I am very pleased to welcome Rave Reviews Book Club “SPOTLIGHT” Author, Nicholas Rossis author of:  Pearseus,Year 18: The Schism (Book 1),  Pearseus, Rise of the Prince (Book 2),and The Power of Six: Science Fiction Short Stories. Nicholas discusses the Snowfall Project.

Two Years After The Snowfall Project: What Happened to the New Way of Reading?

Have you heard of the New York Times Snow Fall project?  It is an interactive web-based project called Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek by John Branch.

Taking six months to develop, it was designed as a completely immersive, interactive and dynamic reading experience.  The format was touted as the future of online storytelling and the work is amazing – both from the standpoint of a programmer and an author.  However, I am not sure that’s what books are about: we find it hard enough to get used to the ebook, that this vibrant knowledge can seem a bit overwhelming.  It seems I’m not alone in that.

OK, the book is about an avalanche –obviously!  There is a story behind it regarding skiers trapped under various levels of snow.  The e-book has a video-like image of the mountains where the avalanche is supposed to have taken place and you have an aerial view of the whole area.  You are also shown a satellite image of how, on February 19^th 2012 snow clouds gathered around this area (Washington state, apparently).  Moreover, you get background information of how this area was discovered, what gave it its name (Stevens Pass), photos of the early 20^th century and other details –real ones, not -imagined of what the area looks like, how people have survived there, what sort of people used to live there –OK, you get the gist.

Additionally, you are presented with photos of the heroes –wherever the name of a hero appears on the text, it’s clickable and you can see various photos of that people, along with their age, profession and other important facts.  You also find a geological map of how snow was amassing on the ground and what the earth under the snow must have looked like.  Some chapters begin with all the photos of the people appearing in the chapter, just like a movie.  All in all, this e-book has really taken advantage of how we can present a book in a really interactive way, using all the tools that media offer us.

And yet, like many others, I found it unsettling, and not for the usual reasons cited: that the bells and whistles distracted from the story.  No, my first hesitation was due to a different factor altogether.  I remember when I wrote my book, I had put an actual image of a hero in the cover, and a kind friend who was beta-reading it thought that it was absolutely awful not to be allowed to imagine what the hero looks like.  She really considered this off-putting, since she wanted to dream and visualize, rather than being shown what the author had in mind.  So, I guess she would not have impressed by the avalanche e-book.  As we were discussing it, I realized that reading a fiction book means that you are given space to invent, dream up and create a whole environment besides the one the author has produced.  How many times have we been disappointed by a book that has been turned into a movie; I often find myself saying ‘but that’s not how I had seen the hero’.

And yes, my second hesitation would be that all the outside-of-the-story information, although supporting and very informative, was directing my attention away from the plot.   I was distracted because all the facts they were presenting were actually interesting: I read about history, climatology and sociological facts regarding the area, but then I forgot where I had left the story.

I might be saying all that because I am growing old.  Oh dear, I sound like those old people who say ‘back in my days, things were better’ –or any other positive adjective you can think of – and I had sworn I would never be like that!  Or, because I have been reading for the last 40 years, so perhaps I am used to how a book “should” be and my brain just can’t process huge differences compared to what I know.  The fact of the matter is that I just found this e-book presentation complicated and I couldn’t get myself to continue reading the story.

What I can say is that this sort of story arrangement could really work well in kids’ books or school books.  The facts are presented in an amazing way and they just catch your attention and make you want to read more, irrespective of the story.  The interaction between videos, photos, quotes and historic elements is such that you can communicate pretty much any material that way and I can assure you that kids will love it.  Also, spreading the text over multiple pages and diluting it with images and other visual material will convince the most skeptical of kids to keep reading.

I can also say that the writing is really good; the story flows, the description of the actual avalanche is impressive and I thought that describing the snow flakes on her face as ‘breadcrumbs’ was beautiful.  So, I might buy the book in normal e-book format and just read the story!

Could this be a problem unique to the specific project?  There have been many attempts to mimic it, and even a startup called Scroll Kit, that advertised the fact that “The NYT spent hundreds of hours hand-coding ‘Snow Fall.’ We made a replica in an hour” (a statement  that landed them into trouble).   The NYT itself created similar projects, as did a number of others.

I do like it that we can now talk of ‘normal ebook format’ as opposed to, say, ‘interactive ebook format’.  It seems that we have gone a long way from the plain physical book, and the new medium certainly has a lot of endearing qualities.  Is it beautiful?  Absolutely stunning.  Elegant?  Definitely.  Novel?  You bet.  But is it the future of reading?

Two years down the line, it’s clearly part of the future; but definitely not the future.

His books:

Pearseus, Year 18: The Schism (Book 1): www.amazon.com/dp/B00FXOJQA8/ Pearseus, Rise of the Prince (Book 2): http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00FYRKLPI The Power of Six: Science Fiction Short Stories: www.amazon.com/dp/B00K57JTAA/