SURVIVAL SKILL
Reading is a survival skill. Unfortunately, it’s an increasingly lost art. With its duplexed narrative, The Adventures of TBUG & Sasquatch is created for young readers. As they listen to the novel via the QR-code audiobook, they read the pages from the book. The duplexed design encourages the practice of long-form reading of traditional pages of text that also link to animated scribes (via QR-code) thus they become in themselves, SMARTBOOKS. And scribes become animated ideograms that inform, teach and entertain.
Just what is a SMARTBOOK? It is a book to read, to see and to hear. Motionbook titles start with traditional text and include QR-Codes to provide this technical addition to the design. The small, speckled box at the top of each chapter links a Smart phone or tablet to a scibe or visualized audiobook, thereby upscaling the reader to “duplexed” narrative. The goal is to create a multi-engagement pathway for readers.
Text and context-based narratives differ significantly. While one is not inherently better than the other, each manifests powerful attributes. Text narratives drive the high resolution transfer of information. As such, printed text serves as the ultimate tool for creating a structure-of-mind.
Context narratives, with their audio-visual characteristics, enrich a viewer with visualized metaphor and the inflectional power of spoken words. While context records provide a simple, natural map of a given subject, the electronic frame that conveys context media tends to eclipse a page of text.
A simple test: try reading a book while watching a game of rugby on a large screen. Notice how easily the act of reading is blinded in the sounds and motion of context media. The only possible way to make the book more invisible is to place it behind the screen. That’s the sum of it.
The 100-year plus conflict between text and context records has resulted in a significant loss with respect to the practice of reading. But I … diatribe.
By restricting context records (animations, spoken words, illustrations) to a side role as marginalia, the media page is forced to enhance, not eclipse the mind-building properties made possible by a page of text and the act of reading.
Treated as a special class of modifier — think of it as a visualized adjective or adverb — a case can be made for duplexed-narrative as a super language format. One that includes high resolution information based on reading, empowered by the inflectional speed of human language: spoken words, finger pointing, and lines drawn into the sand.
Bottom line: duplexed-narrative seems to work. But of course, that’s eager reporting from a starving author. The only way to confirm this is to buy a copy and give it to a kid. Then watch.
High-resolution media animated ideogram
