Candace

Talmadge

Read Candace's bio and previous columns

May 29, 2009

In the Digital Age, Story-Telling Comes Full Circle

(First in an occasional series on the future of reading.)

Heard any good novels lately?

The digital age is an exciting time to be involved in story-telling, whether through blogs, books, columns, music, poetry, film and the like. Digital technology makes today’s storytelling media dynamic, capable of doing things and reaching out in ways simply not possible for older, static media (like printed physical pages).

Combined with Internet accessibility and wireless distribution, dynamic digital media have blown open untapped potentials for storytelling to vast audiences that keep growing exponentially. Darn near all of us are online now at some point in our day, or for hours at a time. And we want to enjoy ourselves while we’re there.

We arrive right back at storytelling, the original form of family fun at the campfires of countless cave-dwelling ancestors. (The type of entertainment that produces families in the first place is grist for a different venue.)

Just like our ancestors, we modern human beings still love stories. More than entertain us, stories help us explain our lives and enable us to make sense of our world and our experiences in it. The oldest stories, of course, were not preserved as words in any medium but recited as oral histories passed by word of mouth over generations.

Maybe the novel, or long-form storytelling, has also come full circle, from verbal to print back to oral again. Thanks to digital technology, it is financially feasible to produce an audible novel that is far more than words read aloud, recorded and played back. Instead, this spoken fiction is a vividly dramatic experience, complete with different narrative voices that are fully human (not digitally synthesized), sound effects and background music.

Think of this digitally enhanced novel as an audio movie, which we may buy off the Internet and load onto our computers or MP3 players to enjoy anywhere, even driving in our cars (provided we are not also trying to text message or put on make-up at the same time).

At roughly $1,000.00 per hour of recording, audio movies are not cheap to make. Yet they cost a mere fraction of traditional feature-length movie productions while preserving the author’s entire text and spicing it up with drama and flair.

Independent publisher Griffyn Ink, based in Nashville, Tenn., has produced just such an audio movie out of speculative fiction titled Resonance. Spokeswoman Eli Jackson says the Resonance audio movie is selling extremely well, especially the versions pre-loaded onto flash memory drives. Resonance is priced at $34.99 at one popular online store for audio books and slightly less at the author’s web site.

Jackson also says the book as an unabridged audio movie lasts 16.5 hours. “You get your money’s worth,” she adds. Griffyn Ink has found that audio movies seem to appeal most to busy mothers (away from their children), commuters and gym members for workout diversions.

Audio movies are just one of many storytelling options that will take hold in the digital age. Most of them have yet to be imagined or attempted. If the digital age can be compared to the timeline of human flight, we’re probably just past the point where the Wright brothers got their plane off the ground. Now what?

For starters, even the plain vanilla book as storytelling words on a page is getting a digital makeover as the eBook. This of course necessitates an eBook reader for those who want to get away from their computers and take their stories with them to the beach or the mountains. At present, there is competition among the makers of these devices, two of which a future column will discuss. 

© 2009 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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