Rewards: Books,

Boundedness and Reading in Participatory Culture

Kathi Inman Berens

kathiberens@gmail.com

Portland State University, United States of America

As a professor whose appointment encompasses both electronic literature and
printed book publishing, I think a lot about interactive reading and reward
systems. Reward systems are fundamental to videogames, where the consequences
of reader/gamer choice materialize the stakes of interpretation (Juul, 2005).
Computational reader response critics like Bell, Ensslin, Bouchardon and
Saemmer frame their discussions of reading as medium-specific and, as I have
argued, device specific (Berens). This emergent subfield is “literary interface
criticism” (Pold), informed by comparative textual studies (Hayles
and Pressman), performance studies (Fletcher), and interface criticism
(Galloway; Critical Code Studies Working Group; Chun).

The book publishing world is only now, in the age of mobile-first web access,
beginning to reckon with the implications of readers' daily exposure to
pervasive, quotidian experiences of interactive reading and gaming environments
in video games and social media. These entail nonhuman disruptions in the
value chain of traditional industrial book production and distribution. John
Maxwell observes that “large swaths of DH [digital humanities] practice overlap
or are adjacent to practices in [book] publishing (e.g. markup, database
design, user experience design, editing), yet publishing studies and the
digital humanities often appear to run at right angles to one another. There is
surely an opportunity for complementary work here.” My object in this talk is
to articulate points of contact between DH and book publishing.
Literary interface criticism offers a window onto interactivity and reward
systems that extend how we understand the actions of reading: physical,
cognitive, social. A book's medium-specific affordances (random-access device;
portable; cheap; no Digital Rights Management) are attractive. But how might
books take advantage of digital interactivity to provide more rewarding
interaction than the “reflowable content” of an e-reader platform?

“Playable books”—the subject of my monograph-in-progress—are part of the
“complementary” space Maxwell identifies between book publishing and DH. A
playable book is a story object that can be held in human hands, requires
physical interaction between human and computer to render, and outputs a story
experience that can be “bound” or is otherwise finite. A printed book with
interactive elements is playable (see, for example, Tyehimba Jess's Olio and
Zachary Thomas Dodson's Bats of the Republic); a novel displayed on an e-reader
is not; an improvised, participatory story in social media is not. (My
monograph situates playable books in both literary games and fanfiction
archives and databases: such situation is beyond the scope of this short
paper-see Note).

In this paper I compare reading's reward structures in one bestseller and a
popular, socially dynamic e-literature. I suggest how physically playful
digital interactivity could inform mainstream book production and marketing. 
Selp-Helf, a 2015 New York Times bestselling book published by Gallery Books
(an imprint owned by Simon and Schuster) is a successful YA [young adult]
title. It is designed for hands-on, playful interaction; and its author,
YouTube sensation Miranda Sings [Colleen Ballinger] sparked such a successful
pre-sale campaign that her book débuted at #1 on the Publisher's Weekly
Nonfiction Hardcover list, and #1 on the New York Times' Advice, How-To
and Miscellaneous list, where it remained for eleven weeks. But Selp-Helf is
just one piece of a successful transmedia campaign spanning a Netflix series 
Haters Back Off, a fifty-seven city comedy tour, and several musical albums.
Interactivity, in this case, is spread among various media. Book publishing
gets a small slice of the pie.

How might mass market book publishing increase its relevance in the
contemporary media ecology? I present a short reading of Ink After Print
(2012), an interactive story machine installed in public spaces such as a rock
festival and public libraries, as a way of suggesting what next-generation
story interactivity could look like for book publishers who currently
funnel their social activity around book into social media campaigns they don't
own, because they are hosted in platforms that dictate the terms of
interactivity and serve their own agendas. A book like Selp-Helf has potential
to benefit from reading rewards that are materialized in the book interface
itself rather than a paratextual social media campaign.

Rationale & Analysis

Ink After Print is a full-body, playable literary interface. Exhibited at rock
festivals, public libraries and train stations (in a French copy of the Danish
original), Ink brings full-body haptics to the unbound book in ways that
resonate with the embodied online social marketing of YA [young adult] titles.
Both Ink and Selp-Helf ask the reader to do real things in the world, and leave
traces of those activities in the literary interface, whether it's navigating
through the sea of words in “Ink” and printing the results, or posting photos
of oneself when meeting the YA author, or dressing up as a character (in this
case, teen girls dressing as Miranda Sings.)

In both cases, writer/readers or “w/readers” (Landau, 1999) are having
authentic experiences with literary interfaces. “Spreadable media” (Jenkins,
Ford and Green, 2013) is a byproduct that empowers Ballinger's fans to use her
book as a springboard to articulate their own perspectives on identity and
gender. Use of digital skills is the precondition for fan interaction. Jenkins
reminds us that audiences are individuals, “produced through measurement and
surveillance, usually unaware of how the traces they leave can be calibrated by
the media industries.” Publics are collectives that “actively direct attention
onto the messages they value” (166). An entire subculture of book fans—often of
young adult literature—is using books as totems around which to build worlds
made by and through participatory media; Selp-Helf is one strong example. 
Selp-Helf and other YA books like it are centerpieces of book-specific media
microecologies with particularized rules of conduct, aesthetics, and dynamic
interaction. “Playability” focuses through the book, but exceeds the bounded
dimensions of the book itself.

As more book marketing focuses on live events captured for and refracted
through social media, this paper proposes that book interactivity should do
more to engage the actual practice of reading to draw audiences into memorable
relationships with the works. Analysis will focus on how the physical aspects
of unbound book reading disclose new quantitative and qualitative shifts in
mass market book reading practices.

Book publishers, loathe to develop content that they can't expressly monetize,
run cheap social media campaigns in platforms they don't own like
YouTube, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat. That's where book publishers should
look to literary experimental pieces like Ink for how to create “eventness”
(pace Bahktin) around distribution and play beyond social media.

This would involve investment in digital-first book design and possibly a
reading apparatus that could be physically moved location to location. Such
techniques could scale, having a few select interactive reading “shows” that
are captured in and for the social media audiences. Book publishers have built
the expectation among YA readers that social media is their gathering space.
Following the example of Ink After Print, publishers could offer actual,
embodied, interactive reading experiences.

Ink After Print provides a rich context for readers to experiment with their
affective experience of boundedness. The mechanics of Ink gameplay are
sufficiently challenging that readers might feel a sense of reward in
assembling a poem using the hand-held “books”; in this sense, the printed
receipt is token of achievement. But it is also a highly portable object and a
potential gift: to the ephemeral community of others playing Ink After Print,
where you can share your poems with others who have played; and to the
virtual community where Ink “receipts” are stored in the blog. When I curated a
media arts show and exhibited Ink, I observed readers also folding their
receipts into small objects that they then shared with others. The
un-trackability of what people do with their Ink “receipts” stands in stark
contrast to the databased traces of participation left by fans of Selp-Helf.
While Ink does output to a blog, its outputs focus on the words themselves, not
the user identity. In this sense, Ink resists the types of identity
quantification that feeds and funds corporate sponsorship of social media
platforms.

Note

[1] Working groups of note in this space are: the

Games and Literary Theory group founded by Espen

Aarseth, and the Critical Code Studies Working

Group. Books of note: Astrid Ensslin's Literary Gaming; Timothy Welsh's Mixed
Realism: Videogames and the Violence of Fiction; Anasta-sia Salter, What
Is Your Quest? From Adventure Games to Interactive Books; the excellent
collec-tion Analyzing Digital Fiction, edited by Alice Bell and Astrid Ensslin.
Alice De Kosnik's Rogue Ar-chives, and Amy Earhart's Traces of the Old, Uses of
the New discuss the effect of fan archives and tribute sites that (as Earhart
shows) are subject to abandonment, decay and obsolescence.