I find the top comment quite cynical, it’s literally the same as reading text on an ebook or even paperback. IMO once you get engrossed in a story the medium falls away. It’s cool that people are experimenting with a platform in a way maybe not originally intended, but that’s the beauty of it. No one can really foresee all the things you can do with a new platform/technology.
They have broken the internet by banning hyperlinks. So naturally everything starts happening inside the app. How would you do copy a quote, table of contents or term lookups? I can't even check out the links u posted cause it asks me to login.
While I agree that this is strictly worse than current document and eBook formats meant for computers, this inarguably not much worse than physical books. We couldn't have copied quotes or table of contents in a physical book.
People used to copy quotes all the time. I've known older folks who kept entire journals of memorable and meaningful quotations from books and poems they've read, sometimes annotated with a little note for context or what they were thinking when they read it. Usually with a page number reference.
Other people would put book darts or little sticky notes in their books or dog ear pages where they've highlighted the quotations.
But can you easily take a highlighter and highlight sections, scribble notes and annotations on the margins, cross things out, doodle on a screenshot when you're bored?
Yeah, especially on a phone or tablet. At least on iOS, when you snap a screenshot, you see a thumbnail. Clicking on that takes you to an interface where you can do that right away.
About the only one of those that's maybe easyish to do is highlighting things. Working with text in just about any photo editing app is a pain in the ass, scribbling and doodling is pretty impossible with a mouse or touch screen(though if you can do this well I commend you) and all those things take longer and are more difficult than just picking up a pen and doing it.
I get the users are just looking for ways of doing thing they like. Many won't know what features are available elsewhere. Sooner or later they will start grumbling about it.
And then expect Zuck and his henchmen, to come up with retarded round about ways to provide the features. "We pay close attention to our cattle. Our new AI based cloud OCR can identify upto 40% of all words on a single page! You can even copy and paste some of them etc etc".
I personally don't like reading books on the Kindle or Phone but do find the bookmarking/lookup/navigation features very useful and of course the ability to store a zillion books. Given all those advantages expect some Facebook exec to start drawing up master plans.
Did you have to login to an online website to buy that book/reader? How did you procure your ebook? What about the book, did you have to create a library card (login)?
What ebook reader are you using? I've added a few notes to some books on my Paperwhite Kindle and it's a terrible experience. I have no idea where the notes are and, depending on the document type, it may or may not be synced to all the places I read Kindle books.
The iPad with the Pencil seems promising. If I could underline and scribble notes (that are recognized and indexed) it might be good enough to move me off of Kindle and their great e-ink screens. I have no idea if iBooks does that though.
Since a few comments mention the superiority of "real books", maybe those with that opinion see Instagram as downgrading the reading experience.
For some perspective, keep in mind that many famous novels were originally magazine or newspaper installments.[0]
Therefore, reading works like Dumas' "Count of Monte Cristo", Dostoevsky's "Crime & Punishment", or Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina" -- in consolidated book form -- is the incorrect method of reading their words. And the correct way to read Charles Dickens is in partial installments to stop at the cliffhanger and then wait a month to resume the story.
Or maybe, the Instagram'ing of novels can be seen as harmless re-serializing of books.
An aside about what "reading" really is...
Some think that listening to the words of a book (e.g. Audible) instead of seeing the words with eyeballs is also not really reading. Does this also mean that blind people are never really "reading" unless their fingers are touching braille?
But the reverse can be true. We're consuming "The Iliad" incorrectly if reading it as a book since it was originally orally transmitted instead of written down.
For some, the physical medium defines what reading is. I don't agree with that but it's clear some really have rigid opinions about how the authors' words are supposed to enter our brains.
EDIT ADD: similar bite-sized reading behavior on smartphones in China explained by a16z Connie Chan. It's not too different from Charles Dickens serializations in the 19th century. Deeplink about China's mobile book economy at 6m25s: https://youtu.be/78pLIj4xeVs?t=6m25s
Definitely, and in a sense a novel back then was much closer to nowaday’s shows, that come with a new piece of the story every week.
Slightly off topic, but since your brought it up, ive just finished the count of monte cristo, and it is the most fantastic and incredible story i have ever heard. Its a story of broken hearts and vengeance like never before nor after. I couldnt believe someone had imagined such an incredible story, and it turns out the book is loosely based of off a true story. Because you couldnt make it up ;p besides, at least in french, it is very well written. Not at all « heavy » to read, it flows very well, it really does not feel like it was written back then.
So if you’ve been looking for a book to read while commuting, i couldnt recommend this one more, enjoy ! ;)
Likewise, "The Iliad" with its repetitions of text that look tedious in written form is really a long poem that's meant to be performed and heard. The oral repetitions are a memory aid for the audience listening to the story. Some historians say the itinerant wanderer would also have a lute to pluck some music accompaniment to add drama to key parts of the poem.
The Iliad has nothing on other literature from around the same time and earlier, most of which is Egyptian or Babylonian / Akkadian. The latter, especially, I find damn near un-readable for that reason. What little Ancient Egyptian storytelling we have is similar, lots of repetition probably to make it easier to recite from memory, but (massive exception of Gilgamesh aside—holy crap it's good) they're better storytellers so it's a bit more tolerable.
Well that is certainly true. Ready poetry in silence is like reading the lyrics of a song instead of listening to the music. Sure you can do it but don't tell me you're getting the whole experience.
Am I the only one that's skeptical of the claim that "300,000 people are reading books this way"?
That there are 300k people who are now suddenly "reading" books that have been available in a huge variety of formats in the public domain for years because they show up on Instagram?
Show me the actual usage data. How many of these 300k got past page 3?
The design is nice, the presentation is good, yes, but I doubt very seriously the existence of this hidden, neglected population of bibliophiles.
>now suddenly "reading" books that have been available in a huge variety of formats in the public domain for years because they show up on Instagram?
I can't speak to the 300k number but an increase in readership is plausible because I saw how reducing friction to consume a book can massively change reading habits. E.g. my friend with the new Kindle finally got around to reading the classics like "Madame Bovary" and "Anna Karenina" because she could get ebooks from Amazon for $0.00 (or sometimes a tiny amount like 95 cents).
The previous existence of those public domain books on Gutenberg Project's website was irrelevant since the HTML or TXT files weren't easy to consume unless one printed them out on a printer.
Yes, public domain books have always been sold on Amazon as real paper books but the shipping would end up being $3.99 even for a book costing $0.00.
The Kindle e-reader was the technology to enable her to read public domain books for free with minimum friction. (Even a trip to the public library to check out and later return a physical book for "free" is too much of a hassle.)
I can see how this NYPL project is trying to make a friction-free book reading experience for Instagram users who already own their smartphones. No Kindle purchase necessary. (In my other comment, I mention how millions of Chinese people are reading books on their smartphones.)
I hear you, but I remain skeptical about any sort of significant uptick in adoption of, not of e-reading in general, but of these particular books.
You mention a friend who read chose to read "Madame Bovary" and "Anna Karenina" upon discovering a cheap and convenient e-book format. Those books are classics in the Western Canon, yes, but they are also slogs, by some measures.
The other thing that happened, and continues to happen in parallel with the explosion of e-reading tech, is an explosion of other things to (copyrighted) read, written in the modern colloquial, (perhaps more) relevant to modern times. The rise of the tepid, self-published novel on Amazon is the best example of this.
I can believe that there is a latent desire out there for more good books to read or a cool new tech to use to read them, but I doubt very much that very old books in the public domain sate that thirst in any significant way. I think your friend is in the minority.
AFAIK Instagram does this by default. It should put you on the page after the one you saw last time. At least this is how it works with normal non-pinned stories.
Wow, talking about putting the horse behind the carriage.
So, people don't have the concentration to read a book anymore. But instead of fixing the cause of this, whatever it is, we mangle them through platforms that weren't designed for it and if there is some success, we claim that people are reading again. Of course they are not. It's a whole different experience. It can be nice and it can add to the experiences that we already knew, but it is definitely not the same as reading a book. It is more like seeing the movie adaptation of the book.
Books have remained the same for centuries. If people are suddenly unable to read them anymore, it is far more likely that it is the people that need "fixing", and not the books.
> So, people don't have the concentration to read a book anymore.
Or people don't really carry books anymore, whereas they always carry their phone, so reading novels there is convenient, and the experiment specifically designed an experience for the platform.
> we claim that people are reading again. Of course they are not. It's a whole different experience.
Of reading novels.
> It is more like seeing the movie adaptation of the book.
In what way is the full novel text "more like seeing the movie adaptation" exactly? It seems odd that you would care solely about the physical format and apparently not even remotely care about the contents.
> Books have remained the same for centuries.
Except for all the times people were not reading books e.g. many 19th century classics were initially serialised in newspapers, consumed as bite-sized chapters before being collected into volumes.
> If people are suddenly unable to read them anymore, it is far more likely that it is the people that need "fixing", and not the books.
Good luck with that. Meanwhile other people care more about the works than the format and are, as the article notes,
> we claim that people are reading again. Of course they are not. It's a whole different experience. It can be nice and it can add to the experiences that we already knew, but it is definitely not the same as reading a book. It is more like seeing the movie adaptation of the book.
This really sounds like you just don't like it because it's not how you would like the reading experience to be. Are you open to the idea that someone can have a meaningful reading experience that's wildly different to yours?
> it can add to the experiences that we already knew, but it is definitely not the same as reading a book. It is more like seeing the movie adaptation of the book.
In full text, in text only form, verbatim
Explain the distinction you are making again and why do you feel it is a productive distinction to make?
The article says there are animations which “bring the story to life”. Normal adult readers don’t need pictures and animations to aid engagement/understanding - people who are more used to watching movies or reading series of tweets/reaction gifs might.
I had some of the same snobbery about audiobooks (which one could level the same criticisms at, maybe even more so). But I have tried a few recently, and have to admit I got a lot out of the experience, maybe even more than reading it myself in the case of some of the better narrations.
I don't think your comparison to a movie adaption works at all. It is very much like reading the book - you consume the same text. The difference is maybe the 'distracting' animated illustrations, and the tendency to read in very small pieces, rather than settle down to reading chapters at a time. The last point speaks to your concentration comment, though not sure it's definitely a bad thing, certainly better than not reading at all.
Audio books are fine but I've heard from teacher friends that a very high percentage of middle-school-aged kids now strongly resist reading without also having the audio version playing. I suspect access to such has stunted their ability to 1) sound out new words, and 2) to pick up tone, cadence et c from text alone. I find this worrying.
Last year my then-kindergartener's "reading time" at school turned out largely to be having the school iPad read to her. She got worse at reading for months before we realized what was going on and how much work we'd have to do at home to undo the damage the school was inflicting. If you give them the option plus little supervision of course they'll take the easy way. Ugh.
That is quite a negative opinion, and seems to be very elitist ("book-readers club" vs "non-book readers club"). Nobody is getting "fixed", as sharing written text via new methods does not "harm" written books. People who are going to read books will do so, people who won't may read something similar to books, or may not. The books do not "gain" or "loose" anything, but people do gain, as does society. Those who wouldn't read may do so, which is a positive, those who would already do.
Short stories often were excluded by the medium if they weren't assembled into collections, so I would think of this as a good addition.
The general critique about people reading fewer books is probably true. In my case it is just time constrains. Belletristic works are something I only read while travelling (which I do perhaps 1-2 times a year).
But yeah, Instagram wouldn't be my first choice, but I never tried it on the other hand.
The site details out the motivation behind the project, provides a list of novels released and to come. It is also loaded with eye candy from the gorgeous animation and design examples.
Not to turn the subject to IP but I think this is a wonderful example of what can be done with the public domain:
>Each book so far in the Insta Novels Collection has come from the public domain.
Another example of how technologically inferior platforms can be successful given the right exposure. (this is obviously inferior because the user cannot reflow the text, change font color, copy paste, highlight, etc.)
Isn’t this exactly what Steve Jobs hoped would happen when iBooks was introduced? That a new, multimedia format where books “come to life with animations and video” would be born... granted he hoped such creators would do this for the ipad’s ebooks and not Insta-Face-App.
Don't worry; just think that in the time spent reading a single page/picture, the user is not watch another shaky (ie, hard to compress) HD video, which are common on IG.
I know for some backbone comms technologies (SDH, maybe?) there has to be some sort of carrier signal at all times. I think this is probably true for fibre as well, it's never truly dark. So maybe the bandwidth being there should be used for something useful?
(I purposely ignore the processing power required at the other end to serve you the images ;-)
Well, there's taste, and I agree with GP here - I too find such things distasteful. It's not much waste in the grand scheme of things, but it's still ridiculously wasteful, and the more wastefulness is accepted, the more it adds up everywhere.
You're not going to believe this but sometimes I stream video and go to sleep before it's finished. It's 4k too. I don't even give a fuck. An hour of wasted bandwidth, not even half a shit given.
It is likely that if you did an experiment that compared retention and understanding of reading with the real books and these Instagram Stories, the readers of real books would trounce the Instagram readers. I suppose that something is better than nothing but at a certain point, I also wonder, what is the point of doing this? I wonder how many Instagram readers will drop their habits and read more? I also wonder how many of these readers will finish the books? I didn't see that information presented in the article.
Any given Instagram reader may not have read a real book in their life - or maybe they are avid readers who read constantly. All the same, there will always be readers and non-readers.
Literary snobs today imagine a past world where everybody was constantly discussing the finer points of the classic masterpieces every day of their lives. In reality only about 12% of the global population in 1820 was literate. And that's just baseline, not to speak of people who actually spent time reading difficult, thoughtful, full-length books.
Thoreau has a great passage in Walden (published in the 1850s) where he complains about people knowing how to read, yet spending their time reading garbage romance novels instead of classics like the Iliad. I think the complaint of people "reading books" on Instagram comes from the exact same place. It's a timeless problem, which is not really a problem.
Even when global literacy reaches 100%, there will still be a very small percentage of people who are hardcore readers. There is a certain kind of person who will sit down with a big heavy paper book and read it cover to cover, and they are not a common species among humans. It's something you are born with, or something that you gain in very early childhood anyway, and nothing Instagram does will ever change that.
So there's really no use in complaining about it one way or the other. Instagrammers will instagram. Some of them will read real books too, and others will not.
There's no basis in that assumption. In fact, I'd argue that it's possible that this format (interspersed with graphics and with a user base tuned to ingest content in a certain way) may actually aid retention and understanding. Instagram users have gotten very good at quickly gleaning information from the format. There's a huge userbase and they are not likely carrying around a physical book or eReader. This book format is essentially on them at all times and takes advantage of the potential to "hook" a user at an opportune moment.
Instagram users aren't expected to "drop their habits". Their habit is one of consumption - this just fits into that habit.
I think its useful as a thought exercise and idea for profiles but nothing more. Its not useful for NYPL to increase its physical engagement, and thats fine. Kinda a fun reason to use instagram though, see what a profile is up to.
Sidenote: I’ve inadvertently joined book clubs just because a meme account started shilling a book and then started posting memes about the book
This also reminds me of this company [1] wavve, which I first noticed on Indie Hackers. They basically convert podcasts to videos for social media and generate huge (Stripe-verified) profits from providing the service.
This just shows the enormity of the Instagram user-base. A tiny fraction of niche users on Instagram can add up to a massive market...
If you'd like to do something similar, but for your blog (or any website really) -- I wrote an app that produces segmented videos in both Instagram Story / square aspect ratios. It's called StoryScroll => https://neal.rs/app
Ever since I read the A Song of Ice and Fire books on my phone from plain text files I acquired (don't ask me how) on a reader app, paper books feel like a much more inferior experience. On my phone, I can control the text size, the font, can control the screen brightness, have a night mode option, and can read in the dark. Furthermore, my phone is always with me, so I don't need to carry around an additional device or a book.
For 300.000 people it is... kinda useful.
And the books are shared via the highlight function of Instagram. It's like stories, but they aren't deleted after 24h. They stay in your profile and can be watched again and again until you delete them.
Really excited about these kind of steps taken towards multimedia literature and digitalization of it. For quite some time, school textbooks and literature has been brought to touch screen devices or otherwise digitalized on other devices as-is - pages with text as we have known it for long time. Modern tech could enable much more deeper and interactable content for both studies and leisure reading.
and yet in my experience most HNers and similar tech communities want all docs in plain text, tex, or very simple markdown
suggest that Wikipedia would be better if it's physics articles had interactive simulations or that stack overflow's failed docs initiative should make room for working examples and get downvoted into oblivion
We've seen some interactive education projects on HN (the famous page on raytracing, the one where there's everything about curves, many audio-based projects) and they have had great reception. I think the reason why most devs still prefer plain-text resources over anything else is two-fold: interactive stuff tends to be less standard (because there isn't really a good standard for it) and harder to version than text, but also for interactive education/documentation tools to be accepted, they need to meet a certain high bar of quality, otherwise they are just eye-candy with insufficient value-add. When developing such tools, I believe there is a point of immersion after which they clearly become superior to text materials to most people including otherwise text-heavy devs, but if an author of such interactive tool fails to reach this level, their work is seen as a distraction, because you still need to refer elsewhere. Stack Overflow's documentation examples (as much as I really wished the initiative would succeed) were very far from reaching this bar. They were not organized well, lackluster and were not interactive enough either.
>I think the reason why most devs still prefer plain-text resources over anything else is...
I think you missed a vital reason and that is portability and sharability. No one needs to install anything special to read or edit a text file.
It's the digital equivalent of paper and pen when you think about it and that makes it a popular platform for everyone to be able to consume it.
Plus, back when we were all old and dinosaurs roamed the Earth, the text file was the lightest/smallest way to transfer data (read: ideas) between computers.
The practice/behaviour saturated the industry so much that many readmes of today are still on text files.
Maybe there's a correlation to the real world, where we're definitely more apt to consume mediums that don't have superfluous data points than the words/ideas that they're meant to convey? Maybe I'm just talking out of my ass?
Either way, plain-text resources are the easiest to create, share, and consume because there's almost a universality in the standard for text files (except the EOL and CRLF but that's more of an inconvenience than anything).
This is what I meant by standardization but I used a wrong term. I completely agree with you. At the basis, there will always need to be plain text, which should result in a wide variety of viewers and editors becoming available. In order for interactive visualizations to succeed among software devs, they can't be a SaaS, they need to become a part of the plumbing.
Part of the reason is because that decouples the content from the presentation format. Give me a .txt, .md, or even a .tex file, and I can load it in my editor next to the code I'm working on, and I can efficiently jump around, search, and copy from it, all via a keyboard. At any point I can easily print it out and have a stab at it with a highlighter. Give me the super modern web documentation, and now I have to pick up the mouse, I have to install a tiling WM just to stay sane, I only have the most basic search available (which is broken half of the time because of bleeding-edge webdev bullshit), and if I try to print it (God forbid!), every page is 50% header and sidebar.
Techies like plaintext because it's free of superfluous bullshit. It's efficient. It's flexible.
As for interactive simulations, I'm all for them. I love the work of Bret Victor, or Nicky Case, or other stuff in the category of "explorable explanations". Those people do it well. But if it's not executed well, it's worse than not being done at all.
There's no way 300000 people are actually reading entire books this way. Probably not even 3000. They're just clicking/swiping to get thru their entire stories feed, and these just happen to be in the mix.
These look very cool! They clearly put a lot of thought into the design, and it's always nice to see these sorts of novel efforts to encourage reading.
Metamorphosis: https://www.instagram.com/s/aGlnaGxpZ2h0OjE3ODUyMTE0ODA2MzA3...
The Raven: https://www.instagram.com/s/aGlnaGxpZ2h0OjE3OTYyMTk5MTcwMTYz...
Alice In Wonderland: https://www.instagram.com/s/aGlnaGxpZ2h0OjE3OTQ0MTEwMzE5MTg4...
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I find the top comment quite cynical, it’s literally the same as reading text on an ebook or even paperback. IMO once you get engrossed in a story the medium falls away. It’s cool that people are experimenting with a platform in a way maybe not originally intended, but that’s the beauty of it. No one can really foresee all the things you can do with a new platform/technology.