The Story of a Transmedia Revolution: (Part 3) The Rise of The Unbook

The Unbook: A digital narrative that's more than meets the eye...

"When we think about digital's effect on storytelling, we tend to grasp for the lowest hanging fruits: words will move, pictures become movies, every story will be a choose-your-own-adventure. While digital does make all of this possible, these are the changes of least radical importance..."
        --Craig Mod, Storytelling 2.0: The digital death of the author

In an age of digital storytelling, the distance between author and reader is rapidly shrinking, and the roles those parties play are rapidly changing. One of the most radical concepts that I've come across during my research of transmedia storytelling is the "unbook."

Instead of viewing books as the cold, static, and lifeless byproduct of creativity--an unbook sees the creation of a narrative as a continuing creative process. It views the book as a living thing, one that continuously changes and evolves over time. Thanks to updated research, feedback (and in some cases even the active participation of its audience), an unbook has the potential to bridge the gap between writer and reader, creator and participant...

The Story of a Transmedia Revolution: (Part 1) To Arms...

The Book Thump Heard Round The World

After more than thirty years of fits and starts, a storytelling revolution is finally about to begin.  Naturally, the catalyst was a book; surprisingly, however, it was a high school text book...

Immersive and interactive digital books will
soon be jumping off screens everywhere...
(Image via Creative Commons) 

Earlier this week, Apple announced the release of iBooks Author, a new content creation platform for their ubiquitous iPad.  However, unlike most of Apple’s hardware or software announcements, this one has seemed to garner little public interest.  This could be attributed to the fact that according to Apple’s keynote, the only things that were “unveiled” were a new kind of digital school textbook, and a software program to make them.

School, text books, and reading…ho-hum.

The average person is as likely to sit through a keynote presentation on those two topics, as work on their taxes for fun. And this new software isn’t even wrapped in shiny high-tech aluminum: a baby iPad to combat Amazon’s encroaching Kindle Fire.  As I watched the footage of the keynote, and it become apparent there was going to be no iText, iTome, or iTablet reader—just a pair of “un-Jobs” like Apple executives walking the audience through the pages of a digital biology text book—I was sorely tempted to give up early on the hour long presentation.

Apple Education Keynote, January 2012

But I’m very glad I didn’t.  It isn't often that you get the chance to be on the ground floor of history as it happens.  Stop, and bookmark this moment in your life (it happens right around time marker 23:52 in the video above).

It might seem like a trivial thing, but imagine if you could remember the exact moment mankind learned to use fire as a tool, or how to farm, or how to surf the net on the world’s first web browser?  Imagine if you could remember where you were, and what you were doing, when a major cultural revolution happened?

News flash: it already has...

"The evolution of e-readers..."
(Image via Wikipedia)