found this nice and well-argumented article on the pros and cons for ebooks on the txtr blog, a berlin based start up which is developing an ebook to come out later this year. what’s so interesting about it is: the folks at txtr have started to build web services for connected reading at the same time. smart move. if you ask me, that is what takes them one decisive step ahead of all ebook hardware development so far: think about what readers will have from reading digital instead of on dead trees and deliver this experience with the hardware.
experiencing a book, like all these books you can get for your iphone now (on textunes for instance, another berlin based company) on a digital device only begins with flipping the page while the device makes a flip-the-page-sound. think literature, and i mean solid, prize-winning prose and storytelling, going together with tech features such as real time connectivity and social media = tracing the sovial graph in (simultaneous) reading in the same book all over the world, mash up= plots embedded with personal data and/or related media such as sound, film, imagery, and not to forget other pieces of literature. finally intertextuality, one of the grails of (post)modern literary theory, appears to be feasible for technical implementation on a mass medium: linking books to books that have been linked on a content level since the creation of the story thats in it.
that’s where the excitement of augmented literature, as i like to call it, kicks in for me. i have only just begun to think about the possibilities of augmented literature this year. if you share my thoughts, i’d be happy to hear what you are thinking…
