Alex Butterworth on the book as app
Back in the mid-1990s I did some research on narrative in digital media. Of the projects I worked on, those that seemed most outlandish then have since become familiar concepts. Virtual worlds hit the headlines with Second Life, geo-tagging has become mainstream with Foursquare, while many of today's best video games deploy something like a "story engine" to manage the narrative flow experienced by the player.
What, though, of the digital book, and its promise of a rich, new, constructive interaction with the text? With this Christmas looking like the moment when the transition from codex to screen will finally gain real traction, will the expectations of new digital readers be fulfilled? And is there anything to encourage my own ambitious sense of the revolutionary changes in narrative that digital books might bring about?
There was a time when I would have scorned a mere nonlinear rendition of a book as too simple, as not fulfilling its digital potential. So I was surprised to find myself warming to the MyFry app version of Stephen Fry's memoir. Its elegant interface charted my progress through a wheel of segments colour-coded by theme and character, drawing me into an episodic engagement with the text: I skipped through the story of Fry's addictive personality ? he was hooked on sugar as a seven-year-old, before picking up serious smoking and reading habits.
Are other new apps similarly successful? Illustrated non-fiction immediately suggests itself as an area where the iPad's qualities might be most apparent, and two apps without accompanying books seek to be in the vanguard. The Solar System, from the makers of The Elements, is self-explanatory, while Why the Net Matters, by David Eagleman, sells itself as a groundbreaking interactive essay on the world-saving potential of the internet. Sadly the latter over-promises, with a design that's sometimes cluttered, at other times misleading.
The contrast with the considered elegance of TouchPress's The Solar System is instructive. As with Eagleman, here too an author, Marcus Chown, has been closely involved, but this time the form, content and function are fused in near perfection. The features are not dissimilar to those of Why the Net Matters, including three-dimensional animations, but here they are made beautiful: the "Orrery" is a particular treat, making good use of the iPad's "gestural interface" to allow the reader to zoom and pivot through space with a pinch or sweep of the finger on the screen.
Most inspiring to me in my search for a more open and communal kind of text, though, has been the use of crowd-sourcing tools by the Galaxy Zoo project to reach out and engage the public in academic research, tapping a well of altruism. By answering a few short questions based on observation of grainy astronomical images, 300,000 amateur enthusiasts have, in a matter of months, collectively completed research that would have taken a team of scientists decades. Their sole reward has been the process of participating in a greater endeavour.
As an historian, I was particularly interested in the "Old Weather" project's application of this method. "Help scientists recover worldwide weather observations made by Royal Navy ships around the time of World War One," its website says. Participants are invited to transcribe handwritten ships' records into digital form on the basis that, if this task is duplicated by enough people, errors will be virtually eliminated. More intriguingly, it also leads participants into a creative relationship with the documentary material of the past.
Online tools such as Storify are already enabling readers to "turn what people post on social media into compelling stories", assembling clips of information. An example of "social reading", the idea is equally applicable to ebook texts. Already e-readers offer the ability to add basic annotation, but there are many initiatives afoot to support constructing knowledge around reading. Profile Books is set to publish an app tool with the suggestive name Cognician: readers will input information of interest to them and be guided through the process of evaluating and making decisions related to it.
There will be disruption to the model of authorship from many other directions too. Macmillan's app version of Ken Follett's Fall of Giants, brilliantly evokes key scenes from the novel using immersive sound. It's a more direct experience even than the author's purposeful prose. And then there is the question of visualisation of complex data, with which Guardian readers will be familiar through the work of David McCandless. The powerful visualisation of data in research projects such as The Enlightenment, where the animated flow of late-18th-century correspondence pulses across a European map, throws up irresistible opportunities for an author of historical works to guide rather than lecture, and makes the notion of a fixed text seem ever more archaic.
It's an old chestnut that innovative fiction piggybacks on established modes of communication, that all those letters flying around prompted Samuel Richardson to write an epistolary novel. Well, thanks perhaps to encouragement from the top at Faber that editors should think of "licensing a copyright" rather than merely "buying a book", that publisher's app interpretation of The Thick of It makes consummate creative use of technologies of communication on which we depend in our "networked life": email, voicemail, Twitter etc. Know someone who deserves a Christmas on the receiving end of Malcolm Tucker's sweariness? Apple's App Store can sell you his stolen smart phone.
My app of the festival season, though, is Hide and Seek's Board Game Remix Kit, which offers the chance to mash-up your board game favourites: in Buyoff, you can barter your way through Scrabble; in A-Z, you can combine Monopoly with Trivial Pursuit by playing a cabby carrying passengers round the board. I could make much of parallels with Oulipo, situationism and the lineage of avant-garde literary playfulness, or reference the case of the young German author who countered charges of cut-and-paste plagiarism by claiming to have written a mash-up homage. Instead, I'll just relish a genius piece of Christmas publishing that leaves most of the book industry standing.
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