booktwo.org

So, I just finished reading a novel on my phone. Stepping up to the plate, I downloaded Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (which is a blast, by the way) from booksinmyphone.com and gave it a go.

And you know what? It was great. It was easy to read. It didn’t strain my eyes. It slipped into my pocket when I changed tube trains and it jumped straight back to the right place when I slid it open again. Alex has a few good points on problems with booksinmyphone’s interface, but overall the experience was a joy. I was done in a couple of days - slightly above average for me.

I recently had a go at reading Charles Stross’ Accelerando in the ebook version - a similarly great, near-future novel - and gave up about half way and tracked down a paper copy. And in hindsight, the reason was obvious: I was reading it off a laptop. That’s miserable. Put it on a phone, and it immediately becomes wieldable.

My phone is a Nokia N95. It fits in the hand, but has a nice big screen (pictured right, courtesy, again, of Alex) - about 40mm x 55mm. Comparing that to the 100mm x 160mm block of text you get on the average B-Format paperback page means you get about a third of the line length, and a third of the page height. But once again - it really didn’t seem to affect my reading. I even found myself reading it in bed, even when I’d only started out of necessity when I found myself on a bus without a book.

Does that imply it was better? Well, I’m not going to go that far - yet. My paper books don’t run out of batteries, for starters, and the platform is still suffering from format fatigue (Mobipocket has the best range, but they’re still priced too high, and the free stuff doesn’t cut it), but I’ll definitely be reading more this way. And with the recent news that cellphone novels - books not only read but written on mobiles - are beating out the bestsellers in Japan, I’m not the only one.

Brief outline of ideas for locative storytelling (more thoughts originating from here and here).

Goal: To produce a locative storytelling experience, where strands of the story are triggered by the reader/listener’s location.

Tech requirements: GPS-enabled mobile phone, or Google Maps’ new locator function, headphones, application running on Symbian or Windows Mobile (or preferably both…).

Personnel: Writer or team of writers, developer, interface designer, voice actor.

Issues: Low GPS penetration - few handsets currently but set to change rapidly - GMaps not yet accurate enough, at least outside large towns.

Proposal: Create a downloadable application which runs on a mobile device. Each standalone app contains a story, specially created for the medium and a particular location (although it would be possible to edit stories with strong localities for this, the former offers more possibilities).

Running the app spawns a navigation map - either a GMaps overlay or a specially created one (perfectly possible for small areas), showing the user’s location (X, above, wide and zoomed) and the accessible storypoints - location-specific ’shards’ of the story.

As the user moves across the map, they come into contact with the storypoints - close enough, and they trigger the shards associated with that point: scrollable texts, an audio recording, even images or video.

This format offers a number of interesting possibilities for the narrative form, beyond a simple (and still wholly possible) linear structure, such as:

• Multiple entry and exit points
• Threaded/associative storytelling (storypoints only revealed after certain others have been visited)
• … tending to “Choose your own adventure” style
• Surprise shards (hidden storypoints)
• Story as treasure hunt.

To achieve the full potential, it would require a writer prepared to engage with (at least partially) non-linear storytelling.

So, that’s a start. Thoughts? Would be pretty sweet to set one of these up in time for London Lit Plus in the summer…

Further reading:

• The Missing Voice
• And While London Burns
• Navball
• Mscapers

A short story for you, in a different form.

I’m not entirely sold on QR codes, but I like the interaction that they create, a physical bartering with the environment to obtain the message - providing people are willing to do so. There’s also the element of surprise inherent in uncovering the message.

I’d like to see one on a book cover, or chalked on a wall. I might print this one out and paste it around town…

[ No idea what’s going on? Here you go. ]

[ More info on the story. ]

An update on some of the locative stuff I’ve been talking about…

I did get that GPS unit, and thanks to quite a lot of Googling I’ve managed to hack it to my laptop to update my location on Google Maps (screenshot above) - which involved teaching myself rudimentary Python and exploiting my new, poor PHP skills. What I did learn was how fun technology on your own terms is; just as we’re moving past the stage of being passive consumers of TV and other media, so we’re taking control of technology at it’s most base level too. But I digress…

In my research, I’ve discovered I’ve been partially beaten to the punch by more professional services. CrowdScapes uses Yahoo’s ZoneTag service to pull in Flickr photos near your location - at the moment it’s limited to Nokia N-series phones in the US, but you can get a taste by hitting “Launch” and entering your location here. It’s pretty cool.

Patrick from mscapers pointed me towards the fascinating stuff that Hewlett Packard are doing with a bunch of UK artists, mostly centred around their research centre in Bristol, from fun locative games like Hidden Danger UXB! which can be played anywhere (providing you’ve got a GPS-enabled HP tablet - anyone?), ‘playable’ guides to specific locations (e.g. The Tower of London), to more meditative experiences like always something somewhere else.

‘always something somewhere else’ is a generative mediascape that creates a temporary map in a location as the user is asked to seek out certain base materials such as glass, stone, and water. As they reach each material they hear the beginning of a fictional narrative about another person in a far off location standing next to the same material. As the map is created the user can return to the points they marked to hear the stories fold in on themselves and conclude.

The associations with storytelling here remind me strongly of earlier, less-tech’d-up locative artworks, particularly the operatic climate-change tour And While London Burns, and Janet Cardiff’s awesome The Missing Voice (which I believe is still available on request from the Whitechapel Gallery, but I’ll double-check). Story-telling is incredibly well-suited to this medium - does anyone have any other examples of such experiments?

For myself, I’m going to keep hacking away - I think I missed a trick not getting a Bluetooth GPS to work with my phone, so that might be the next step. I’m particularly interested in what geocached information we can hack out of Google Book Search:

Literature is inescapably intertwined with our everyday environment. By making this visible, we can encourage and spread it, and send it in new and exciting directions.

Yesterday I was given a fascinating demonstration of ICUE, an application which allows ebooks purchased from the ICUE store to be read on a mobile phone. There are three reading modes: a simple down-scrolling page, a sideways-scrolling ticker, and ‘flicker’, which flashes a single word at a time, at a speed of your choosing. The latter is surprisingly comprehensible, and apparently allows much faster reading than a person’s norm.

According to Managing Director Jane Tappuni, ICUE is popular with lots of people who wouldn’t normally be big readers; kids especially. She made the good point that while for many adults, reading off a screen is difficult and annoying, for many kids it’s all they’ve ever known. There’s very little difference between reading an ICUE ebook and reading a text message, and a good mobile phone reader may have great benefits for general literacy. A friend also made the good point - which applies to ebooks in general - that those deterred by thick, heavy or intimidating-looking books are less likely to be deterred by an electronic file.

The ICUE store currently contains a few hundred books, most of which are in the public domain but there is intended to be an increasing number of frontlist titles from major publishers. The bookstore is a bit of a chore to use, but the download is a fairly hassle-free procedure. There’s also a list of books available on the website, although here again the organisation is fairly poor, and there are no blurbs or other information about the books. At £4.50 the books are not cheap - ebooks of many of these titles are available elsewhere, significantly cheaper if not entirely free - but future new releases should provide better value, and it will be interesting to see whether a proposed, linked charity [PDF Press Release] does encourage schools to provide or even pay for text books for their students.

Unfortunately the downloaded books can only be read with the ICUE application - they can’t be transferred to a Sony Reader or onto your computer for example - nor can you read third-party files, which is a pity. That’s because ICUE books are stored in a proprietary format, which ICUE refers to as mBooks, something regular readers will know we’re generally opposed to. But if it gets kids reading, we can’t but applaud. I’m going to download a couple of titles and see if it improves my night bus reading; it’s certainly easier than cramming a paperback into your pocket.