Recently I have been working on the design of an e-publishing prototype on tablet devices targeted to self-publishing authors, partnered with Ricky Wong, an MBA student from Insead. From some of the voices in the field I heard so far, the current trend of e-reading experience design is how to create innovative reading experiences and again, make it something social. But I already saw some mistakes people are making as they try to interpret the meaning of “social reading experiences”.
The first common mistake is equalizing “social interaction” with “social media interaction” when it comes to user experience design. For example, Copia aims to build a “truly social reading experience” by synchronizing your Facebook and Twitter account. And one of the iBook charm is that as you highlight a part of the text, it will give you information about how many times this part of text is being highlighted by other people.
Personally I really like the statistical method of endorsing the text, a succinct indication of how popular the sentence is. But for the reader the feature is almost useless. If a reader is to be convinced of the value of the book, the best voice to be heard is the persuasion of the critics and tribal readers. The promising thing I see from that is not from a reader’s perspective but the self-publisher. Researching the market and estimating social influence of the book are the two most difficult things for a self-publisher to do on their own. (Under the premise that self-publisher is someone who regards writing as a profession and who is interested in commercial and cultural value of their writing).
Smashwords and Amazon Digital Text Platform made publishing your own book to Kindle and iPad possible. But neither of them resolves the problem before and after publishing the book. The e-publishing service we are designing aimed to respond to the need for creating continual dynamics between the author, as an aid for the authors to find out more about their audience, sourcing ideas and collecting opinion for writing. If we keep talking more about reading experience without switching the view between the readers and authors, it is very likely we will be create some services that neither of the author or the reader would really want.
The fact that social media tend to create “one-size-fits-all” experiences has become more problematic when we use it as a syntax to foster affiliations in a reading society. For relationships developed through reading is quite different from other social networks. Even now we can claim friendly relationship with more than 100 people, we can only share maybe 1 out of the 100 people the tastes for the language, books and thoughts. Reading is an experience built upon a lot of common grounds. And the bigger the common ground, the more unsharable the experiences is. The attempt of “pulling in as much relationships as possible” does not point to a better experience when it comes to reading and writing.
Some tech savvy authors have provided really insightful opinion about how writing and publishing will be like in the future, how they should adjust themselves to get ready for the new trends and what they really want to claim from the e-readers. (These resources including Peter Meyer’s presentation from TOC e-publishing conference, an interview with novelist Justine Musk, and UCLA e-publishing panel discussion)
