Interactive

From: Retronaut

"There's a pervasive arrogance in the approach of technologists to books. Every new wave of technology arrives with its techno-prophets, assuring us we'll no longer have to deal with those fusty old book things and their tiresome words. In the future all novels will be interactive multimedia experiences….

     We're in the process of shifting the book from paper page to digital screen, but what we actually choose to read are still chunks of text, around 100,000 words long give or take, which start at the beginning and finish at the end. No branching interactive story lines. No embedded multimedia widgets. And definitely no chance for the reader to mess it up by doing something silly. Or worse, mundane."
— Damien Walter, The Guardian
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Step Forty

"Fiction edged its way closer to a digital incarnation with the publication this week of an interactive visual version of John Buchan's classic thriller, The Thirty-Nine Steps.

     Publisher Faber&Faber announced that it had up with two software publishers and a developer, The Story Mechanics, to create a 'fully playable, fully immersive product' which it believes breaks new ground in digital reading.
     Published originally as a serial in Blackwoods magazine in 1915, The Thirty-Nine Steps was the first of five novels to feature the 20th century's earliest and most famous action hero, Richard Hannay, a man constantly on the run.
     Buchan described the novel as a 'shocker' – an adventure so unlikely that the reader is only just able to believe that it could really have happened. A number of film and TV adaptations, beginning with Alfred Hitchcock's 1935 version, have taken the book beyond the printed page, but Faber promises another step beyond Buchan's original storytelling."
— Claire Armitstead, The Guardian
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