OUR POWERS OF ATTENTION are failing, or so the
headline reports keep reiterating. The span decreases
decade to decade: 12 seconds, 10 seconds, 8.... If
you’ve failed to read that far, let me sum up the essen-
tials. Unable to consume a full intellectual meal, today’s
consumers merely snack on bite-sized pieces of infor-
mation, served screen-first. Particularly for millennials
and the Gen Zers following behind them, weightier fare
apparently equals indigestion. It’s hardly surprising.
Social feeds and streaming services offer a festival of
rich, interactive and interrelated media at pace. If you
liked that, you’ll love this – and this, and this, and this.
While reports that we're increasingly unwilling
or unable to consume long-form media have largely
proved false, what is certain is that this new content
landscape is more competitive than any we’ve seen
before. If your job is to advocate for older formats
(postmodernists excused) – say those that start at the
beginning, finish at the end and have several hundred
pages flipped in between – how are you to compete?
That was the challenge advertising agency Mother
tackled as it approached the New York Public Library –
custodian of 43 million items across its core collection- to suggest a new means of inspiring readers. Together
they co-opted what many might consider enemy terri-
tory, producing a new literary format that lives right at
the heart of the social-media vacuum.
The resultant Insta Novels take Instagram Stories
at face value, offering the NYPL’s followers an in-app
means of reading classics of the canon, complete with
bespoke animations, illustrations and sound work that
activate as you tap through the text. Dickens’ A Christ-
mas Carol features a candle that gradually burns down
to the holder as you progress. Highlighting Kafka’s The
Metamorphosis is a beetle that bumbles around the
bottom of the page. Viewing ‘The Raven’ by Poe, you are
instructed to cover an eye with your thumb, amid inter-
mittent full-screen refrains of ‘nevermore’. Phone-based
literature has rarely looked better, and this not from
some fresh-faced tech start-up, but from something as
apparently unmodern as a nonprofit public institution.
Truth be told, the assumption that ‘library’ neces-
sarily means ‘analogue’ is long outdated. Many libraries
already give users the ability to borrow e-books direct
from their devices; NYPL hopes those enthused by its
Insta Novels will register to become members and then
download the SimplyE app, allowing them to read the
full breadth of its digital collection. For older genera-
tions, the public library was often the first place they
could gain access to a computer and, latterly, the inter-Bespoke animations and sound work
appear as users tap through the texts
uploaded to Instagram Stories.
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