On Storytelling
February 16th, 2010
Sure, it’s Chip Kidd’s nightmare and neglects entire sub-genres of modern literature, but to me, the relative homogenization of story formats on the Kindle is great. It’s making me read more often and with less prejudice.
I’ve often wondered about the gap between the story an author creates and the experience had by readers. I’m not thinking of the changes that come at the hand of editors, but rather the effects of the design and marketing process. The number of words per page, the typography, the stock, the cover – all variables that shape the reading experience.
The Kindle – and probably other e-ink readers – displays all books with the same detachment. All texts are reduced to…text. The typefaces are basically standardized and the font size is under the control of the reader. Even the display of the reader’s current “position” in the story is abstracted from physical page count and instead shown as a percentage. Reading on the Kindle is – and I say this with endearment – like reading a digital copy of the original manuscript on a word processor.
This consistency of presentation along with the nearly non-existent display of covers and marketing effort in the Kindle store leads me to pick more widely than if I were ordering a hard copy online or standing in a bookstore. There’s no distraction. No salesmanship or reification of marketing fluff via design.
I’m sure there is a downside to this, but so far, as a reader, I can’t find it. Each book I read stands on the merit of the words, and the words alone.
It actually feels more intimate, in a way. The reader and the author communicating without much noise in between and around the channel separates the story from the package. It’s cool.
Enter iPad?
Surely, the iPad will help spark new forms of storytelling the same way hypertext helped inspire lit movements. I can’t wait to see the first few generations of touch-based, mobile literature. My mind races happily along each time I imagine journalism, poetry, and prose five years from now.
But, much like a time machine – only able to travel back to the moment it was invented – I think there will always be a place for Kindle-like devices because new interactive platforms will probably just get in the way of texts developed for plain-text display and that classic format is both intensely front-loaded and clearly here to stay.
