Can social media revive interest in classic books?

By R.D.

JAPANESE publishing has had a rough few decades. The country’s print market peaked around 1996, shortly before the Asian financial crisis in 1997. Sales of magazines and books declined rapidly and have continued to fall ever since, despite the economy clambering back to its feet. The phenomenon even earned its own term, moji-banare, which roughly translates as “flight from the written word”. And yet, by the mid-2000s more people, particularly young women, were thought to be reading than ever before. What happened?

The rapid adoption of hand-held phones after the turn of the century gave rise to keitai shousetsu: novels written on mobiles and delivered to readers in serialised chunks. They didn’t require a new understanding of technology—young people were accustomed to communicating via their mobiles—and came in chapters of 50 to 100 words, which could be easily downloaded onto phones and read between stops on a commuter train or on a break from work. Once fiction was delivered in this ultra-convenient format, readers who had typically shunned print media responded with enthusiasm. The most loved stories were, somewhat ironically, converted back into print books. At one point, four of the five bestselling novels in Japan started life on a mobile phone.

Now a library in America is adopting this digital-first philosophy of fiction in the hope that it will lure readers back to the page. In August the New York Public Library (NYPL) announced that it would be releasing illustrated versions of classic novels, produced in collaboration with Mother, an independent creative and advertising agency, on Instagram, a photo-sharing app. The novels and novellas would become “Insta Novels”, posted on the platform’s “Stories” feature (a daily slideshow of pictures and videos).

The first tale, “Alice in Wonderland” by Lewis Carroll, was released in approximately 200 slides over the course of two days. Flicking through, the experience is similar to reading an e-book on a mobile phone, with the addition of whimsical animations. Two further books have been lined up: “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and “The Metamorphosis” by Franz Kafka. Each work will be illustrated by a different artist, all of whom have strong online followings. According to the library, the purpose of the project is to “make some of the greatest stories ever written accessible to every New Yorker and Instagram user”.

Statistics and studies would suggest that this is a good idea. In 2015 the National Endowment for the Arts reported that 43% of American adults had read at least one work of literature—defined as novels, short stories, poems or plays—in the previous year. This was the lowest number since the agency began recording reading and arts participation in 1982 (when the figure was 57%). At the same time, social-media usage is increasing. Facebook remains the most popular platform, but Instagram is accruing users at a faster rate and now boasts 1bn active users a month. Those aged 18-24 are its most faithful devotees, with 81% saying that they visited the platform at least once per day.

With increasing demands on finite amounts of time, literature is losing out. The NYPL is not the first to try and redress this balance: a number of companies have sprung up in recent years hoping to use technology and new delivery patterns to encourage engagement with the written word. Urd, an immersive fiction app, delivers content to readers’ phones in real time via a chat app. StoryTourist is a sort of Pokémon Go for fiction, unfolding stories as treasure hunts around the places in which they are set. Their first full release was a tour based around the Sherlock Holmes story “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle”, set in London.

But the NYPL’s latest project is unlikely to revolutionise the fiction market in the way that Japanese mobile-phone novels did. “Insta Novels” is restricted to sharing existing fiction that meets certain, limited requirements: it must have been released long enough ago for it to be available in the public domain, and be short enough to read comfortably in a slideshow. Still, as each work appears next to the shots of dogs and holidays that commonly populate Instagram feeds, it is a thoughtful reminder that new types of media can be leveraged to encourage interest in old ones. It also shows that reading need not be an arduous or time-consuming process, that literature can be consumed in the small, snatched moments in everyday life. Technological advancement—with its myriad distractions—doesn’t mean having to turn the page on old favourites.