Hardbound — The Biggest Thing in Books Since the Library?
An ambitious experiment in literature
Today’s post is a departure from the usual “historical” social fiction analyses we here at Woven provide. That’s because right now, we’re lucky enough to witness in real time the efforts of a prescient group of New York storytellers, as they attempt to rethink books — and succeed.
Storytelling has undergone a series of profound changes in the past few decades. The rise of ebooks, myriad new distribution channels, and novel forms of storytelling developing around internet services have led us into a brave new world of literature.
But let us not forget one of the most significant technologies to have impacted storytelling — libraries. Albeit straightforward in hindsight, the impact that libraries had on the future of storytelling — and on humankind — is massive.
The first libraries, built in Sumer over 4,500 years ago, stored clay tablets that marked commercial transactions. This is a far cry from the resplendent halls of knowledge like those of Trinity College Dublin, where you might walk in, blindly pick up any book, and:
The evolution of libraries — from storage houses to repositories of knowledge — was thousands of years in the making. They were not a revolutionary, but rather an evolutionary technology, created with one goal in mind — supporting a new medium of information transfer — but leading to countless beneficial knock-on effects.
Libraries continue to evolve, supporting the various new mediums on which we humans find to transfer information: papyrus sheets in Egypt, books in China, even microfiche and laserdiscs in 1980s America (OK, well before that, but that seemed to define my library experience as a kid).
Now, information is stored digitally on centralized servers, and a smartphone in every hand is challenging the status of libraries as the distribution points of knowledge. While this likely isn’t a bad thing, we’ll soon encounter the same issue that the first librarians had, namely:
How do we gather and present knowledge appropriate to it’s new medium?
A startup from New York City (with a sweet throwback name), Hardbound, is tackling this question head on.
Not Just Another Mobile Reading App
First, a disclaimer: the Woven team were beta testers of the Hardbound app from late 2015. We’ve had the pleasure of building a great relationship with the Hardbound team, have watched their project evolve, and have participated through feedback. This is not a puff piece about a friend’s app, however; rather— as you’ll read — we present an objective analysis of what Hardbound has started… and what it still needs to accomplish it’s lofty goals.
Apps for reading stories on your smartphone abound. I’ve got a folder on my iPhone that is 5 swipes deep with reading apps. Some are genre-specific. Some are interactive. Some are… unique. The point is there are tons of them out there, and for good reason:
- there’s an ongoing explosion in written content, both on the web and in apps (hi, Medium!);
- People still love to read; and
- The publishing business has adopted their business to the internet era through essentially porting their preexisting formats to the computer.
Add the fact that ebook (and audiobook) distribution is essentially an Amazon-dominated monopoly, and you have conditions that any entrepreneur would jump at.
So you end up with reading apps. Lots of them. But despite my best efforts, I’ve not been able to find a smartphone reading experience that wasn’t either:
a) a simple (oftentimes beautiful) window through which to view old, ported formats (books, novella’s, etc.); or
b) a bespoke app for a new type of “internet story,” begun with good intentions I’m sure, but culminating in an uninspired and ultimately painful synthesis of text and images and social media profile pictures.
That is to say, I never found anything where I felt the developers asked the question: What would storytelling look like if we scrapped all previous formats, and built something that really utilizes the capabilities of the smartphone? That is:
What would a mobile-first storytelling experience feel like?
The developers of Hardbound’s iOS app asked this question. They strive for, and have masterfully delivered, a reading experience and interesting content that feels like it belongs on your phone.
But What’s Wrong With eBooks?
Kindle (and other ebook reader) content is simple: a book that’s been smashed onto your smartphone screen, Procrustean bed-style. To be sure, this is not by accident, but rather by design.
Content for ebook reader apps is built to feel as close to a paperback book as possible for one simple reason: ebook readers want to read books. Let me say it again just to make sure:
Readers of ebooks want to read books.
They want physical books. They (we) grew up with books in their hands, so naturally, we want something that feels familiar to them. (OK, we want more than books, they want books paired with the convenience of storage, font settings, dimming, etc… they want books plus.) I posit that much of this comes from the nostalgia factor that we, as humans who grew up reading physical books, are unconsciously searching for.
Nathan Bashaw, the co-founder of Hardbound, thought about this, too:
Hardbound was created, it seems, with Henry Ford’s “faster horse” quote in mind. Hardbound doesn’t come with a lead iPhone case or a 5 pound wearable that attaches to your thigh so you can “feel the weight” of a heavy book in your lap (but I know really want to see a Kickstarter campaign for this). This is for the same reason the automobile wasn’t designed to reproduce the “clickety clack” of horse hooves or the (once nostalgic) smell of manure.
No, Hardbound is here to show us the way, easing us into the near future, where we (and our kids before us) consume most of our stories from the supercomputers attached to our palms.
What Makes A Good Native Story App
Hardbound is not being developed in a bubble, and there are, predictably, other companies looking to service this group of readers as well. One great example is Hooked, an app that boldly calls itself “Fiction for the Snapchat Generation” and delivers stories told through a faux-voyeuristic SMS chat experience (look for more detailed Woven post on this soon). There’s also probably some amazing section of the WeChat app that I don’t know about which provides an awesome, smartphone-native reading experience.
Hardbound has really nailed the smartphone-native experience in a few key ways, however:
1. A Mobile-First (Mobile-Only?) UI
- One-touch (or one-swipe) interactions: critical for the smartphone generation:
- Dead simple interface design: no nested menus here.
- Simple story stats: enough to give social proof without overloading you.
- A commitment to constraint: we use our phones more than ever, but the interactions are shorter than ever, and so are Hardbound’s mobile stories.
- SNS-based login and notifications: not being forced to authenticate with Twitter or Facebook leaves users feeling safe that every action they take in the app won’t be potentially posted for the world to see. And, let’s face it, “big” social network authentication doesn’t feel good (or cool) anymore.
The app is also lightning fast, has a great web-based sharing option, and oh yeah did I mention the stories?
2. Mobile-First Stories
Hardbound isn’t just the library at this stage: it’s the books themselves, too. (We’re waiting with bated breath for the day when we can create our own Hardbound stories) These stories really hit the mark for smartphone content: they’re delightful, bite-sized containers of knowledge.
“Container” is the key word here, and it’s something that the Hardbound team has been thinking about for over a year now.
Hardbound stories are a combination of text and animation, a sort of slideshow for your phone. While the word slideshow would normally surface long-repressed, painful memories from business school, Hardbound’s stories are beautifully designed, interesting, and leave a refreshingly low-Keynote aftertaste.
The current offering revolves around “edutainment” stories, a fancy word for highly-interesting content that anyone who subscribes to any of these subreddits would gobble up immediately.
I found the bite-sized length of these stories as wonderful preambles to the long-form content from which they often draw or allude to. This is important for the writing community, as stories cannot afford to live locked up between the covers of a book anymore these days, but must rather live throughout the internet in order to be discovered. We’re spending so much of our time on the web nowadays, the meatspace book “container” doesn’t make sense as a standalone offering anymore.
My favorite Hardbound story was their latest, an intro to a book I’d had on my wish list since early Summer. Check it out below; it’s available as a web-view if you don’t have the Hardbound app yet:
What crystalized the potential for this type of mobile-first knowledge container for me was the fact that I learned about this book in early June from this blog, which I saved in my Instapaper because — despite it being labeled a paltry 5 minute read — it was clearly too complex to consume at the time of discovery. Fast forward to Hardbound’s low-commitment, beautiful and (major 🔑) progressively-disclosed story, and without hesitation I chose to “experience” the story, and found myself pleasantly surprised to want to buy the book:
3. A Commitment to Experimentation
Being a Lean Startup lover, I think the Hardbound “Stuff We Love” section of the app, a Digg-like curated list of interesting content, is a great, non-obvious and completely lovely way to find out through data (clicks) what topics the audience might want to read next.
I also like how Hardbound is validating the value of their offering with a simple, tiered patron model (sort of like a library… am I taking this metaphor too far?). After a few months, they’ll hopefully have a great handle on the value of their content in readers’ minds, and will be able to use that information to better inform future content monetization efforts.
The Librarian
From the beginning, when we were introduced to Nathan by a mutual friend who sits at the hub of tech and literature, he was focused on one thing:
“I’ve never been able to shake the idea of creating books made of software. I find it endlessly fascinating for a couple reasons:
First, I believe that books make us better people. I believe that every human being is essentially curious, loving, and good.”
This is the type of beneficent passion that will change literature as we know it.
Nathan and his team are like the first librarians in Sumer: they recognize that while there’s a killing to be made selling books today, there’s something more important to do:
“The goal isn’t just to make reading better on a phone, it’s to give us the superpower of absorbing information more efficiently and becoming better humans.” — Nathan Bashaw
No library can claim ownership to the knowledge in the books housed therein. But without the first libraries to give those books a home, future stores of knowledge would never be available to us. Nathan and team are developing a library to house our future knowledge, and it’s a laudable effort.
This is really important, and it’s thrilling to watch it happen in real time.
Going Forward
There’s still a lot of work to be done. Here’s short list of what I’d like to see Hardbound — and other story apps — do better:
- Encourage sharing of more than the container itself. Just as readers like to share bits of the content that makes up webpages (quotes, images, etc.) and not just a link to the page itself, I’d love to see a way to share moments within the stories. This is a point we at Woven are very passionate about, as we’re building a mid-content sharing function (shoutout to the slick new image+text sharing tool from Genius) into a new app we’ll release this Fall (stay tuned!).
- Assume distractions. For most users, smartphones notifications are a ridiculous source of distractions, and perpetuate the frenetic behavior that has us checking our phones over 100 times a day. Assume that readers will jump in and out of the story, and build content around that (i.e., content that can be entered and exited multiple times without breaking — or perhaps even adding to — the story). Take progressive disclosure to it’s furtherest extent to aid in this endeavor.
- Let content live. Let it breath. Let it go where it would go if it were alive. Would it choose to only live inside an app? Or would it get on social media? What services would the content use? Think of content as a living, breathing creature and build it into the fabric of the internet.
- Sell the vision. It’s hard to get behind the patron model with the pitch as it is now. The benefits are clear, and the goal is to validate whether those benefits have real value to readers. But don’t undersell this vision — literature lovers are an emotional species (many of them are writers themselves), and you’ll want to validate that this rings true to them.
This is Just The Beginning
Is Hardbound the first mobile library?
It’s too early to say. But their foundation is rock hard, er… solid, so I’m looking forward to seeing what they build on top of it 😉
Do you know of any other mobile apps or other software that are experimenting with how we stories are told? Do you have any ideas for ways to tell stories on smartphones? Let us know in the response section, we’d love to hear from you!
Enjoy!
Woven is supported by LongShorts, a social media-based storytelling app. Check it out and here for iOS.
