These chats will probably start with text, although you could easily imagine chats happening in a face-to-face way, with video as well as audio. I can even see authors meeting with journalists and interviewers in the actual pages of their books and conducting the interviews within the books, so that the interviews themselves become part of the reading experience. “Meet me in the chapter on the future,” I’ll say to any journalist, because that’s where I’ll talk to them, right here on this page. The book can become the home where you’ll find the readers, as well as the author.
But even once a book is done being read, the interaction between reader and author doesn’t end. Some readers are privileged. They’re either authors themselves or cultural influencers. Typically, the reviews they write often appear on the backs of book jackets or in the first few pages of a book as testimonials to would-be readers.
This concept is archaic in the digital space, because by downloading any Kindle book, you’re going to be taken past these testimonials. You’ll be plunked down right at the prologue or chapter one. The testimonials may well be in the content, but few readers will notice them. The only place for such book reviews will likely be in the pages of legacy stalwarts like the LA Times or The New York Review of Books, periodicals that are swiftly moving into digital format themselves, making the reviews and testimonials even harder to find as they vie for our attention with pop-up ads and Facebook games animated right there on your screen.
Paradoxically, the arbiters of taste will likely no longer be professional book reviewers but readers themselves, people like you and me. It’s a continuation of the trend Amazon started with its own book reviews, in which anyone can contribute a review for a book and the reviews can be as long or as short as you like. The inherent democracy thus provided is a sensible gauge, more sure perhaps and certainly less biased than the most astute of paid reviewers. Amazon has done a remarkable job with this and still has a leg up on Apple and Google and all the others. Even if you’ve chosen to buy Apple content for your iPad reading pleasure, you’ll still often find yourself going to Amazon to read its reviews first.
Interestingly, some Amazon reviews are better than the products themselves—not only can they be entertaining, but they’re social commentary too. I’m thinking in particular about the Denon AKDL1 Dedicated Link Cable or the “Three Wolf Moon” T-shirt or Tuscan whole milk, all of which can be found on Amazon.com. I can read these reviews all afternoon long, laughing my ass off. The reviews likely started as reactions to odd products or high prices—the Denon product is a stereo cable that retails for $999, and a gallon of Tuscan milk sells for $45.
Hipsters started writing reviews to mock the products, contriving fictional reasons for why the products are so expensive—with the laughable results that the milk reviews read like those for high-priced wines (“best paired with fresh macadamia nut scones”). And the Denon cable, these reviews suggest, can transmit music from your stereo faster than the speed of light, with the unfortunate side effect of summoning legions of devils into your home.
The “Three Wolf Moon” T-shirt, with its mawkish and unintentionally hilarious design, soared into mock popularity due to hundreds of irreverent hipster product reviews and found itself to be a top-selling item in Amazon’s clothing store. In fact, I think Amazon should consider publishing a book of their best and most infamous product reviews!
The digital space has already started transforming the engagement between author and reader, and that process will only continue to accelerate along the lines I described above. How long will it be before we see a book written as a series of comments on an Amazon product review? How long before we see a novel published only on Facebook as a series of posts, a novel that is inherently viral?
Epistolary fiction used to be popular—that is, fiction based on exchanges of letters—but I think we’ll start to see more fiction shaped by the forces (and mannerisms) of social networks. This has already been happening in Japan, where the first cell phone novel comprised of text messages was sold in 2003. It became so wildly popular that a franchise of print books, manga, TV shows, and a movie was spun off from it. There are cell phone applications available in South Africa specifically targeted at letting you write—and receive—novels in text-message format.
In cell phone novels, you receive text messages directly from the author. If you’ve got an unlimited text message plan on your phone, I totally encourage you to try one of these books—just search for “cell phone novel” on the web and look for a book that’s interesting! These books are written in a sparse, sublime style. They come at you like text messages from a friend. And yes, they have tension. Intrigue. And suspense. And in some of these, you can write back to the author to ask for clarification or a change in the plot.
For the first time, authors and readers are able to talk directly with one another. Reading has always been a solitary pursuit, and even book clubs have been small affairs. But now book discussions can cross nations’ lines. There’s no limit to how many readers can cram into a chat room or participate online with Facebook or Twitter. Now, at last, ebooks have ignited the conversation between authors and readers.
If that’s not engagement, what is?
Bookmark: Autographs
Personally, I find book autographs amusing. I look at them like calling cards from the late 1800s, which date back to a more demure, genteel time. But that said, I too have autographed books in my collection. And I’m not alone. Many fans and book aficionados collect author’s autographs, not just because a signed book is more valuable, but because it solidifies a connection between reader and author. It brings you closer to the work, as close as you can come without being a character in a book.
One day people will talk about print books in a wonderful folkloric way, as if to say, “You know, people once met with the author in person, presented a book to him, and had him sign it with his own hands! In ink!” Sadly, in the ebook world, autographs don’t quite make sense. You can sign the back of a Kindle, but that can maybe hold two or three signatures before it runs out of space. More if you use a tablet e-reader, of course. And besides, the autographs will smudge off.
Inventors are even now coming up with complex Rube Goldberg ways of making autographs work digitally, involving complex combinations of Wi-Fi and flash drives and digital cameras and custom software, but there’s nothing like print to let you see the nuances of a signature, the quality and personality of an author’s penmanship.
True, you could have a feature on an e-reader that lets an author dictate the autograph and say something like, “Dear Mary, you look great today. Thanks for buying this book. Hugs and kisses, Mark Twain,” or even something like an embedded video to show you standing with the author, a camera in the back of an iPad perhaps being used to capture you and embed the footage into the book itself. It’s a way to take an old metaphor from the past and reclothe it for the future. Rather than trying to get complex systems in place to emulate autographs, I think inventors would be better off creating new features that only work digitally.