SFBRP Listeners discussion
#150 Reading Novels and the future
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The tip about the iPod Timer should come in useful. It will prevent me waking up with a flat or nearly flat battery on my iPod and several podcasts marked as read which I don't remember even starting, and no idea how far through I the first one I was when I fell asleep.
There's an App called iTired that let's you set a sleep timer. When the time is about to expire it makes a sound and if you touch, shake the device or move the volume button, it resets the timer. If you miss the timer it resets to the last position in the audio file where you showed sings of being awake. The only caveat is that it only works with audio played in the native Music App.It's 0.99 on the App Store.
http://www.softwaresimians.com/iTired/
There is an E-Book format designed for the blind and learning disabled that matches the text and the audio of a book. It's called DAISY.sadly this format hasn't been adopted by the mainstream publishers and is mainly used by organizations that provide books to the blind and otherwise text challenged.
You can learn more about it here: http://www.daisy.org/
With all the ideas Luke was throwing out for the future of books, I'm surprised he only mentioned choose-your-own-adventures in passing. The ones I read as a kid were kinda lame, but that was mainly because the author had to fit everything into a 200 page book. With ebooks, there's no such constraint and a writer could construct a really intricate story where the reader is faced with difficult moral choices.The Japanese actually have this already. They're called "visual novels" and feature many of the bells-and-whistles Luke suggested in the podcast -- music, sound effects, illustrations and occasional animations -- but the bulk of the game is just sitting there reading text until you come to a decision point. Unfortunately not many have been (legally) translated. There's a recent one called Katawa Shoujo that's available free in English, but it's romance instead of SF (and rather NSFW), though it's still a good example of what the future could hold for books.
Mod
Personally I don't find choose-your-own adventures to be a form of novel. They are like text adventures but in paper form, and far more limited. They are a game that creates a narrative, but totally different from a novel.
As for "visual novels", I'm not going to pretend they appeal to me in any way at all.
One of the main things I want from the "bells and whistles" in future ebook formats is that they are NOT bell-like or whistle-like in any way. I want them to get the fuck out of the way when I'm reading. If they draw attention to themselves, they have failed.
For example, when talking about music, I said it should play music in your own library, stuff you are already familiar with. If it is new, it will just distract you from the text.
Sound effects? I can't think of anything less annoying in a novel. In an audio production it might work, but I found it pretty annoying in The City and The Stars. A soundscape might work, as an ambient thing, but only if I don't notice it too much.
Animations and illustrations are something that must be referenced in the text. I like it when a novel says "She looked at the sign, and it read..." and you see a picture of the sign. ESPECIALLY if there is a clue.
Listen to episode 152, and we talk about "How will you send a message to the future that only people in the future understand as a message?" in the novel End of Eternity. Wouldn't it be fun to play the same game the character is playing? It'll show you twenty adverts in old magazines, and you have to pick out the one which Harlan, the protagonist, notices.
BUT, and this is very import, all the extra material has to be opt-in, and unintrusive. To see how this can go wrong, check out some amazon reviews of the Kindle version of A Fire Upon The Deep.
The visual novels you mention here are novels by name only. You even refer to them as games. And a novel isn't "just sitting there reading text", it's being immersed in the text until you no longer notice the text at all. You aren't meant to be making decisions at all, and as soon as you do, you are sucked out of the text, and no longer reading a novel.
Finally, I don't care that much about what the future holds for books. I care about what the future holds for novels. There is a difference, and to me it is an important one.
Mod
Thanks for this! I know what I'll be installing on my phone tomorrow.
Maybe it's the Zeo.