LiveInk Experiment at Smashwords

A couple years back, while Smashwords was still incubating in my head, I attended the May, 2007 IDPF Digital Book conference in New York.

I heard a presentation from Randall Walker, the creator of a new online reading format called LiveInk. By arranging text differently on screen, Walker found he could increase reading speed and comprehension. I was so excited about the concept I wrote up a story for VentureBeat that caused quite a stir among tech geeks.

Here's an excerpt

Live Ink offers better way to read text online

Mark Coker | May 10th, 2007

Did you know our primitive brains weren’t wired very well to read this paragraph?

Scientific research conducted by Walker Reading Technologies, a small Minnesota startup that has been studying our ability to read for the last ten years, has concluded that the natural field of focus for our eyes is circular, so our eyes view the printed page as if we’re peering through a straw.

And a very bad-behaving straw at that, because not only do our eyes feed our brain the words we’re reading, they’re also uploading characters and words from the two sentences above and below the line we’re reading.

Every time we read block text, we’re forcing our brain to a wage a constant subconscious battle with itself to filter and discard the superfluous inputs. This mental tug of war slows reading speed and diminishes comprehension.

When our ancestors first invented written language about 5,000 years ago, they unfortunately didn’t have armies of neuroscientists standing by to tell them block type was the wrong way to format their papyrus rolls. But fret not. Help is on the way.

Walker Reading Technologies’ CEO and co-founder, Randall Walker MD, believes he and his team have developed a solution with a product called Live Ink that allows online publishers to improve reading speed and comprehension. Live Ink works by analyzing written language for meaning and language structure, and then applies algorithms that reformat the text into a series of short, cascading phrases. It breaks complex syntax into simpler syntax, which makes it easier for the brain to absorb the material.

.....Read the rest of the story at VentureBeat

Fast forward to today, and I'm surprised more publishers aren't using LiveInk for online reading.

With the generous assistance of Adam Gordon at LiveInk, I created a LiveInk version of my own novel, Boob Tube, to showcase on Smashwords as an experiment. He provided me a LiveInk-formatted HTML document, which I opened in Word, saved as a .doc file, then uploaded to Smashwords.

I set the price to free so folks can play with it. I think the best way to read it it is via the "Plain Text (view) (viewable as web page)" format, and then use your down arrow to scroll continuously through the text.

I see in Stanza on the iPhone, the indents aren't preserved. Maybe because my source file broke the rules of my own Smashwords Style Guide. Will continue experimenting.

You can find it here: http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1630

What do you think of LiveInk?

The Twitterization of Santos Dumont Número 8

Claudio Soares, a Brazilian author and literary blogger, has launched an intriguing multimedia online publishing experiment involving Twitter, CommentPress, videos, music and ultimately, Smashwords.

A couple years back, Soares published his novel, Santos Dumont Número 8. The story revolves around an aircraft inventor who numbers each of his inventions with "Santos-Dumont número 1" through "Santos-Dumont número 22." Mysteriously, for some superstitious reason, the inventor refuses to use the number 8.

The book follows eight main characters, seven of whom are intent upon unlocking the truth behind the mystery, and one of whom, I assume, is intent on keeping the reason a secret.

Soares has broken the novel into pieces, and is serializing it from the unique perspectives of each of the characters, each of whom has their own Twitter account. In an interesting twist, the characters will interact with their Twitter followers. This has the potential to create an immersive experience, not just for the community of readers that congregates around the book and its characters as the story unfolds, but for the author as well.

At the same time, Soares is serializing the the novel in its entirety from http://www.twiter.com/sd8. Readers can view the twitterstreams of all characters simultaneously at Crowdstatus, an online app that allows you to aggregate the Twitterstreams of multiple people.

There's a bookish twist to the novel, because it's also a book about books and readers. The narrator of the story is reading from a book. As Soares explained to me, "The main character, Abayomi, reads and it seems as if the story he reads is really happening." Soares says in writing the book, he found inspiration from by some ideas of the Argentine writer, Jorge Luis Borges, who once said words to the effect that, "the reading of a book makes us experience parallel worlds, which often, superstitiously, invade our reality."

Does Soares believe his experiment presages the future of reading? Not at all. He recognizes Twitter has numerous flaws in terms of its ability to convey a story. Twitterstreams, for example, are like ongoing conversations, and the participants pop in and out of them as if pedestrians passing in the street, so it's difficult to follow a narrative. People also tend to read Twitterstreams in reverse chronological order, which is also not terribly conducive to an immersive reading experience. And finally, for those who want to follow a story from start to beginning, Twitter doesn't make it easy to locate the start of a stream, or follow complex conversations that occur within the stream.

According to Soares, discovering the inherent limitations of these social reading tools is part of his experiment. He plans to document his experiences on his blog, and he'll publish the complete Twitterized version of the novel on Smashwords after the completion of the experiment.

The book is written in Brazilian Portuguese, though you don't need to understand the language to appreciate the experiment. For additional details on the experiment, check out this imprecise English translation of the project description, visit his blog at http://www.pontolit.com/br, view an online presentation of the project at http://prezi.com/25890/view/#104, or follow his personal Twitterstream at twitter.com/pontolit

No matter how you look at it, we've come a long way since papyrus scrolls, stone tablets and Gutenberg.