Interactive ebooks that enable us to inhabit characters and rewrite the tale are transforming our reading experienceAs China’s Zhou Enlai would affirm, it’s always also early to predict the outcome of a revolution – however wherever it’s headed, the one that’s happening in the publishing earth looks to have reached a mark of no giveback.This week, the Publishers Association Statistics Yearbook – collating data from 250 publishers – announced that ebook sales in the UK had increased by 366% at the end year. Meanwhile, JK Rowling’s Pottermore sold more than £1m of ebooks in its first three days of trading, and has had a billion visits to the interactive website since it opened to all-comers three weeks ago.One of the less trumpeted innovations of the Pottermore experiment is that Rowling has waived digital rights management for her ebooks – which method they can be shared across multiple devices. The earth’s largest science fiction publisher, Tor, followed suit, in a go that has been welcomed by champions of open access as “tearing up the rulebook”, and will be watched beadily by more conservative players fearful that it will also tear up defences against ebook piracy.So a abundance is happening however what does it all mean? Much of the focus of the e-publishing debate in recent months has been on the ingenuity of writers such as Amanda Hocking, who muscled her path into a conventional publishing contract by demonstrating that there was a mass readership for her self-published novels of the paranormal.Admirable though Hocking and her kind are in commercial terms, nobody would claim they are changing the aesthetic landscape – and a abundance of the ebooks published so far are just digital versions of traditional codex books. However in literary terms, also, a revolution is under path.At the end week, the independent publisher Profile launched an updated, interactive version of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which leapt straight into the top 10 in the books section of Apple’s App Store on both sides of the Atlantic.The mark about Frankenstein – and other innovative ebooks – is that it is a fresh type of monster, one that would be impossible to constitute within the pages of a paper textbook. Made by a writer with a background in video games, the reader can influence the route the tale takes by making choices in the character of the monster or of Frankenstein himself. Since it deals with multiple pathways, Dave Morris’s fresh words is longer than that of the original novel.Another departure is promised for the end of the month, when the “enhanced ebook” of a fresh employment by Ewan Morrison is released. Tales from the Mall takes its structure from the floorplan of a shopping mall. It mixes history with sociology, reportage with fiction. Anecdotes are repeated in print and on video, making a words that can only be fully appreciated by “reading” both versions.The educational potential in the fresh technologies is nowhere more apparent than in Faber’s iPad app of TS Eliot’s The Waste Land, which became one of the pace-setters on its release at the end year and took just a month to constitute back its production costs. It offers the treat of reading this dense modernist poem in a specially designed digital typeface while listening to your favourite archive performances – from Alec Guinness, Ted Hughes, Fiona Shaw or Eliot himself. You can puzzle your own path through Eliot’s manuscript and Ezra Pound’s edits, or seek aid from experts such as Seamus Heaney or Jeanette Winterson, who share their thoughts on video.However, no innovations come without health warnings – and a recent article in Age Magazine suggested that digital reading might hurt your learning. It quoted Kate Garland, a psychology lecturer at Leicester University, whose studies on reminiscence and digital reading appeared to exhibit that the human brain doesn’t navigate digital texts as efficiently as paper ones. Her findings suggested that machine readers needed more repetition to absorb the same data as from a textbook, and that textbook readers seemed to digest the material more fully.However Garland’s experiments were carried outside on students whose brains had been trained on the printed textbook – and it is in children’s books, particularly for the youngest readers, that much of the innovation is happening. Today’s three-year-olds don’t just glance at about the three small pigs, however can huff and puff and blow the house down.In all the excitement, though, it’s worth bearing in intellect that, much in children’s books, not all innovation is digital. Coming shortly, thanks to a “ground-breaking fresh technology based on micro-encapsulation and touch activation”, is a range of books that will smell of their subject. And which do we reckon will be most successful with the digital natives of tomorrow? Why, The Tale of the Well-known Farter, of direction. Some things never alter.• Follow Comment is autonomous of charge on Twitter @commentisfreeEbooksJK RowlingHarry PotterTS EliotAppsDigital mediaDigital rights managementIntellectual propertyClaire Armitsteadguardian.co.uk © 2012 Twitter News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Employ of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
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