The transformation of the book continues.As I wrote in an earlier post I think digital technologies and their ability to add multimedia to text will change the nature of the book. But I had not thought about this variation. Stephen Elliott, a writer, has produced a book as app that enables the interactivity that is such a feature of the web. As the NYT article puts it,
"Once readers buy the app, he says, they are beginning a relationship with him and other readers; they can leave comments and read responses and updates from the author. They may even be told down the line that he has a new book for sale and then be able to buy it through the app."
Again, we see the book in digital form seems to inexorably move away from quiet individual reading and communion with the author's words and towards a more social, shared, collective experience.
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Or could this interactive app offer one or more new versions of the book? It may well be that the quiet, reading-alone version will continue to survive on its own as an alternative, maybe a secondary, "old-fashioned" kind of book. If so, we'll surely need a new vocabulary to distinguish all the variations.
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