Video: A Look Inside The Mystery Box That Is J.J. Abrams' Novel 'S'

As attention spans shrink and the written word becomes more obsolete, the modern novel is facing a problem similar to movie theaters. How can we make reading a physical book essential? One possible suggestion is provide content that needs to be touched, and J.J. Abrams' latest idea is just that.

After a few teases we finally have our look at S, a novel conceived by Abrams and written by Doug Porst. Much like Mark Z. Danielewski's amazing House of Leaves and a number of other books that have gone before, S is a novel with a secondary story happening in between the lines, as multiple previous readers interact at the same time.

Confused? Boing Boing has an unboxing video which takes us through the pages of the beautiful package. Check it out below.

Thanks to Boing Boing for this video.

If you're like me, you'll want to buy the book right now and here's the link to do that.

Here's how that Amazon page describes the book.

One book. Two readers. A world of mystery, menace, and desire.

A young woman picks up a book left behind by a stranger. Inside it are his margin notes, which reveal a reader entranced by the story and by its mysterious author. She responds with notes of her own, leaving the book for the stranger, and so begins an unlikely conversation that plunges them both into the unknown.

The book: Ship of Theseus, the final novel by a prolific but enigmatic writer named V.M. Straka, in which a man with no past is shanghaied onto a strange ship with a monstrous crew and launched onto a disorienting and perilous journey.

The writer: Straka, the incendiary and secretive subject of one of the world's greatest mysteries, a revolutionary about whom the world knows nothing apart from the words he wrote and the rumors that swirl around him.

The readers: Jennifer and Eric, a college senior and a disgraced grad student, both facing crucial decisions about who they are, who they might become, and how much they're willing to trust another person with their passions, hurts, and fears.

S., conceived by filmmaker J. J. Abrams and written by award-winning novelist Doug Dorst, is the chronicle of two readers finding each other in the margins of a book and enmeshing themselves in a deadly struggle between forces they don't understand, and it is also Abrams and Dorst's love letter to the written word.