My very clever friend, Dr Donna Hancox, has an article here today about the changing nature of reader participation and the interactivity of books – which is another way of talking about digital books and the extra add-ons for texts that come in this high tech age.
“Ever get lost in a book? A new online database of crowd-sourced information called Placing Literature allows readers to explore the settings they are reading about through an interactive map.
To me, this sounds like a winning formula as I’ve always viewed reading as an interactive experience. As a child the best kind of stories had me looking up dictionaries, checking out atlases and consulting my beloved Encyclopedia Britannica. Digital technology affords writers and readers the chance to surround a story with expanded content which does some of this same work.”