation between writer and reader, “and there was a great distance between the two,” she said. Since then, of course, technology has turned the UX of reading almost completely upside down.

Cynthia Good,
Humber College

“Now everyone is talking to or bombarding the reader,” she said, noting how not only writers but publishers, distributors, reviewers and other third parties all engage with book lovers through digital channels. Perhaps even more significantly, though, the conversation is no longer one-way. “The reader is now approaching the writer … a story becomes a community.”

As Good pointed out, some of the roots of this community have been there from literature’s earliest days. Think about theatres, where a playwright’s work gets interpreted, then reinterpreted, by a director and set of actors. The rise of the Internet, social media and e-books have simply taken that dynamic to greater extremes.

Some of the best examples in Good’s presentation included Martha Baillie’s The Search for Heinrich Schlögel, a novel which is not yet published but which was written in collaboration with a series of people to whom Braillie sent postcards that included pieces of the story. Then there is Lucy Hardin’s Missing Period, a work by Stephen Marche that uses the Web to automate the kind of Choose Your Own Adventure books that were popular in the 80s and 90s. Fan fiction like 50 Shades of Grey and merchandizing tie-ins like the Harry Potter theme park show just how many places a story can travel, she said.

There are some trade-offs to all this community-building, of course. For Good, one of the biggest concerns is about what happens to our collective understanding of literature that is in perpetual beta, a state of intellectual property that transforms through social media and other online channels. “What will we be studying if the text isn’t fixed?” she asked.

This may be an area where Canadian UX design researchers can help, perhaps through versioning software or other mechanisms that capture a work at various modes of creation and revision. The other thing that remains at least somewhat fixed, however, is our memory of what I’ll call the “core” story: what happened, what it meant, how we envisioned it. That inner place where the reader encounters, imagines and feels a story — that’s the one place where, despite all the digital options available to us, we continue to do all the UX design work on our own.