Hardbound.co: Book ‘trailers’ — or book replacements?

Hardbound.co is an innovative, mobile-first approach to digital storytelling. It provides bite-sized, visual ‘tap stories’ (as in, you tap your screen to progress through the narrative) that teach you about various topics.

However, Hardbound’s latest ‘pivot’ may, at first glance, concern some in the publishing industry: the platform will now create digested, visual stories based on published non-fiction books. Check out this story based on Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind, or this one based on Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto, for example.

Hardbound’s approach raises an interesting question for authors and publishers. Namely: what are the intellectual, moral and commercial implications of an app creating and publishing content based on existing works?

Hardbound’s new direction was received with broad acclaim on Product Hunt, where it’s long been a popular app and where Hardbound founder Nathan Bashaw is a familiar face. However, Product Hunt’s audience of early adopters isn’t especially concerned with the health of the publishing industry.

Amongst the positive notices, it was left to one commenter to voice what some from the industry may feel:

“There is an actual reason why books are written and the benefit of actually reading a book (sic)… and there is much more to be gleaned from reading an actual story or book than can be understood from this bastardization of a novel into tiny snippets… with animations, images etc…

“This is basically on-your-phone super-abbreviated version of the yellow/black Cliff Notes — they were already a bad idea but at least they summarized things semi-well…”

Not mentioned here is the other elephant in the room: is this not essentially ripping authors off? Will consuming a digested version of a book in five minutes preclude people from buying the original book on which the story is based?

It would have been easy for Bashaw to overlook this one dissenter in a sea of positive responses. But he’s clearly thought through such claims, and decided to address them in a blog post.

From my point of view I thought he addressed them pretty well; for example, on the notion of Hardbound ‘dumbing down’ the approach to learning he says:

“In truth, visuals help almost everyone learn more quickly and efficiently than decoding a bunch of text. Ten years from now, people will look back on our weird aversion to visual storytelling like we now look back on our parents’ weird aversion to text messaging in the early 2000’s.”

I’m not convinced the reference to parental text messaging is the strongest comparison he could have made, but I agree with his assertion that visuals help storytelling. I’m sure I’m not the only one to have sat through all-text PowerPoint presentations that cry out for an engaging image here or there.

Moving on to the concern that the Hardbound version of a book will prevent someone from buying the original source, Bashaw remarks:

“Sure, not everyone who reads a Hardbound story will go on to read the book. But I’d bet that those people were never going to read the book in the first place.“

This feels like a strong point to me. I am probably not going to invest in The Righteous Mind; but before the Hardbound story based on it, I’d only vaguely heard of it and so would have been even less likely to buy. On this basis I can see there being times when a Hardbound story exposes me to something I go on to purchase — acting rather like a movie trailer, but for books.

On the same theme, Bashaw says:

“When authors do podcast interviews, or give TED talks, or make YouTube videos, they are increasing the number of people who read their books. Hardbound serves the exact same function.”

He makes it sound more cut-and-dried than is perhaps warranted here — I imagine not every related YouTube video increases the sale of every book. But I can definitely think of examples on both sides of this coin when it comes to my own experiences of book buying. Susan Cain’s TED talk encouraged me to read Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking; but for some reason Amy Cuddy’s enjoyable presentation about body language didn’t lead me to buy Presence.

Furthermore, says Bashaw: “We link people to the Amazon page of books and can tell that since yesterday, dozens of people have already bought books directly after reading the Hardbound story. And that’s just what we can directly measure on the first day!”

(I have to say I couldn’t actually see these links, on desktop or mobile, but I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he wouldn’t make this claim if it weren’t true; perhaps there’s a bug related to the new format preventing me from seeing them.)

Reading Bashaw’s rationale I found myself becoming more convinced of the value of Hardbound’s approach to authors and publishers. This was helped by an apparent eagerness on the behalf of authors to partner with the startup, which Bashaw shared:

“From our conversations with authors and publishers, it’s clear that there is a willingness and ability to pay for great content that helps sell book copies. From our early data, we’re extremely confident we will help sell a lot of books. So now we have a natural market of people who would be willing to create Hardbound stories themselves, or at least pay for the creation of Hardbound stories.

“One idea we had is to create a marketplace where businesses who want Hardbound stories created could hire writers and designers to build one for them.”

This is compounded by the fact that Jonathan Haidt retweeted the link to the Hardbound story based on his book; plus the news that they’re starting to work with authors before publication, outlined in this explanation of their new direction:

“We’re starting to get access to books before they launch (stay tuned for our adaptation of Neil deGrasse Tyson’s upcoming book 😉) and believe if we play our cards right, we can become a part of the book launch. News outlets can embed our stories in the articles they write about new books, and get their readers to engage 5–10x longer.”

So Hardbound exposes people to books they may not have heard of, making them more likely to buy them; they want to work with authors and publishers to ensure the quality of their content remains high; and they want to create jobs around this proposition.

This is a win all-round, right? I’d be very interested to hear what authors/publishers think about this particular innovation and its implications for the industry.

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An edited version of this article was originally published at www.digitalbookworld.com on April 10, 2017.

Stuart Waterman is a strategist at digital consultancy & startup studio Mint Digital, and co-curator of the Non-Fiction Addiction community and event series. Mint Digital has worked with several publishing houses, and BookEngine, their latest software product, is a title manipulation and distribution engine that gives publishers more power over their book catalogue data.