Interactive Fiction in the eBook Era

Keith Stuart, The Guardian (UK): "Now that we're all getting comfortable with the notion of reading books on digital displays, it's little surprise that developers are starting to explore the interactive possibilities of electronic novels. In fact, simple interactive fiction has been available on the iPod since the very beginning, with a community of writers using the HTML functionality in the device's Notes application to create 'choose your own adventure' stories. ... "

‘Adderall Diaries’ Blurs Books-Apps Line

NYTimes.com:

STEPHEN ELLIOTT, a 38-year-old from San Francisco, just introduced his first piece of software for sale: an app for the iPad and iPhone called “The Adderall Diaries.”

He’s not exactly a programmer — better to call him a writer. And the app that he conceived looks a lot like an electronic book. That is, most people who buy the app will do so to read the text of “The Adderall Diaries,” his “memoir of moods, masochism and murder” based on his childhood in Chicago group homes, which was published in hardcover last year by Graywolf Press.

But Mr. Elliott says he has good reasons for producing his own iPad app, separate and apart from the e-book version of “Adderall Diaries” that is for sale, say, for the Kindle or the iPad reader from Apple. But those reasons are not the artistic, meta-fictional ones you might suspect — you know, so that when characters enter a bar, you suddenly hear music and a glass dropped by the waiter, or more fancifully, you can make them turn around and go somewhere else.

Rather than exploit the multimedia potential of an app book, Mr. Elliott said he wanted to include tools that cater to a special group: Stephen Elliott readers. ...

French Enhanced eBook Teaches Photoshop with Interactivity, Text and Video

Tutorials are, of course, a natural for enhanced books. theBookseller.com: "Editions Eyrolles has unveiled what it claims to be the first French enhanced e-book. Photoshop Elements, Special Debutants [for beginners] by Cyril Bruneau and Bernard Richebe, includes 45 minutes of educational videos and was conceived as a tutorial composed of practical files, the company said. The aim is to 'give a real added value to professional works, where a savoir-faire in a given field needs to be demonstrated and explained,' the publisher said."

eBooks, Wordless Novels, Readers as Authors, and Other Revolutionary Acts

Sammy Perlmutter on Huffington Post:

This month, the Library of America will publish a stunning box set containing six of Lynd Ward's wordless 'novels-in-woodcut.' Over 1,600 pages thick and packaged in a deep red, the box set feels and looks like a brick -- a desperate effort, perhaps, to reassert the durability of the printed page in the era of the eBook. Anachronistic as it is, however, Ward's box set can actually serve as a useful example of how authors should innovate into the future. ...

Widely recognized as the "founder of the graphic novel," Ward introduced the form to America with his 1929 novel "Gods' Man," a narrative told entirely in pictures. Radical as a formal practice, the wordless novel was also a political art form in its ability to communicate a message through the universal language of pictures. Perhaps the form's most provocative aspect -- in regard to both storytelling and political innovation -- can be witnessed in its application to books for children.

Having illustrated books for children himself, including the Caldecott Medal winning "The Biggest Bear," Ward's influence on picture books has stretched widely. Some highlights of the genre include: David Wiesner's "Flotsam" Shaun Tan's "The Arrival," Jerry Pinkey's "The Lion and the Mouse," and Brian Selznick's "The Invention of Hugo Cabret." In terms of innovation, however, none seems to surpass Barbara Lehman's "Red Book," a book about, well, a book.

Lehman's "Red Book" follows a day in the life of a little girl who reads her own "red book" and discovers that inside her "red book" another child reads his own "red book" ... and so on. When a child reads Lehman's "The Red Book," she must perceive and interpret the images and then piece the pictures together to form a cohesive narrative. This process empowers the reader by requiring her to construct a storyline and by enabling her to interact with the book.

Put differently: a novel without words can elevate its reader to a level of authority equal to -- or beyond -- that of the author. One message of wordless books, then, is that the reader is simultaneously an author ... or, at the very least, an active participant ...

Books lacking this interactivity are not only boring, but can also be dangerous, especially in our digital age when messages and media spew at us from a million directions at a mile a minute.

Unfortunately, technological efforts to innovate have fallen short. Sure, there has been some creative progress with content for the iPad. Textbooks, for example, now feature 3D graphics and videos, and there's an App that makes picture books accessible to deaf and blind children. And companies such as Vook have also started to merge text and video into a cohesive unit.

Nevertheless, all these so-called interactive forms of media remain systems wherein one voice dictates a narrative. ...

I believe that wordless novels present a fresh and unique way to understand and interpret a narrative. That's why I urge authors, editors, programmers, etcetera, to go and read books like Ward's to gain new ideas of how to truly break ground.

"Two years after meeting Lynd Ward, when I was beginning to seriously explore the limits and possibilities of comics, I drew a four-page comics story about my mother's suicide," [Art] Spiegelman writes in the collection's introduction. The panels to which he refers were eventually included in the revolutionary comic book "Maus." Let's follow Spiegelman's example and look to Ward for how to create revolutionary content -- printed, digital or otherwise -- into the future.

Lonely Planet Interactve "Discover" Guidebooks for the iPad

The books include direct links to relevant web content (hotel sites, restaurant websites, etc.), the ability to search in Google or Wikipedia, etc. Currently available: Great Britain, Ireland, Spain, Italy and France. More on the way.

Quark's New Digital Publishing 2.0 Ideal for Color/Interactive Content

From eBooknewser's Diana Dilworth:

Quark has a new digital publishing platform out today called Quark Digital Publishing 2.0. The company unveiled the platform at The Big Money's Untethered conference--partnering with K-NFB Reading Technology, creator of the Blio e-reader application and distributor Baker & Taylor. The three companies are collaborating to offer Digital Publishing 2.0.

Taking advantage of the popularity of color screens on iPads and other tablets, Quark's new platform allows publishers to publish in color and create interactive design-heavy content. Designers don't have to know how to program code, they just have to input their designs into the platform to create interactive content.

QuarkXPress's built-in interactive features include the ability to add slide shows, embed video and create other interactive elements. The published content can be formatted for viewing on various devices. ...