The Literary Platform has a look at a new publishing project called “Booksurfers”. Booksurfers e-books consist of classic, public-domain works (such as Treasure Island or The Wizard of Oz) paired and hypertextually interlinked with a newer work based on the older one. The article goes into further detail about the ways the narrative is interwoven, and how the publishing company behind it hopes that this will get kids more interested in reading the classics. But more interesting to me is the way that this shows, once again, that there is still current value in the public domain—even for...

Scott Rosenberg, late of Salon Magazine, has an interesting post on his blog, Wordyard. It is actually a rebuttal to another post by Nicholas Carr depicting hyperlinking as a bad, confusing thing. Rosenberg points out that Carr is actually conflating two different forms of linking in his rant: the artistic and the pragmatic. Artistic hyperlinking is predicated on creating an artistic work in segments with links that lead to different parts of the work. An example might be a “Choose Your Own Adventure” book. Pragmatic hyperlinking uses links as footnotes and references, demonstrating where information comes from and...

Over at Nieman Reports, assistant editor Jan Gardner has an interview with V. Michael Bove, Jr., a research scientist at the MIT Media Lab. Bove discusses interaction, user participation, and collaboration as components of the future of storytelling. The first part of the interview involves an idea for adding more interactivity to televised events by allowing user access to alternate camera feeds using a handheld device. For instance, being able to get a camera shot of the audience at a football game by holding up his iPhone and turning around. While an interesting idea, I couldn’t help being...

People have been beating the drum for years (in some cases, decades) that "interactivity” was the future of the book. For example, in my reviews of A Fire Upon the Deep and Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge, I talk about how Vinge has held for a long time that future novels will be written in hypertext. And people have posted about it here, too. Well, interactive books have finally come to the Kindle—except that these books are actually thirty years old. Amazon has begun selling Kindle editions of the venerable “Choose Your Own Adventure” series. These...

The recent post about book scanners that can process 3,000 pages per minute reminded me (and at least one other person) of the Vernor Vinge novel Rainbows End. Since it had been a while since I had read that novel, I decided to take another look. For a while, the novel was posted free in its entirety on Vernor Vinge’s website. It has since been taken down; however, the Internet Archive still has it available in its entirety in the Wayback Machine’s archive of the page. I’m actually surprised nobody reviewed it here back when it was newly published, but I...

The RAND Corporation, a nonprofit research organization that provides analysis and solutions for the challenges facing the public and private sectors around the world, has done an interesting study of e-books entitled: Innovation and the Future of e-Books. The author of the study was John W. Warren. According to Mr. Warren, the future of e-books may include enhanced e-books. This concept could prove interesting to authors interested in experimenting with hypertext novels. A hypertext novel would include links in the text that take a reader to various locations either within, or without, the novel itself. In 2002 when my...