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| Adam Rajah |
The rising popularity of the ebook is well documented, but the true potential of enhanced ebooks and literary apps is only just becoming apparent. For the more adventurous, apps can enrich the reading experience in exciting ways.
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| Comma Press' Gimbal app allows readers to connect exciting fiction to their geographical surroundings. |
Author James Attlee and Fabrizio Nevola of Bath University are working on a literary app called ‘Writer on the Train’ aimed at people travelling by rail from Bristol to London. It will use the phone’s GPS tracking system to deliver video and written material relevant to the train’s location, offering up new stories as you pass places of interest. Attlee describes it as a ‘moving book for moving people’, and wants commuters to reconsider the time they spend between home work as a space in which they can embark on mental journeys of their own.
It is worth an aside here that although enhanced ebooks are blurring the line between ebooks and literary apps, perhaps the key difference that enhanced ebooks are usually intended to be read in a linear fashion, whereas literary apps are more flexible, and weighted in favour of media other than text. And, if there is no distinct line between the two, maybe this is cause for excitement (as well as some confusion).
This ‘bells-and-whistles’ treatment might seem sacrilegious to some, but the longlist for this year’s Man Booker Prize also features an enhanced ebook, which should serve to convince that they can and are being taken seriously. Richard House’s The Kills comes in four instalments, the first of which can be bought with a single tweet. House set out to ‘exploit the cross-discipline possibilities of virtual publishing’, which he certainly does: the supplementary material consists of film footage, images and sound embedded in the text, drawing on the author’s experience as a film-maker and artist. The videos are mostly shots of landscapes with voice-overs describing life-changing moments in characters’ lives. These enhancements aid significantly in character development, but the film footage and audio are described in an interview with House as stand-alone pieces which can either be dipped into while reading or explored after.
Poetry is also getting the app treatment, perhaps most famously by Faber for T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, which was highly successful. Footnotes and critical analysis were included, which were the most popular features of the app and helped attract a wider audience, according to the head of Faber Digital, Henry Volans. The app also included video and audio performances of the poems. Shakespeare’s sonnets have received a similar treatment.
It is not hard to imagine that the ebook will continue to evolve, and that what we see now is only the beginning. Perhaps, therefore, we should be asking not whether ebooks will outcompete print books, but what direction ebooks will take.
The Carcanet Blog Sale
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