Article: “Hundreds of Thousands of People Read Novels On Instagram. They May Be The Future”

From Fast Company:

n August 2018, Instagram followers of the New York Public Library were tapping through their Insta Stories when something unexpected showed up: the full text of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, designed for a small screen, with small animations that brought the story to life as you flipped.

The project, known as Insta Novels, is part of the NYPL’s goal to reach beyond its walls and convince more people to read books. In pursuit of this mission, the institution has turned to one of the largest social media platforms in the world, bringing classic literature to Instagram’s 400 million daily active users.

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There have been many attempts to update books for the digital age: Beyond e-readers like the Kindle and Nook, designers have tried to take advantage of the visual, context-aware nature of the internet to make reading more interactive. A project called Ambient Literature publishes stories that pull in details about your location, the time of day, and the weather for a story you can read only on a smartphone. Others have redesigned the digital reading experience for the browser, making it more pleasant to read a book on your computer.

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See Also: How the New York Public Library Brought Novels to Instagram With Unexpectedly Huge Results (via AdWeek; June 2019)

See Also: What Brands Can Learn From The New York Public Library’s Instagram Stories (via Forbes; October 2018)

See Also: The New York Public Library Convinced Thousands of People to Read Books in Instagram Stories (via Mental Floss)

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