Love is a Mixtape: an exploration in digital publishing
Testing the limits of iBooks Author by creating an immersive iBook experience.
Love is a Mixtape by Rob Sheffield is a book that holds a special place in my heart. It is a book that deals with love, loss and music, in the era of cassette tapes. While this was slightly before my own time of musical cognition, the messages of this nonfiction novel ring true across generations.
While I do have a deep love for this book (and for the age old art of paperbacks), when I first read Love is a Mixtape, I ran into the challenge of not understanding all the nuances of Sheffield’s writing- namely, the countless pop culture references specific to the ’80s and ’90s. While I was familiar with some, I found myself growing weary of constantly googling who various people and artists were. With the numerous songs referenced throughout the book (there are over 30 in the first chapter alone!), I found myself wishing that the book had a soundtrack to go alongside it, as well as a glossary to help me understand all the name dropping that Sheffield likes to do.
I knew that, as much as I loved my gifted copy of Love is a Mixtape, an ebook would allow for an immersive experience that would enhance a young reader’s understanding of the book, allowing them to further appreciate its timeless message.
The Plan
In order to create a more engaging, immersive experience, I made some plans to make more of the book’s content understandable, regardless of the reader’s age and understanding of late-20th century pop culture. I knew I wanted to:
- Update the art to modernize it and make it consistent throughout the ebook,
- Incorporate music into the book,
- Add a glossary of pop culture references,
- and create some type of interactive experience that would help engage the reader.
Updating the Art
I knew that for the book I wanted to create a more modern, yet era specific feel. I experimented quite a bit, knowing I wanted to incorporate cassette tapes. In the end, I drew inspiration from flat-lay images of cassette tapes and all the unique designs and colors that were common amongst ’90s cassettes.
Here’s a comparison of the old cover art and my updated art:
Incorporating Music
I would be remiss not to incorporate music into a novel that focuses so much on a relationship built around, and influenced by, music. Every chapter of Love is a Mixtape starts off with a playlist- one that Rob Sheffield or his departed wife Renée created. While it was a no-brainer that I would recreate these mixtapes as Spotify playlists, the challenge came when I tried to decide how to make these playlists accessible in the book.
I experimented with a few options: I tried out QR codes. This seemed like a good choice, since it would not require wifi on the actual device for the reader to listen to the playlist. The downside of this, however, was, what if the reader was on their smartphone? There is not an easy way to access the QR code for them. It would require the reader to constantly have two digital devices on them, and with that you risk the reader constantly getting distracted from book (read: me trying to google various references while reading the book! I got sidetracked constantly).
After deciding the QR codes was not the optimal approach, I looked into embedding Spotify widgets into the book. This seemed like an excellent approach, but unfortunately Spotify does not package their widgets in an easy, usable iBook Author compatible .wdgt file, which would have required me to take the HTML output into third party software. If it weren’t for time constraints, this is an option I would have liked to pursue further.
After pursuing that option, I looked into creating my own iBook widget in Hype. This could have worked well if I had all the audio files on my own device, but to avoid pirating music (and save myself quite a bit of time) I did not take this approach.
In the end I used the simple approach of providing a link in a pop-up box for the reader to click, which would take them to the Spotify playlist. This method still has the challenge of requiring wifi and taking the reader out of the experience briefly, but of the time efficient options, I felt this one worked best since it did not require multiple devices for the reader to access the music.
Since the playlist at the start of the chapter was not the only music in the book, I also created a small cassette icon that could be placed in line with the text for readers to click on. Each cassette, when clicked, opens a pop-up box that reveals the album art and a link to the song on Spotify.
One challenge I faced in designing the pop-ups was adjusting the window and the images to fit nicely. When I first added the content, the images were too large and required the reader to scroll in order to access the link to the music. After some adjustments, however, everything fit nicely in a small frame that retained its size and shape beautifully across multiple platforms.
Adding a Glossary
Since the novel is riddled with era-specific pop culture references, it can be hard to follow for young readers. In order to make the experience more timeless, I created a glossary of the musicians, movie stars, critics and more that are reference throughout the book.
Every image used in the glossary is in black and white, in order to enhance consistency in a format that could lend itself to lots of inconsistencies.
Creating an Interactive Animation
Even though the book deals with some challenging themes of love and loss, Sheffield has a playful way of presenting his passion for music and culture. I wanted to incorporate some of this playfulness into the design.
In chapter two of the book, Sheffield outlines a few of the reasons why people create mixtapes, offering quippy descriptions of each one. I thought this would be an interesting opportunity to make reading the book a bit more interactive.
Instead of simply formatting the text as it is throughout the rest of the book, I implemented the cassette tape designs that are featured throughout the novel. Each tape is labeled with a different type of mix tape and are clickable.
The Finished Product
Upon completing the design (and throughout the design process, really) I previewed the ebook in the Apple Books app. There were certain things that I tweaked towards the end- one of which was the pop-ups, as mentioned before. Another challenge I faced was ensuring that the typefaces were consistent. I found that iBooks Author does not retain styles well, and often reverts to its internal default font, Iowan Old Style. While this wasn’t a huge deal for the size of this project, I imagine it would become quite tedious in the context of a larger project (i.e. if I were to have created the entire ebook, rather than only the first couple of chapters).
In order to ensure that the project looked and functioned as intended, I previewed the book across multiple platforms- my macbook pro, iPad and iPhone.
Most of the design held up exceptionally well, except for the interactive animation. When viewed from the small screen of an iPhone 5, the text became rather small. I did include alt-text for the image, which could help address this issue, but the situation is not ideal. Given more time I would have found another solution to help better retain the readability.
Overall with this project I have come to better understand the capabilities and limitations of authoring in iBooks. Certain features were not as easily implemented as I had hoped, but I believe that the experience of reading Love is a Mixtape is, indeed, enhanced with immersive authoring.
This project was completed as part of DGM 2260: Immersive Authoring I, a course at Utah Valley University.
