Beyond Choose Your Own Adventure: Coliloquy Ebooks Give Readers an Active Role
In a young adult romance novel released Tuesday, a character named J.J. must decide to pursue one of three love interests. She picks up the phone and calls … well, that depends. In books from startup ebook publisher Coliloquy, readers can make choices that affect the way the rest of the story is told.
Depending on how the author has written the book, they can also reread scenes from a different character’s point of view, vote on an outcome or unlock new content as they read. Coliloquy, which is launching with four young adult fiction titles, uses the same technology that enables crossword Kindle apps to turn the idea of a book on its head — thereby giving readers an active role in the story.
“With the printing press, books were designed to not be customizable,” explains Colioquy co-founder Lisa Rutherford. “Now ereaders give us a way to reinvent different forms of narrative and storytelling.”
So far the applications of Coliloquy’s platform have been more subtle than a “choose your own adventure” story. In one of the startup’s novels, readers make small choices that don’t impact the overall storyline but unlock clues to a mystery. Another allows readers to spend more time getting to know the character they like best.
The possibilities for flexible text seem limitless. Rutherford says she imagines, for instance, a legal thriller in which the reader witnesses a scene that disappears from the text before he or she must provide an eyewitness account from memory.
If you want bells and whistles on your books, you don’t have to look very far. A startup called Booktrack is adding soundtracks to classic children’s novels while Kobo’s social reading app puts conversations right into book pages. But what Coliloquy is doing differs in that it expands the author’s storytelling ability rather than adding something flashy on top of their work without their involvement. As a writer and book lover, it’s one of the only ebook “innovations” that hasn’t somewhat offended me.
“Not every story is going to be told this way,” Rutherford says, “but there are lots of stories that can only be told this way. If we discover one gem that way…it’s something that we’re very passionate about.”
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