Chapter ii · The Why Library
The page that holds you inside the page.
A reader at the kitchen table, mid-afternoon, light at the November angle. The kettle is on but not yet whistling. The book is open. The reader leans slightly toward the page.
What transportation means in the literature.
In 2000, Melanie Green and Timothy Brock published a paper with the slightly awkward title The role of transportation in the persuasiveness of public narratives. It was a careful empirical investigation of what happens to a reader who is, in their phrase, transported into a story — absorbed enough that they lose track of the room, the elapsed time, the alternative explanations for what the text asserts. They built a fifteen-item Transportation Scale and tested it across short stories of varying styles. Transported readers, they reported, were more affected by what they read — in belief, in memory, and in emotional response.
The paper has, in the years since, become one of the most cited works in narrative psychology. The Transportation Scale is now standard. The mechanism it describes — the merger of reader and text, momentarily indistinguishable — has been documented across genres, ages, and reading conditions. What predicts transportation, Green and Brock's follow-up work showed, is a richly imagined setting, a protagonist the reader can take inside, and the absence of friction. A storybook for one named reader is a literary form unusually well suited to all three.
What the personalised-reading research actually shows.
The research literature on personalised reading specifically is younger. The most substantial body of work comes from Natalia Kucirkova and her collaborators at the Open University, who have spent more than a decade studying parent-child pairs reading personalised storybooks together. In one representative study from 2014, they observed longer sustained engagement, more spontaneous comment by the child, and more elaborated back-and-forth than during comparable sessions with non-personalised material. The effect was strongest when the personalisation was substantive — the child as protagonist of the story — rather than cosmetic. A name dropped into a template, the authors noted, was sometimes detected by the child as a kind of mis-addressing.
This is consistent with what transportation theory would predict. A name dropped into a template breaks the situation model at the seam; a story written around the child, by hand, by a person, deepens it. Raymond Mar and Keith Oatley, in a 2008 paper, framed fiction as cognitive simulation — a way of running social and emotional scenarios at low cost. A storybook for one named reader is a simulator built around that reader. The world it asks the brain to inhabit is the world the brain already inhabits, lightly heightened. The simulation runs smoothly because the source data is the reader's own life.
The book has to vanish for the page to do its work.
Transportation is fragile. It is most reliably preserved when the reading object is itself quiet — when the book in the reader's hand is not, in itself, a distraction. A hardcover, bound as a hardcover, with a textblock that opens flat is a reading object that disappears into the reading. A cheap perfect-bound book with a glued spine, held open against itself, is a reading object that keeps reminding the reader it is an object. The book has to vanish for the page to do its work. That is, partly, why the press makes the books it does.
The kettle whistles. The reader does not look up.
Cited.
- Green, M. C., & Brock, T. C. (2000). The role of transportation in the persuasiveness of public narratives. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79(5), 701–721. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.79.5.701
- Kucirkova, N., Messer, D., Sheehy, K., & Flewitt, R. (2014). Sharing personalised stories on iPads: a close look at one parent-child interaction. Literacy, 48(2), 109–116. https://doi.org/10.1111/lit.12030
- Mar, R. A., & Oatley, K. (2008). The function of fiction is the abstraction and simulation of social experience. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 3(3), 173–192. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-6924.2008.00073.x
- Rogers, T. B., Kuiper, N. A., & Kirker, W. S. (1977). Self-reference and the encoding of personal information. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 35(9), 677–688. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.35.9.677
a storybook no one else has ever read.