When you think about sitting down and reading a story you imagine leafing through the dusty pages of a nice hardback. Or maybe feeding your obsession for sleazy pulp fiction with something you picked up in the departure lounge on your way to Magaluf on holiday. More recently there has been the advent of digital books – but all they do is present the reader with pages, albeit digital pages staring back at you from an LCD screen.
Now, however, the whole concept of storytelling is being re-invented with this lovely piece of interactivity brought to the world by a small company called Six to Start in conjunction with Penguin Books. Hopefully the door between fact and fiction, reality and virtuality has been nudged open just a little bit more.
Ah yes… but how does the book industry intend to combat what some call file sharing and others call theft? Perhaps they need to look towards the ‘mistakes’ made by the music industry to see what can be learnt.
The digital book market is very much something to watch. Late last year online retailer Amazon unveiled an own-brand wireless electronic book reader called Kindle. Very much like the ‘ipod’ of books this new offering can store up to 200 books in its onboard memory.