(Image: New York Public Library/Estate of Stella Sampas Kerouac)
In April 1951, when Jack Kerouac fed the first pieces of what would become a 120-foot scroll of paper into his Underwood portable to write the famous first draft of his novel, On the Road, he was, in one sense, blowing up the typewriter to make his own primitive homemade word processor. Sixty years later, Kerouac’s publisher, Penguin Books, is, in its own quiet way, blowing up the book to make – what, exactly? For now, they are calling it a book app, and even to my mildly technophobic eyes, the results offer a glimpse onto a potentially brave new world of publishing.
I’ll admit I was suspicious when I first heard about a “book app” for On the Road, assuming I would be subjected to some tech geek’s notion of what the book of the future should look like – that is, that it would be all future and no book. So you can imagine my relief when I took the app, now for sale on iTunes, for a test drive on a borrowed iPad, and found it to be an informative, even tasteful, accessory to Kerouac’s book, not an attempt to bury the text under a blaring, technophiliac mess of gadgetry and special effects. That said, the real star of the show is the technology itself, which promises not just a slew of new apps for beloved classic texts, but also, it seems to me, a new, richer way to make books.
By now, of course, e-books are old hat, and even book apps have been around at least since the advent of the iPhone, but this most recent riff on the book app takes the technology in a new, intriguing direction. Publishers have designed apps around comic books and children’s texts, and have even built a few original book apps for nonfiction takes on the periodic table and the solar system, but On the Road is among the first wave of apps designed for the adult trade fiction and poetry markets, following on the heels of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, the app for which recently startled the digerati when it knocked Marvel Comics from the #1 spot on the list of top-grossing book apps on iTunes.
It isn’t hard to see why Penguin is using On the Road to launch its adult trade fiction apps category. For one, it is a canonical classic appealing to everyone from nostalgic Boomers getting their first iPad for Father’s Day to tech-savvy teenage boys who love their digital devices almost as much as they love smoking “tea” and driving fast cars. At the same time, Kerouac’s book has a long and involved back story that begins with that famous 120-foot scroll and extends to the incestuous pack of Columbia grads and assorted hangers-on who made up the Beat Generation.
It is here, in providing the clef for the real-life figures behind the characters in Kerouac’s roman à clef and in drawing a detailed map of Kerouac’s long road to writing On the Road, that this app shines. Chris Russell, editorial director for the project at Penguin, calls the app “a virtual museum” of the book, but to my eyes it comes closer to being a refreshing take on the standard critical edition, with primary sources replacing scholarly essays. The central feature of the app is a digital copy of the published version of the book that comes with tabs readers can tap to see bios of the main characters as well background on some of the people and places Kerouac visited on his travels. Zipping around the app, one can also find maps detailing Kerouac’s travel itinerary, Kerouac’s own maps and writing notes, as well as photos of the major players and original documents from the publisher’s archives showing the book’s tortured road to publication.
Much of this added content is either pedestrian, as in the potted bios of the characters, or familiar to anyone who has ever picked up a biography of Kerouac or a history of the Beats. Some elements, though, such as the maps, do add real texture to the experience of reading the book. I read On the Road the first time twenty-some years ago when I was taking the first of several long road trips around the U.S. and I would have loved to have the graphical aid of the map of his journey to compare to my own. The app allows you to tap a location on the map and go directly to the page in the novel when Kerouac’s alter ego Sal Paradise arrives there. I also enjoyed the audio clips of Kerouac reading from On the Road, which, for me, were like seeing the Grateful Dead in concert for the first time after listening only to their studio albums: a cult phenomenon that had never really clicked for me suddenly made a new kind of sense as I listened to Kerouac’s husky, sensual voice make music of prose.
Thus, while the concept is exciting, in this case the execution isn’t always as strong as it could be, especially given the app’s $16.99 retail price ($12.99 for the first two weeks). So it’s a good thing the app can be expanded at no new cost to the buyer. At the least, Penguin needs to make the experience more genuinely interactive by adding a talk-back or comment feature so fans can compare reactions to the novel and offer analyses of favorite passages. Even better would be a wiki-like feature to let readers add to the commentary provided by the publishers. For instance, one of the maps in the app shows “Mill City,” just north of San Francisco, as one of Kerouac’s stops on his journey. I happen to be from Mill Valley, Calif., which is next door to Marin City, where Kerouac briefly lived in barracks built for the World War II-era Marinship plant in Sausalito. It adds little to one’s reading of the book to know that Kerouac combined the two city names, but given his obsession with African-American culture, it does add context to know that, when he lived in Marin City, those barracks – now public housing, famous for being the home of rapper Tupac Shakur – were among the only truly racially integrated housing in the United States.
But even with added interactivity, there is little here you couldn’t find on a well curated website devoted to On the Road, and cynics will suggest that Penguin is only trying to push sales of a popular backlist title by forcing fans to buy a new digital edition just to see a few cool bits of memorabilia from the archives. And, of course, the cynics would have a point. That is no doubt part of what is driving this sudden interest in putting out “enhanced” digital editions of titles like On the Road and The Waste Land, and if these new iPad apps do no more than draw in a few old Kerouac and Eliot heads, this will prove to be a pointless exercise. If, on the other hand, it draws in new readers, wired iKids who love wriggling down the hypertextual wormholes of the web, then book apps of classic texts will serve a valuable, if somewhat limited, purpose. As I dipped into On the Road’s digital archives, I couldn’t help thinking of other classics that would benefit from similar treatment. Wouldn’t you love to peek into the files that famous pack rat, Hunter S. Thompson, kept on Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas? (See my recent essay on Fear and Loathing here.) Or what about a book app for Tim O’Brien’s metafictional Vietnam novel, The Things They Carried, with maps and photos and bios of the real people behind O’Brien’s characters?
But, again, if the book app phenomenon ends there, as virtual attics for the houses of a few great books, then I doubt the book app will draw many iPad users away from their treasured GarageBand and iMovie apps. The real promise here, as I see it, is the underlying technology, which, with any luck, will some day allow a kid now sitting in his eighth-grade English class playing Spider-Man: Total Mayhem HD to write an original literary app: a truly interactive novel that not only combines text with hypertext, but also with sound and images and reader responses, all at the swipe of a finger. This notion has been the holy grail of a certain school of digitally avant garde writers since the days of dial-up connections, but the technology has always been clunky, and the stories, at least in my own admittedly limited experience, damnably dull.
Two factors suggest the lackluster track record of the interactive novel may be due for a change. First, it takes only a few minutes on an iPad to see that this sleek hand-held device, with its gleaming touch screen and seemingly bottomless array of multi-media features, is a quantum leap forward in terms of flexibility and user friendliness. Second, until very recently, the minds of the people creating interactive novels have been as old school as their equipment. If the central building block of most interactive novels has until now been the codex text – otherwise known as the book – that’s because most of the people making them were raised on codex texts. Every day, as more toddlers read The Little Engine That Could on their parents’ iPads and Skype their grandparents on their smart phones, this is becoming less true, and soon a young writer whose brain is more supple than mine may well take this technology and bend it to uses that my mind, hopelessly mired in the linear, cannot even imagine.
In the meantime, old fogies like me can happily potter around in the virtual attics of classic novels like On the Road and recall a day when blowing up a venerable piece of technology took only a big stack of paper and some tape.
Max,
How do those numbers compare to average weekend sales figures for the actual, physical book? Any idea?
It's tough to know for sure, obviously the numbers vary widely and publishers are notoriously tight-lipped about sales numbers, but Jynne Martin did also tell me this: "quite amazing considering most debut novels don't even sell 10,000 copies in their whole lifespan"
Richard Ford's Lay of the Land, not considered a "big seller" compared to his earlier books, sold 51,000 in hardcover and 36,000 in paper. Those are Nielsen BookScan numbers which track about 70% of sales and were reported in a recent NYT piece on Ford.
So, that's just a random recent comparison but it offers a little perspective.
My sources tell me Random House would consider 50,000ish copies sold over the life of the hardcover to be a success. This could be utter bushwa, given that I've only heard the darkest murmurs about the amount of advance money tied up in the book.
How do those numbers compare to average weekend sales figures for the actual, physical book? Any idea?
A lot more. 15,000 copies in one week would be in the top ten on the Times list. Watch the list this week and see if it moves up or down from 38 and that should give you a sense of whether it worked or not.
Honestly, I very much doubt that one week will show the effect of this. The download event got this novel a ton of exposure and spread it's name. Along with all the other publicity — the features, the mostly positive and very positive reviews, the general discussion and buzz around this book and its merits or lack thereof — it seems more than possible that this will be a title people remember and check out, either in hardback or paper form.
I don't think comparing a first novel's sales to the sales of Richard Ford's sequel to his pulitzer prize-winning novel is necessarily fair. I also don't think that judging this promotion in a week is particularly shrewd. Most successful books need to be passed from one person to another, or have a special air to them. This novel seems to have a chance at being one of those books.
Thanks for the input from all three anonymous commenters. I particularly agree with this sentiment: "I also don't think that judging this promotion in a week is particularly shrewd. Most successful books need to be passed from one person to another, or have a special air to them."
For those still interested in the numbers involved here, USA Today offers a little more color: "Nielsen Book-Scan, which tracks about 70% of book sales, reports 12,000 sales as of Feb. 27. The publisher says the novel is in its seventh printing, with 50,000 copies in print."
So it's possible that the number of books downloaded from the Random House site alone equaled or surpassed the total number of book sales thus far.
yes, I saw that USA today article yesterday. So 12,000 by Feb 27th, a little over a month after publication which they said is perfectly solid sales for a new author no one has heard of.
But with bock, he received a spread in the NY Times magazine followed the next week by NY times book review cover. So that means about 2500-3000 per week (with maybe a spike just after the cover to say 4,000? I guess this is what got it on the bestseller?).
Interesting to see that all it takes is 4,000 sales in a week to get on the bestseller list. Then even though his book dropped off the list, he can forever more say it was a "bestseller." Always interesting to see the behind the scenes stuff. I'm surprised RH allowed that to be printed because it shows that the book isn't really selling like it should be.
Most publishers have issues with the tracker numbers. Last month Riverhead made a point of saying how off the BookScan numbers were on Oscar Wao. I wouldn't make too big a deal about it.
"Most publishers have issues with the tracker numbers."
Not really. Many editors do, but then editors are often shocked at how their books are doing. Many, if not all marketing and sales people in the trade rely on bookscan.
well, bookscan reportedly reflects about 70% of sales, and it includes borders, b&n, amazon and sales from major independent bookstores. so I think bookscan numbers are a pretty big deal – and at the very least, they are the only hard numbers available for publishers to rely on.
Parse it however you want, but If a literary first novel sells 16K books during a five week period and also has 15K free downloads of it, that book is doing very very well, my friends.