This manifesto was written by Chris De Marco and Chris Evain.

Our Manifesto in a graphic format (in English): Reading-Manifesto

Our Manifesto in a graphic format (in French): available soon

When we developed this platform, the question we had in mind was whether serious reading could still apply to the digital age. The approach we would like to take is not “in my days, people read more and better”: there’s no going back to what “serious” was before. The only way is forward, where serious reading will be encouraged, and rediscovered because we will endeavor to use technology rather than misuse it. And this is why we would like to bring together the French novelist Daniel Pennac’s Readers Bill of Rights which is speaking for Gen Z and our own manifesto of Duties and Obligations for the serious reader.

Pennac’s Bill of Rights, which was written at the very beginning of the digital revolution (1992), describes ways of reading that are appropriate to the new technologies:

1. The right to not read;
2. The right to skip pages;
3. The right to not finish;
4. The right to reread;
5. The right to read anything;
6. The right to escapism;
7. The right to read anywhere;
8. The right to browse;
9. The right to read out loud;
10. The right to not defend your tastes. (Pennac 1994, 170-171)

 

As rights imply responsibilities, we will complement the list above with the reader’s Duties and Obligationsin 12 points in order to add our own note of seriousness.

 1.                  Explore different genres: think of a book as your compass in an unexplored land

2.                  Suspend disbelief (Coleridge): plunge in, let go, and enjoy the magic of storytelling

3.                  Experiment different levels of reading: read high; read low; read widely

4.                  Compare books and authors: you can’t judge a book by its cover, but you can judge a book by the company it keeps

5.                  Allow yourself to develop a passion for this or that particular author: when you feel strongly about an author, commit yourself to reading every word written

6.                  Experience “flow” [1] in reading: lose yourself and your ego in the act of reading in order to experience a suspension of time

7.                  Read and re-read: a book is re-invented with every reading because you, the reader, have changed in the meantime

…and re-re-read: re-re-reading is the key to uncovering the secrets of the writer’s craft through a process of reverse engineering

8.                  Embrace paradoxes: including the ones in this list of recommendations

9.                  Make the effort to read above your level: readers much like athletes must train to keep in shape

10.              Think of reading as a way of developing listening skills: reading a book is engaging in the “give and take” of a conversation with the author

11.              Hang in there until it feels like “I see a voice” (Shakespeare): the silent page will speak to you!

12.              Allow yourself to be infected and infect others (Tolstoy 2010): Unfortunately there is no cure for such an infection; to alleviate the symptoms, read a good book.

Having referred to Tolstoy in the last point of our manifesto, let us quote What Is Art, in order to define art in connection to infectious reading:

If only the spectator or the auditors are infected by the feelings which the author has felt, it is art.

To evoke in oneself a feeling one has once experienced, and having evoked it in oneself, then, by means of movements, lines, colors, sounds, or forms expressed in words, so to transmit that feeling that others may experience the same feeling – this is the activity of art. Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to other feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings and also experience them. (Tolstoy 2010, 51)

And so, the following rule applies: the better the story, the stronger the infection. eZB was designed to nurture tomorrow’s serious readers, to prepare them to get “infected”, as Tolstoy would put it, by fiction. The infectious story gets passed on. It becomes viral. And who better than generation Z understands the importance of going viral? If the book is good, the reader will have a very bad case of infection. That’s how we are able to experience new feelings, feelings that a writer has lived through, if only in his mind’s eye, feelings that he infects us with, so that we can experience them for ourselves, through art, in order to understand what it is that makes us human.