Smartphones, smart watches, smart TVs - everything is adapting to the digital age. But how can books become more modern?
A study project from Joelle Wörtche and Melanie Molata
1. Semester, 2020
Supervising lecturer: Prof. Dr. Peter Schuhmacher, Prof. Dr. Thomas Pleil
Media, Technology and Society
Initital situation
The ageing of society is moving the issue of care more and more into our midst. Even though life is becoming more digital, faster and easier, diseases such as dementia remain an old phenomenon. The phenomenon of dementia in particular is presenting our society with new challenges. According to statistics from the German Alzheimer Society, there are currently about 1.7 million people in Germany living with dementia. However, it is not only those suffering from dementia who are affected, but also their environment, and among them are also young adults, the „grandchildren generation“. It is definitely a topic that many have probably already come into contact with. Therefore, it is important to make this topic more accessible to young adults through multimedia interactions in a non-fiction book. We want to combine the classic print book with the functions of the e-book and the possibilities of the digital age, thus creating a concept for a new sustainable book that combines media, technology and society. The question is: how to design a concept for a contemporary non-fiction book for this target group, that combines aspects of media, technology and society? Through the multimedia connection it should be possible to work on topics that were not in the focus of the young adults, until now. We can convey the message on several levels and create an emotional added value that reading alone cannot convey.
The idea
With the help of expert interviews we want to acquire insider knowledge. In return, we conducted interviews with a publisher, a media developer/journalist and an author and asked, which book trends are popular at the moment and what developments they see in books in terms of multimedia. Moreover we asked them what kind of technology and media does it take to make a book more unique and easier to experience on an emotional side.
Furthermore, we will collect wishes and ideas of our target group with the help of a survey and then incorporate the results into our concept. For our Interviews we looked for a book publisher with a focus on our target group and, if possible, a Non-fiction author with focus on medical topics. For this we imagined a video conference with recording of the interview, for example.
For the concept we are still looking for important literature about print and e-books, among other things. We are also planning to take stock of the existing print and e-books models and create an overview of them. In addition, we will research some best practice examples on the topic of interactive literature and of course get into our topic dementia. At the beginning of the research, we defined and narrowed down our research question in terms of book genre, target group and publisher. For our research, we decided on a non-fiction book for young adults aged 14 – 29, the so-called „Generation Z“, which is distributed by a suitable non-fiction publisher.
We decided on two methods for the question of a suitable research method: expert interviews and a target group survey. In researching suitable interview partners, we wanted to cover all sides – a user of such an idea, an author, a publisher and our target group.
User: Mr. Pranz, who has carried out a similar project himself.
Author: who has written a book with a young influencer
Publishing house: a modern non-fiction publisher specialising in trends.
The outcome
Our research project includes a concept for a modern book and a prototype for illustration. So far, our interviews have shown that digitization creates new possibilities to make a book modern and multi-layered. Integrated QR codes, Augmented Reality (AR) and small add-ons are possibilities that were mentioned in the interviews. At the moment the market is still manageable, because for the use of e.g. Augmented Reality an own app is needed and the costs would be too high for the low demand. However, QR codes are often used in books that lead to further websites. In short: Everything somehow grows together and therefore the demand for modern, contemporary books could increase. Our target group survey is currently underway and after completion we will be able to incorporate the requirements and wishes of our target group into our concept. In addition, we would also like to create a catalog of requirements with the help of the program Miro and visualize one page of the book for the concept e.g. with Canva.