In the current digital age, the appeal of traditional physical books endures. Jocelyn’s project, The Tangibility Paradox , explores the paradox of replicating the tactile qualities and experience of a book within the digital realm. This form of deliberate mimicry includes e-books, the use of paper textures, page turning animations and the implementation of page flipping sounds, seen in websites like publuu.com and issuu.com. Instead of fuelling arguments between the two book formats or seeking to find a solution to this prevailing discourse, Jocelyn takes a discursive approach – aiming to explore potential ways the two mediums can inform and influence each other, prompting critical reflection on our interactions with reading in both physical and digital formats.

You mentioned that in the efforts to digitise books, they haven't been able to achieve the formal refinement of physical books and the reading experience in tangible form. Could you elaborate on this? Where are the shortfalls?

I guess what I mean is more about the sensorial dynamics and the actions that people use. So when you're reading off of a physical book, you kind of use your entire body. There is the movement of your whole arm and things like that. But if you're reading off a screen, whether that is your laptop or your phone, you're just pressing the buttons. You're just swiping your fingers. And I guess that's what I mean by saying that digitised books haven't achieved the sensory dynamics.

Is it not enough to be able to read text off the screen?

It's just a different experience. If you just want to read the text, then you can just read the text. But there's differences in your experience. If you read an actual book, or you absorb it in a different way, and then maybe you can resonate with it even more. You can really understand the words that's being read. But maybe reading on a digital screen is more like reading for the sake of reading. You understand the information, but will it stay in your memory? Or is it something that you forget after maybe an hour, or two hours, a week?

Could you describe some of the outcomes of your project?

I have three types of outcomes. So first I look into the sound aspect of reading on a digital screen, as in the digital books that you can download, iBooks and things like that. There's usually a little flipping sound so I was delving into that type of aspect of incorporating sound into a digital book interface where the sound is just an additional thing and even unnecessary. I guess it builds on the question of: why is the sound even there? In my experiments, I was looking into the differences between unnatural sounds versus the actual sounds that you would create when reading.

Another aspect considered was, what if the sound aspect of these digital books can have a different purpose instead of the one single sound playing over again? What I did was collect a few sounds and then with a blank digital book, I would just collate the sounds together so then that book becomes a container of sounds, which is something that the physical book cannot do.

For my second experiment, I have video animations. I was looking into the movements of these digital books. Usually there's a little page turning animation where if you scroll to the bottom of the page, it will curl up. The digital books always look like the physical books, like with the shadows even though there's no purpose really. In my experiments, my intention was to exaggerate the curves, and the flipping motion. So instead of flipping on the regular Y axis, can you flip it around, using the Z axis? It kind of questions the idea of why we are replicating the physical interface onto a digital screen.

The second thing that I was doing was trying to connect the physical action with my digital experiments. What I was saying is that these digital books are missing the physical interaction. So, what I wanted to do was connect a physical book and the act of flipping with that said digital interaction. You physically flip the page and then the sound will play or the ‘book’ on the screen will turn in a way that is unnatural.