Ephemeral City (Boxed Edition)

We were in lockdown when the final piece of the Ephemeral City puzzle fell into place. It was late 2021 and my book Ex Libris had been out for more than a year. Though it had been released at the height of the first pandemic wave, the idea of a novel made from recombinant chapters was intriguing enough to find a decent audience without the aid of launches or festivals or any of the usual publishing palaver. I had already dedicated a good eighteen months purely to Ex Libris as a publishing project and here, stuck in my house in late 2021, I was finally contemplating what might come next. 

Okay. I say I was busy doing the publishing and promotion for Ex Libris but this is an excuse. In truth, I had been at a creative impasse for some time: filled with ideas but lacking the concentration and energy to see them through, to face the blank screen and blinking cursor.  

Do I blame the pandemic for that? Sure. Why not?  

Weird times, man. 

So rather than force a new idea to fruition, I turned to my archive and a concept that had languished for the better part of fifteen years: the portrait of city over time, told through the stories of people from the margins of history, the people who never expected to be remembered. 

I had a complete manuscript. Several, actually.  

The original idea was to create a collection of stories linked by setting and themes. The individual stories had been successful at the time, published in a few of Australia’s prestigious literary journals, but the collection as a whole gained no traction. I was encouraged at the time to turn the stories into a novel, a reasonable suggestion but one that took years to realise and ultimately led nowhere. After multiple attempts at making it work, I shelved the idea though I never abandoned it. Now, here at this low ebb, the project again beckoned. 

I re-read the various versions of the text and immediately began to imagine the things—big and small—that I wanted to change. However, something was missing.  

Each of the eight stories is set in Brisbane at a specific time, liberally spread between 1931 and 2011. When first writing, I had done a lot of background research on each period seeking to capture the flavour of the time without wanting to draw direct attention to it. In the process, I had amassed quite the collection of digitised ephemera: photographs, print ads, a newsletter, a lottery ticket. Now, reading between the stories and the ephemera—jumping between text and images and people, places, and times—reminded me of less of a short story anthology and more of personal collection of keepsakes, a container—maybe something like a cigar box—filled with treasures. 

That was the moment.  

Indeed, something had been missing and in my reading and re-reading of the stories and research, I stumbled on the ideal way to present the stories. Ephemeral City was created there and then, but it would take another two years for the project to be completed. 

Ephemeral City (Obsolete Edition)

I can explain the floppy disk.  

See, due to a tangled series of false starts and delays, my publisher and I began accepting pre-orders for Ephemeral City before the shipment of book boxes—the actual containers these stories would sit inside—had arrived from the manufacturer. It was a gamble that led to a stressful few weeks, wondering if we would indeed be able to ship the product when promised. We were surrounded by stacks of content, but there was no way to compile them until the shipment arrived. See, Ephemeral City is published in a boxed edition as well as a regular paperback edition (for the normies).  

Each copy of the boxed edition consists of nine booklets and nine pieces of reproduction ephemera. The lottery ticket goes inside the Christmas card which goes into an envelope. The small string of random words needs to be folded and carefully placed at the bottom of the pile. Three separate print runs were involved from two printing companies. And that all had to be organised before we could finalise the design and manufacture of the box. 

I had initially wanted to use an actual cigar box for the container; the reading experience would commence with removing a slipcase. Then, like the ephemera, the box itself would form part of the fictional world of the stories. Remove the slipcase and you enter the story world. I still like the idea, but cost quickly rendered it impractical and I had to disappoint a very excited cigar box manufacturer based in Texas. I have the sample they sent me and it’s cool, but I suspect the solution we arrived at is better. Certainly, it’s more practical. 

All of which is to say yes, a book in a box is a complex thing to put together. I mean that should come as no surprise to anyone, but no amount of forewarning actually prepares you for the experience. There were an alarming number of variables for which we had to take an educated guess and hope everything worked out okay. To keep the workload manageable for my long-suffering designers, I suggested the paperback and the boxed edition’s booklets should be identical in size, meaning the same page layout could apply to both editions, a very early decision that determined the size of the package. There were decisions on choice of paper, typefaces, each with their own knock-on effects.  

And then there was the question of what depth to set the box. How thick would this pile of booklets and ephemera turn out to be? We had no way of knowing for sure without actually making all the things first. What we could be sure of was that nothing would be worse than a box that can’t close properly or one that looks half-full.  

My publisher, Sue Wright of Tiny Owl Workshop, is possibly the only person on this planet capable of helping me shepherd a project like this. Our mantra throughout was that we would give the book whatever time was needed to get it right. That’s pretty much how it played out. There’s not much I would change if given the opportunity even though every stage of the process took at least twice as long as initially anticipated. When we made the agreement to work together in early 2022, I thought we could probably knock the completed book out by the end of that year.  

Sigh. 

The thing is, as you approach the finishing line, frustrations over delays begin to bite that much harder. There’s a point at which you just want this book out of your head and into someone else’s. Lots of someone else’s, if we’re going to be honest. 

And yet, by early this year the text had been finalised, the designs for the ephemera and the cover were done, and delivery of the book’s internal elements was imminent. The bound edition paperback was done. The promotional material was prepared, including a series of videos blogs visiting locations from the book and revealing the real–life stories behind the book, a separate project that could be subject of its own essay. So, I took the best educated guesstimate I could at the size of the final package, approved the box design, and set the manufacturing in motion.  

Now what? What does one do in that final interregnum?  

I noticed the zip file I’d sent the printer containing the nine booklets for the boxed edition came to a very satisfying 1.1MB. 

Hmm. You know what format that file would neatly fit onto? And for a collection built around historical artefacts, why not play around with some dead media while I’m at it? 

That’s how I found myself scouring eBay for a brand-new floppy disk drive and a box of old-new-stock diskettes, fashioning a never-initially planned-for obsolete edition of the book. 

Yes, it’s real. Yes, it works. And yes, real people have parted with some of their hard-earned for one.  

There are still a few available. And, should you acquire one, what you do with it is up to you. If need be, I can hook you up with a drive via eBay. 

* 

Compared to my previous work, Ephemeral City leans much more heavily to the physical and the organic. I have always maintained a strict separation between the technologies used in the making of literature and the technology through which it is read. The fluid and flexible nature of the digital tools we use every day can be applied intelligently and creatively to the craft of narrative and the presentation of text, even when the output is purely ink and paper, still for me the gold standard of reading experiences. 

And as our interconnected electronic world become increasingly undermined, artificialised, scammy, and enshittified, as archivists and thinkers around the world contemplate the possibility that we have already entered what future generations will consider a dark age, personally I find it more rewarding to create a tactile reading experience that rewards a longer engagement through unconventional means than shovelling yet more instant consumption into an ephemeral attention economy.  

I don’t know. Maybe that’s just me. 

Ephemeral City is available now online. 

Children’s literature has always been a genre curious to experiment and play with media. Just think of pop-up-books and how the Alice in Wonderland adaptation Alice for the iPad (2010) by Atomic Antelope was one of the first apps to explore the features of the iPad. Since the introduction of the iPad in 2010, several attempts have been made to explore meaningful alliances between the print book and the digital device using augmented reality technology; creating hybrid experiences combining the traditional medium for children’s literature and its newest carrier. Such experiences depend on the user installing an app on her digital device and pointing its camera at the pages of a book. The device reads or decodes the data on the paper page and activates and displays content on the screen. The user’s physical, multi-sensory and cognitive engagement in such experiences is also one of complex character as she is managing two technologies at the same time. 

On the one hand, the book or codex technology which include turning the pages and navigating in specific ways, and on the other hand, the digital device and its specific interface navigation. In this way, and as is the defining nature of augmented reality, the book that exists in the user’s real-world environment is enhanced by computer-generated sensory information thus playing with the user’s perception. Off-hand, the effort to create this union seems slightly paradoxical if we consider the fact that the iPad was conceived and designed specifically as the unification of the book and the computer. So, what can actually come of this persistent Sisyphean task of making the print book and the tablet computer work together? 

This article will dig into this question by taking you through some remarkable international examples of literary AR book projects for children, their development over the past decade and the experiences they can produce. It will then shift from an international to a more local, Danish perspective and explore the potential of AR books for children for supporting reading motivation. In Denmark, a new partnership saw the light of day in 2021 in the company Smart Books. The company consists of the popular YouTuber and influencer Rasmus Kolbe, best known under his old boy scout name Lakserytteren (directly translated: the salmon rider) and Søren Jønsson, who is a successful and experienced producer of games for children. Smart Books deliver an augmented reality ‘smart book’ concept, where the reader chooses the path through the paper book’s narrative, interacting with both a book and digital content on a smartphone or tablet, and in this way gains an interactive reading experience. While this strategy is new in a Danish context, the venture also stands on the shoulders of a line of previous AR book projects.

Literary “AR + book” projects for children

When looking over the last decade’s projects that combine AR and paper books aimed at children, it is clear that this media interplay has gained a stronger footing in non-fiction and educational publications than in more literary, narrative projects. Generally, in these latter projects there has been a development from early projects that mainly ‘digitize’ the content of paper books, such as 3D animation of characters in picture books (e.g., Resin’s Two Left Feet, 2013), without asking for the user’s engagement to any significant degree, to newer projects that play with the potential of the augmented digital environment more fully and call for the user’s engagement via interactive game elements (such as Books & Magic’s The Little Mermaid, 2016). However, in some of the latter projects the print book’s materiality and role is in turn neglected. The crux of the matter seems to be to find a balance between the media where one is not a gimmicky appendix to the other. 

Resin’s Two Left Feet

Books & Magic’s The Little Mermaid

If we look to projects that can be characterised as literary in the sense that storytelling and an aesthetic experience are at the forefront of the works, projects produced  by the now hibernating American multi-platform storytelling company Moonbot Studios stand out. These works include The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore and The Numberlys. Both works are aimed at children, The Numberlys at young children (3-7 years old) and Lessmore at slightly older children, yet a target audience is not mentioned anywhere. They both exist in several media at the same time constituting cluster works (Mygind 2017): as picturebooks and AR apps that can be used in conjunction with the picturebooks, as standalone interactive apps and animation films. In the changeable, fleeting world of apps, these works are already old (the books, the apps and films came out in the period 2011-2014) and are not available for purchase anymore, but this does not mean that they are not worth mentioning here. On the contrary, these works draw closer to a balance and a mutual relationship between the print and digital media than many other works. 

Moonbot Studios’ The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore, teaser for all versions

Moonbot Studios Imag-n-o-tron: Numberlys edition

The picturebook The Numberlys takes full advantage of the book medium by playing with the reader’s ingrained expectation to the book by using the oblong format and mixing the reading directions of the book. The book is bound in the short, left side, which would normally mean that the book is read horizontally, but already from the title page the expectation is denied as this page must be read vertically and the book must, therefore, be turned. The title is one large image that spreads from top to bottom, with the five little main characters marching across the page at the bottom. This vertical reading direction enhances the impression of the vast, oppressive world of all-pervading numbers that the characters inhabit. This is a characteristic of the picturebook that it takes advantage of the book medium, its materiality and reading conventions and plays with them to convey meaning. In relation to the hybrid AR book experience, it is noteworthy to point out how the interactivity between the reader and the medium becomes part of the way meaning is conveyed in this universe and therefore not something that is reserved for the digital component.  

In relation to the rest of the cluster work that The Numberlys compose through its many independent media versions, the AR app IMAG-N-O-TRON: Numberlys Edition is the only one that cannot stand alone. Since the app is dependent on the picturebook to activate its content, it can be characterised as an intracompositional transmedia phenomenon (Dena 2009), meaning that the ‘AR app + book’ composition is transmedial in itself, and the app is not a self-contained narrative unit. When opening the AR app, the reader is transformed into and staged as a player, collector and detective, using the digital device as a magnifying glass through which to explore and investigate the picturebook. The AR app encourages the player to scan the book for objects, which,  when located on the paper page via the camera, will turn into animated objects on the screen and be stored in the apps interface. When the objects from the book have been collected, the player can build new, fun constructions in the digital space and practice constructing letters and numbers. In this way, the app encourages the player to perform creative, educating tasks that mimic what the fictional characters do in the picturebook, thereby extending what we might call the core values or message from the picturebook to the digital environment via the AR technology.  

In relation to the aforementioned balance between the media in AR book compositions, it is noteworthy how, on the one hand, The Numberlys picturebook composes a self-contained narrative entity, while, on the other hand, the ‘AR app + book’ composition actually works independently as well. Of course, the reader/player will gain a deeper, more informed experience if she reads the story in picturebook, but it is not a prerequisite to engage with the part of the Numberlys universe that is available in the AR book composition as they offer two distinct kinds of engagement: engagement in a narrative and engagement in playful activities.

Disrupting reading and media cultural hierarchies

Moonbot Studios’ few productions were, and still are, innovative and remarkable examples of AR + book compositions and, on the whole, of experiments with multi-platform, transmedia storytelling, however, the venture did not continue and did not set a precedent for subsequent international AR books for children. If we look to the recent Danish Smart Book concept, this endeavour is targeted at older children, specifically children from 9-13 years old, and here we find yet another approach to the composition of the AR book. 

The Smart Book concept consists of a series of paperback books with individual accompanying AR apps. Currently, three books have been published in Danish and two in English are forthcoming. The series takes place in a fantasy universe of wizards and magic where the reader assumes the role as the protagonist “you”, the First Student of the Firemaster. Just like in the so-called gamebook series for children from the 80-90s Choose You Own Adventure, you navigate the book by reading short numbered chapters that present you with a choice and, depending on the choice, directs you to a new chapter. Some chapters also present the reader with challenges and puzzles, often small maths related puzzles, that must be solved to move on. These obstacles are presented in the book via simple illustrations and text but must be met and solved in the AR app that, when accomplished, will direct the reader to a new chapter in the book. The content of the puzzles is most often not related to the narrative and therefore not narratively motivated. Instead, they offer different kinds of cognitive engagement.       

An interesting aspect of this AR book composition is that the traditional way of reading a book is turned into something else via the non-linear and unknowable reading path. We might say that the book and the AR app create both a material and fictional space in which the reader moves back and forth, yet with a feeling of moving forward without knowing when the journey will end. Normally the reader of a book can see, feel and count the number of pages read and the number of pages remaining in the book. This conventional way of navigating a narrative in a book is suspended and disrupted both by integrating the AR app and through the non-linear structure resulting, paradoxically, in both a higher degree of agency assigned to the reader and a higher degree of obscurity or mystery for the reader.

In their public presentations of the Smart Book concept, the two owners of the company, Søren Jønsson and Rasmus Kolbe/Lakserytteren, associate their project and their motivation behind it with the widespread concerns about the decrease in reading among children. A Danish study of children’s reading habits conclude that children’s joy of reading literature decreases with age and that the drop happens between 5th and 6th grade (Hansen et al. 2017). This situation is the point of departure for the Smart Book project, and the owners’ stated mission is to reignite children and young people’s joy for the written word, and showing them the way to the AR books especially through Lakserytteren’s media channels, such as YouTube, TikTok and Instagram.

The Smart Book series adapts the known “choose your own adventure” form to the AR book, hereby disturbing existing notions of what it means to read literature and proposes a new way of reading. These hybrid works of fiction combine print and digital media in a mutually dependent fashion that challenges prevalent public debates about onscreen reading. In these debates a notion of a media hierarchy is formed. A hierarchy that contrasts print media as the authentic, educational way of reading with digital reading (both visual and audio) as the inferior way of reading. Transmedia AR book projects have an intrinsic potential of being able to break down this hierarchy and offer new multi-sensory, transmedia experiences that support different reading styles. 

References

Dena, C. 2009. Transmedia Practice. Theorising the Practice of Expressing a Fictional World across Distinct Media and Environments. PhD dissertation.

Hansen, S. R. et al (2017): Børns læsning 2017: En kvantitativ undersøgelse af børns læse- og medievaner i fritiden, Læremiddel.dk: Tænketanken Fremtidens Biblioteker.

Mygind, S., 2017. “A Chinese cluster: Danish-born digital comic as source for transmedia design and innovation” in Ensslin, A. et al (eds.): Small Screen Fictions. Vashon Island, Washington: Paradoxa

When writers discuss plot and pacing in narrative craft, especially in creative writing classes, we often talk about the curve of stories, the rise and fall in tension that characterises the most common story structures. Now usually, at least in my experience, that curve is not something a writer actively thinks about while composing a work. It’s more instinctive. Manipulating pace is one of the writer’s primary tricks in taking a simple sequence of events and turning them into narrative. But what in retrospect looks deliberate and disciplined, is in the act of writing more like manipulating the feel of the story as you go.

When it came to my current publishing project, all that instinct counted for nothing. An experiment in recombinant narrative structure requires careful consideration and active manipulation of the curve.

Ex Libris is a novel containing twelve chapters that can be shuffled in any order, yet always presents as a cohesive narrative arc. It is being published in a print run that randomises the chapters between each copy. With close to half a billion possible combinations, each copy will contain a unique version of the text, yet all will tell the same story.

The title for ‘Ex Libris’ comes from the nineteenth century fad for bookplates.

The two books that, more than any others, inspired the structure of Ex Libris are The Unfortunates by B. S. Johnson and Tristano by Nanni Balestrini. Curiously, both were written in the 1960s, though Tristano wouldn’t find its true form until 2007.

The Unfortunates is a beautiful but restless story about grief and the intrusion of memories that overlay the banality of daily life. The novel was structured with a fixed opening and closing and with freely fluid chapters between. The first edition and its more recent reproduction was published as chapter-length booklets contained in a box, which the reader was free to arrange in whatever order they desired.

Balestrini envisaged Tristano as a standard bound work with content that was randomised between copies. Sound familiar? The author was unable to realise the work as intended until forty years after its initial publication and with the advent of digital-based print technology. As the title suggests, Tristano builds its text using Tristan and Isolde as scaffold, which frees Balestrini to desiccate the narrative into the smallest of fragments, hints of meaning that only ever briefly come into focus.

Both works experiment boldly, not just with structure, but also with the language itself. The result is intoxicating: as a reader you feel like you’re having fun, even as you stumble around the text, constantly trying to find your footing. Tristano is one of the best examples of what I call ‘narrative drift’, the sense that, as a reader, you must let go of any sense of structure or meaning and allow the pages to take you wherever they lead. The Unfortunates is more focused, a narrative that initially drifts, but tightens as more of its pieces fall into place.

When I began writing what would become Ex Libris, I didn’t have a particular structure or publishing method in mind. What I wanted to do was write a work with fluid text without sacrificing a reader’s sense of plot or narrative arc.

I started with much more complicated mechanics and elaborate concoctions of fixed and fluid chapters. I ground my way through three drafts of the story, never completely satisfied, trying to find some magic key that would unlock how the story should work.

Eventually, I abandoned these versions of the story altogether. After a break from the manuscript, I returned and found myself back at first principles. Finally, I contemplated the curve.

I created a storyboard of sorts in Scriviner—movable lists in dot points—obstinately refusing to write anything resembling finished prose until a supporting structure had been mapped in sufficient detail. Slowly, a new structure began to take shape. The story begins in media res, at the beginning of the climax. Then it backtracks. It fills in details and circumstances that led directly to the opening scene. Then it jumps to the rest of the climax and conclusion. This means Ex Libris, like Johnson’s The Unfortunates, opens and closes with fixed chapters that frame the narrative. I had hoped not to invite such direct comparisons with Johnson, since clearly I would come off a distant second best. But the structure he pioneered, with its parallels to classic storytelling technique, is compelling in its simplicity.

Beyond the framing device, the fluid or recombinant chapters in Ex Libris primarily concern themselves with exploring character and world. These chapters exist in a weird state of semi-independence. A fluid chapter is episodic, with its own miniature arc. It cannot rely on prior knowledge. That doesn’t make it a short story. Although it shares traits with the short story form, a fluid chapter’s raison d’etre is to contribute to a greater whole. Detached from their surroundings and the framing of the novel, these little stories might struggle to pass a ‘so what?’ test.

Story and the structure developed in tandem. Part dystopia, part satire, with doses of paranoia and farce, and a self-reflexive bent, the novel is set in a hyper-networked surveillance state that has abandoned and almost forgotten the book. It focuses on a small band of subversives who collect the fragments and scraps of stories left behind. Calling themselves the ‘free readers’, they are attempting to rebuild a grand library they know must have once existed. A fragmented book about fragmented books, Ex Libris both feeds off and contributes to its own structure, a virtuous cycle of knowing winks.

I was very conscious of the reader’s experience.

I was very conscious of the reader’s experience, signposting and orienting the text at every opportunity to counter and minimise the sense of narrative drift. I maintained strict upper and lower word limits for each chapter. Too long indicated waffle that needed to be broken up. Too short pointed to a lack of substance. Often throughout the long planning stage of the project, I would stare at a dot-point breakdown for a chapter and think ‘but where’s the story?’.

I also avoided working on chapters in any particular order. Instead, I jumped around. From its initial use as a storyboard, Scrivener became a kind of reference tool as I wrote, a way to maintain a wide-angle view of the story, while moving the chapters around. The texts themselves were composed in separate documents, organised by character name and working title. Early printouts were separated into chapters, each one held together with a bulldog clip, so that I could shuffle and reshuffle while reading.

When I finally created the first complete manuscript, I used a random number generator and manually combined the chapters into a single file. I’ve never considered putting together a preferred or canonical order. The thought of it seems a bit…wrong to me. The chronology of the story can be reconstructed in part—some events clearly happen before others—but a grand overarching chronology would be impossible to determine. That’s not how this story works.

At the end of an exhaustive process, I wasn’t sure if I’d succeeded. It wasn’t until the first feedback from beta readers (each of them with their own unique random shuffle) that I suspected maybe this was working as intended. A good indication was that some of these early readers did their own reshuffling to see if I had cheated.

The coding to compile finished print-ready files is done in Automator, the computer equivalent of a Rube Goldberg machine.

The long process of conceiving, planning, and writing Ex Libris has led me to a different way of thinking about raising tension in a narrative arc. The behaviour of the characters introduced in the opening sequences is gradually becomes clearer as their background is revealed. It doesn’t matter in what order those revelations happen.

The best analogy I’ve found is that it’s like a jigsaw puzzle. The order in which you place the pieces doesn’t change the final picture, but it does change how you experience the journey towards it. Adjacent chapters might flow or they might juxtapose. A character might disappear from the story for a while. A particular piece of key knowledge might be revealed earlier or later. The story has a different rhythm between copies. If the traditional narrative arc is the linear curve, this is more two-dimensional.

So does it work? That remains my burning question as I finalise editing and prepare to publish. It’s impossible to speak for every possible combination. There are 479,001,600 of them so I can’t check. It’s something every individual reader will have to determine on their own based on the version of the text they receive. I’ve always hoped that the story might be good enough to transcend its construction. I imagine a reader happening across a copy of Ex Libris, with no prior knowledge of its creation, who will read from cover to cover and enjoy it.

Is that even possible? I guess we’ll see.

The crowdfunding campaign to publish Ex Libris is live until 25 November 2019.