Keeping writers honest: Why interactivity should be a priority for the e-book business

By David Rothman

Nag time again. I want the IDPF to get off its butt and make interactivity a top priority for e-books—so that, for example, if an author lies or is just plain wrong, readers can talk back via forums within the book. It’s a credibility issue. Readers don’t expect writers to be all knowing, but they do expect honesty. Just as importantly, interactivity, as the true mavens now, can help turn a book into a community.

So what prompts the above plea for meaningful annotation standards, the key to in-book interactivity? Well, the New York Times reports yet another literary fraud. An all-white memoirist named Margaret Seltzer, writing as Margaret B. Jones, falsely depicted herself as a half-Native American women who had grown up among druggies.

Making E more credible than P—or at least narrowing the gap

If p-books have a credibility problem—fact checking isn’t exactly the forte of American publishers—that’s nothing compared to E originals. More than a few of them are just advertising pamphlets in disguises. But even "genuine" e-books don’t get the same editorial attention in most cases that p-books do. The economics of E often favor quantity over quality.

How to remedy this? Well, the easier it is for readers to talk back, ideally with publishers adding value by monitoring the feedback mechanisms to make sure that the bad news isn’t suppressed, the more credible can be nonfiction in E.

Worrying about plain old factual matters, too

We’re not just talking about lies but also about plain old factual matters. Many blogs are prominently posting comments from readers near the upper right or in other locations—so that anything, from typos to questioning of posts’ major premises, can happen. TeleBlog readers have obliged, and I’m glad since I want the blog to be right in the end, even if I’m not always right to begin with. Along the way, the audience for the TeleBlog grew noticeably after we started posting comments prominently. The overall blog–and, yes, that includes readers’ comments, not just posts from me and other featured contributors–became more credible. Why shouldn’t the same concept apply to books? I’ve written six of ‘em in P, and they’d have been much better with electronic feedback included, and perhaps incorporated into new editions.

Yes, memoirs, histories, you name it, can have accompanying Web forums, but that’s still no substitute for give-and-take with readers happening within the actual books.

Some sister: None other than Seltzer’s sister apparently tipped off the publisher, Riverhead Books, a branch of Penguin. I heartily disapprove of the fraud. At the same time I  wonder if there almost might be another book here, a real one, on the relationship between the two sisters. In the sister’s place, I would have leaned on Margaret Seltzer to confess on her own. At least in this case, there was a sister to come forward; what about situations where the fraud may not surface?

Detail: Technically, the forums wouldn’t be within the actual texts. But that’s how the readers would perceive them, even when they were offline.

Reminder: Interactivity isn’t for all books. No, I wouldn’t demand it for a John Updike novel.

Update: Tracking the Fallout of (Another) Literary Fraud, in the Times.