The recent official launch for The City We Build, the amplified ebook made between if:book and the Queensland Poetry Festival, has highlighted some of the challenges faced by authors, publishers, and readers when designing digital books that take advantage of their capabilities.

Regardless of how well designed or how beautiful its content, The City We Build is unlikely to ever reach some readers. This is because it has been designed for one digital platform alone.

Writers and publishers alike want their content accessible and available to as many readers as possible, but in the digital world this means taking into account a wide variety of devices. Some have high colour screens that can handle video and other content. Some have more simple ‘eink’ black and white screens that are simply not fast enough to handle anything other than page turns (and even those are too slow for some readers). Some devices are connected to the internet and handle much more than just reading; others are largely unaware of anything on the web other than their own bookstore. Some devices use highly response touch-sensitive surfaces, others opt for physical buttons.

Some devices are available in Australia, others are not.

It’s entirely appropriate there should be no one-size-fits-all reading device. But, for creators of content, this incredible diversity of devices presents a challenge of first principle.

What kind of book are we making here?

The Riverbend Poetry Series is set to start off the 2013 series with a bang, featuring graveyard poet Zenobia Frost,  poet Anthony Lawrence and some extra special launches – Vanessa Page launching her latest collectionConfessional Box and the Choose Your Own Poetry Adventure amplified e-book launch. Come along and let poetry light up the night!

When: Tuesday 19th February 2013, 6pm for a 6:30pm start

Where: Riverbend Books, 193 Oxford St, Bulimba

Cost: $10

Bookings made through Riverbend Books on 07 3899 8555 or you can head to their web site for a ticket.

This event always sells out fast, so book early to avoid disappointment!

We’ve been hard at work on an ‘enhanced’ ebook for the iPad, based on last year’s Choose Your Own project for the Queensland Poetry Festival.

In the original project, three local poets wrote a series of pieces based around specific locations within Brisbane’s home of everything loud and late, Fortitude Valley. Each of the three adventures opened at the Judith Wright Centre on Brunswick Street and, from there, readers had to choose the next location and walk there to read (or listen) to the next poem.

The poets – Chris Lynch, Carmen Leigh Keates, and Julie Beveridge – not only created beautiful, evocative, and sometimes hilarious poems, they also played with the notion of choice and prompted quite a bit of what looked like aimless wandering through the Valley streets.

To adapt this locative project for the small screen, we brought in photographer Cindy Keong to the project to capture the essence of the locations for each piece. We also brought the humble hyperlink to the book. Readers can either move sequentially through the book or brave the links to jump between each location minus the heat and legwork (unless you really want to, in which case we have maps).

Titled The City We Build, the book will soon be available free from Apple’s iBookstore, from the Queensland Poetry Festival‘s web site and here at if:book. We’ll post more details of the project   soon (including screenshots), but until then, here are a few images we took while recording the poets’ performances.

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When I was a kid, I loved the Choose Your Own Adventure stories. They transformed reading from a passive pastime into an active one. I was suddenly invested in the monsters and mayhem sprawled across the pages – it was my life on the line! And best of all, I could read them with my brother. We shared a bedroom one summer and would take our turn each night reading the next chapter aloud and then painstakingly deciding on our chosen course.

One of the great things about the Choose Your Own Adventure model, for kids but for adults too, is that there is fluidity in the narrative structure. You can find yourself back in places you have already been, discover new places quite unexpectedly, and the suspension of disbelief is a given.

When people harp on to me about the smell of a book I have to say I’m fairly dismissive.  I mean come on, when was the last time you saw someone on the train taking a good whiff of a book as if it were a bunch of pungent flowers? I pick a book up because of the content, the author and yes, the pretty front covers.  I pick it up because I know it’s going to take me somewhere new, and if I’m lucky, the author is going to have a little play with their words and format. Digital will work just as well for this as any musty book that makes you cough if you sniff a little too hard.

The digital era is allowing us to do so many things with the written word, creating new forms and genres. It also has the capacity to bring an old art form back from the literary dead, such as the Choose Your Own Adventure, which I spoke about in my last post.  Let’s face it, we’re never going to see the Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA) back in print, but digital has allowed us to resurrect this childhood memory, and the writing skills that were lost with it.