HE WAY WE read has changed. For

most twenty-first century readers, read-
ing is a multimedia and multi-platform
activity; a cognitive and material inter-
weaving of texts, images, texts as images,
and images as texts. The problem in this
change, as I see it, is not that contempo-
rary users of textual artifacts do not “read”
in the traditional sense of the word, but
rather that existing texts are ill equipped to
enrich the reading experience and accom-
modate these users. As such, the editorial
designer’s new opportunity and respon-
sibility is to define new ways to deliver
old but culturally significant texts—the
so-called “literary classics”—to these
users. It is time to evolve the book, and this
was the challenge of my Master of Design
thesis project.

I began this project at Emily Carr
owing to my undergraduate background
in literary history and theory. My intent
was to use design methodologies to deliver
classic texts to a generation that grew
up with stories like J.K. Rowling’s Harry
Potter, told through multiple media touch-
points: print books, fan-generated con-
tent, web-based medias, films, and video
games. This is my generation. We are
what Douglas Rushkoff calls the screen-
ager generation [3]. To some scholars and
more skeptical professionals in literary
education, the attention span of this gen-
eration is extremely limited. Our ability
to engage with any text at a critical level
is, supposedly, lesser than our counter-
parts prior to the mid-twentieth century.
For other researchers and profession-
als, the issue is not as clear-cut as, “the
kids aren’t reading”. To them, the kids are
reading differently. Indeed, my interview-
ees for user profiling have demonstrated
that reading is alive and well: the internet
is, for the most part, text. N. Katherine
Hayles proposes a synthesis of digital read-
ing behaviours with non-digital reading
behaviours, and suggests that both digital
and non-digital reading behaviours. A syn-
thesis between the two is key to effective
pedagogical advancements in literacy [1,2].

Adam Cristobal

Evolving the Book

challenges in ebook design for literary classics

With that in mind, how can texts be
brought to life for users in ways that their
original codex forms often fail to do? With
the growing number of ebook forms, the
possibilities of the digital text are endless,
so much so that the term ebook begins
to lose meaning. It is easy to imagine the
graphing of Ux structures from game
design onto an ebook adaptation, and how
these structures might shape the text itself
into something far removed from its origi-
nal form. Moreover, the designer’s role in
this particular publishing process is chang-
ing. Editors, developers, and publishers
increasingly see the value and deeper
applications of designerly techniques and
strategies. This space is quite bountiful,
and many studios currently work within
this space, including Inkle, Simogo, and
Loud Crow Interactive.

My initial exploratory prototypes exper-
imented with radically different modes of
delivering and reimagining a text, includ-
ing gamification and social reading, but
I realized that these approaches were not
quite what I had initially intended. Often,
these adaptations involve rewriting and

interactivity + 39

abridging portions of the text in order to
grow or fit gameplay structures into the
narrative. On a grander scale than my
own prototypes, this kind of adaptation

is demonstrated in Inkle’s Frankenstein
app, which is a choose-your-own-adven-
ture adaptation of Mary Shelley’s nine-
teenth-century text. If we refer back to
Shelley’s original, we might realize that
Inkle’s app is not the book equivalent

of the penny-farthing’s evolution to our
contemporary bicycle. Rather, it is the
book equivalent of bicycle to automo-
bile. Readers no longer pedal themselves
through the text. Instead, Inkle’s rewriting
is a motor that propels the reader through
the text, much asa film adaptation might