INTERVIEW WITH
ALEXANDRA
SAMUEL /CELESTE MARTIN

JANUARY 12, 2012 /

CELESTE MARTIN: We are here today with
Alexandra Samuel, director of the Social and
Interactive Media Centre (SIM) at Emily Carr.
The SIM Centre has been engaged in eBook
development in the last year through a wide
range of projects involving design students and
industry partners. How would you characterize
Design’s contribution to the future of the book?

ALEXANDRA SAMUEL: The whole idea of the book
is breaking down because of this evolution
from the printed codex to the digital book, first
through e-readers like the Amazon Kindle and
the Nook, and now with the advent of tablet
devices, most notably the iPad. 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.
And once you start bringing in those kinds of
media elements and those design possibilities
the design of the book becomes so much more
than just font selection or layout and becomes
really part of the way a book is conceived,
developed and even written.

CM: Can you illuminate us a bit on the ebook
ecology? Who are the major stakeholders and
what do you see them gaining access to?

AS: Sure. To create an enhanced ebook you need
a much wider range of expertise than what it
takes to publish a traditional book. With a tablet
book you are starting to blur the lines between
book and app, so the team of people it takes to
create a title might include a software architect,
a software developer, an interaction designer, a
communication design team who are thinking
about how the book will look but also how it
will function. You may have various kinds of
media artists; if you are incorporating video,

you might have a videographer, a director, a
whole film crew in fact, going into the process
of building that title. [lustrators, sound
engineers, it is almost limitless.

And the other part that changes is the role of
the reader; we are used to the reader as this
passive vessel into whom the book’s content

is poured. But when you look at a title that
includes interactivity, or even just collaborative
annotation, the notes that I read, the highlights
somebody else has left, are able to become
part of the book’s content. So, I think it’s
reasonable to think about readers as partners
in the creation of the book and in some

sense co-authors of that book or that reading
experienice.

CM: Interesting; so, within this context, how
useful is the term ebook? Should we instead
being talking about (digital) device-based
reading, digital literature, new media literacies,
or some thing else?

AS: It’s still useful to talk about books as
opposed to reading, because reading is going
to fail to describe a lot of what might happen
in an ebook. So, for example, if we were to
talk about a traditional coffee table book that
might be a collection of photography or a
catalogue it’s not really accurate to describe
that as reading when you are flipping through
photographs. When you are looking at an
ebook that includes elements of film or image,
photography, illustration, interaction, reading
may only be a portion of what you are doing
when you are using that title and it may be
actually totally beside the point, you might
have not any text within the title at all.

Arguably for that reason you might want to
dispense with the label of book as well, but I
think that book is still a useful term because