it helps us define expectations about what this
experience is going to be. If you look at apps that
are on the line between book and app, if they
didn’t come with the label “book” you wouldn’t
necessarily perceive them as a book: it is a
collection of content, you may be navigating in

a way that is totally non linear, but once you put
the book label on it, certain expectations that we
inherit from the codex.

That includes expectations about a book as
something you are engaging with deeply,
something that presents an idea or set of
ideas, and something that, I would argue, has
the potential to change the reader. Unlike a
magazine or an app that presents content or
headlines, when you open a book you have

this sense that you are going to be having an
experience that is coherent and that has the
potential to leave you as a different person even
if that just means a person with a different idea
of the world, a different idea about a particular
topic or a different set of knowledge.

CM: If we were to think in a longer time line,
subjecting ebooks to the historical perspective
of the codex or even movable type, what do you
foresee in this digital transition, transformation,
translation?

AS: I think a lot about video games. We are really
on the early stages of recognizing video games
as part of our cultural repertoire, we still think
of them as gadgets or distractions. There a lot
of folks out there making the argument that a
video game is an important form of narrative,
especially for younger people who spend more
time with video games than any other media,
and we are seeing examples of video games that
really do tell a story, have a creative vision, and
have challenging content.. If you think about
ebooks as experiences that might converge with
the way video games are experienced or the way
some very interactive websites are experienced,
we can anticipate a time when ebooks will
become a part of our cultural repertoire, as one
form of narrative that we may enjoy alongside
film, gaming or traditional reading.

Right now the vast majority of ebook experiences
are linear. Many people talk about the possibility
for ebooks to become more like the “choose your
own adventure” books that were popular for a
while. That starts to bring us closer to video
games: the idea that the reader would actually
shape the experience of the narrative, the order
in which the text is experienced or the order in
which the content is navigated.

CM: Would you discuss some of the major
affordances you see developing around ebooks?

AS: Ebooks open the door to engaging with so
many forms of creativity and skill within the
Emily Carr community, from illustration to film
making, and from print design to interaction
design. You might even get into thinking
creatively about the ebook as an experience in

a way that our performance art students and
faculty will have very interesting ideas around.

Ebooks are amenable to all of those different
forms of creativity because of the parameters of
the devices themselves. With an Android tablet
or iPad you can do anything you can do in a web
browser, and actually more than that because
they are gesture and touch-based. You can have
simulated tactile experiences which engage

us in a synesthetic way: you can have a title in
which when somebody slams the door, your
tablet physically vibrates. You can have a book
where if you tip the tablet the text slides off the
screen, because most of these tablets have an
accelerometer.

The part that interests me the most is that you
can have titles that are deeply social; we are
now having an experience of the web through
social media where interaction and conversation
is an expected part of the web experience; that
expectation is coming to the book. The idea of
a book as a solitary engagement is really deeply
embedded in our culture. Younger people who
are growing up with this ubiquitous social
layer in everything they do, because they are
constantly facebooking and texting, are actually
nostalgic or protective of that solitary quality of

“We are really opening up the possibility of what a book can be, and

introducing all sorts of interactive elements, multimedia, and social
elements that challenge our conventional notions of books.”