“Anywhere people want to read is fine by us,” Richert Schnorr, the director of digital media at the New York Public Library, recently told Fast Company. “We’re happy to meet people where they are.” Where they are, at least recently, is not hunkered down in a chair amidst shelves of books, but on Instagram.
A year since launching Insta Novels, over 300,000 people have read books directly on NYPL’s Instagram account (@nypl). As Fast Company writes, gaining followers was part of the goal, but “NYPL is more excited — and surprised — that people actually read the books that it published on Instagram.” The surprisingly strong response might portend the future of literature.
Here’s how Insta Novels work: Simply head over to @nypl and scroll through the permanent Instagram Stories (the circles otherwise known as Story Highlights) on the main account page. You’ll see titles like “Alice Part 1,” “The Raven” and “Carol Part 2,” and by clicking on them you’ll be able to read Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” and Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, respectively.
E-books haven’t exactly been the literary revolution that was initially promised, so why did Insta Novels take off? Part of it comes down to smart design. The project wasn’t designed in-house, but by the agency Mother New York, which crafted the experience around Instagram’s functionality rather than forcing a text-based medium into a visual space. These new versions of the public domain books include animations, eye-friendly colors and intuitive directions for flipping pages.
The other part of the popularity comes down to the popularity of the platform as a whole. Instagram passed the one-billion user mark two months before Insta Novels launched, and Fast Company notes that 400 million people currently use it daily.
Sure, the NYPL account only has 390K followers, but you don’t have to follow them to tap through the pages of their Insta Novels. You don’t need a library card, either.
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