How to write Ebooks ?

Historically speaking about hypertextuality is a bit like the 1910s in film studies; there were attractions, practices and very little understanding of what was actually going on, not to mention lots of money to be made and lost.

As we study hypertext and computer games, we need to have some idea of digital media as well as of rhetoric of textuality as a whole. For that purpose (especially for games as Eskalinen put it) we'll use the theories of Espen Aarseth, Roger Caillois, Warren Motte and David Parlett in particular. They form a filter through which the possibly heuristic findings and borrowings from various neighbouring disciplines and predatory theory formations are viewed, tested, modified and transformed.

While discussing articulation, materiality, functionality, typology and orientation, among other things, we are confronting the bare essentials of the traditional rhetoric and linguistic situation: the manipulation or the configuration of temporal, spatial, causal and functional relations and properties in different registers.

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Jean-Philippe Pastor

Virtual reality used as a medium

It sometimes seems that virtual reality is mainly used for fun at the moment. Do you think virtual reality can also be used as a way of communicating?

David Kolb -I think so. It is a bit like writing personal Web pages. Imagine at some future date I have all sorts of computer-related tools, and sufficient bandwidth. I could create a little mini-world, not a textual page, but a sort of mini-world like a room which you could enter, in which there would be symbols and images which I though were me or perhaps were my view on a certain matter. I could send that to you and you could enter it.

And then you could comment on it by altering some things in it or perhaps linking it to other things, creating a second room. So it might be possible to have a mode of communication which was in a sense the creation of small simulated environments, and then a mode of commentary which was the alteration of those environments. Presumably, you’d want to have both the original and the altered version available, as in a hypertext where you can link things, you do not ever have to erase anything. You can substitute something for it but the original remains linked there. You could imagine virtual reality being used as a medium of expression and communication, perhaps not so immediately as a method of argumentation but as a method of presentation.

I think it is important to go beyond thinking of virtual reality as a commercial product which will be simply something you absorb - you go into a Disney virtual reality or a Hardrock Café virtual reality and you are completely dominated by what they want to sell - and think of virtual reality rather as the possibility of having personalised worlds which are not ways of escape but ways of communication.

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PHONEREADER Library - - Jean-Philippe Pastor

Author's job and interactive literature

Choose the future of interactive fiction

Books where you decide what happens sprung from the bedrooms of D&D-playing teenagers, but the form is having something of a revolution

Back in the 1980s, when most proto-geeks could only dream of owning a home computer that would run a primitive text adventure game in which you could PICK UP AXE and ATTACK ORC, the next best thing was, funnily enough, a book. And now they're back.

But it was a very special kind of book, which allowed readers to exercise some semblance of control over the plot through the decisions they took at the end of each segment.
These "choose your own adventures", half work of fiction, half roleplaying game, appear to be enjoying something of a resurgence, perhaps partly due to nostalgia and partly due to a generation weaned on the internet looking for the same interactivity in books.
If you want to explore this argument further, click on "Read More". If you want to take another path, then choose a different blog entry.

The re-emergence of the format has three main strands. Firstly, in what can only be pure nostalgia, the original "Fighting Fantasy" books have all been re-packaged and reissued. The book that started it all off, The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, received the 25th anniversary treatment in 2007.

Just like early text-based computer adventure games, these gamebooks used the tools of heroic fantasy - dwarfs, goblins, quests and the like - as they both had their roots in insanely popular roleplaying games such as Dungeons and Dragons which arose in the 1970s. Fighting Fantasy books dispensed with the need for friends that made D&D so unwieldy. An American publisher, Wizard Books, re-released the original series of books and is adding new titles every year.
The second strand is the appropriation of the formula, in a very nudge-nudge wink-wink way, for a tale of thirtysomething angst called You Are a Miserable Excuse for a Hero, released in the UK by Virgin Books after success in the States. Bob Powers's book replaced the usual hack-and-slash fantasy stuff with choices such as "If you want to have sex with your ex-girlfriend, consider getting back together with her, then think better of it, go to page 183".

These modern rehashes look like a flash in the pan, with grown-up fans returning to the form in a blaze of nostalgia after an adult life spent getting used to web interactivity. Can a book replace a computer game, when a Nintendo DS is as easy to carry around as a paperback?
The last strand in the development of interactive fiction takes the idea in a different direction: it might be called a true web 2.0 version. In a similar way to how Elizabeth Baines wrote a blog-based novel last year with plot input from her readers, with varying results, new American publisher Underland Press is publishing weekly instalments of what it calls a "wovel" (it's a contraction of "web novel" - I know, I know, but give it a chance. It didn't take us long to get used to "blog", after all). Entitled The Living, it is a riff on the zombie genre and new instalments are posted every Monday. Depending on which way the vote at the end of each chapter swings, author Kealan Patrick Burke apparently writes the next chapter in accordance with the readers' wishes.

Whichever way the public takes it, Underland Press's The Living will eventually be released as a proper volume when the experiment is over. The question is, do readers really want the responsibility of driving the narrative, or is that the author's job? Make your choice now...

David Barnett

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ - See that post with different algorithms in metabole - See the journal French Metablog with today different posts - Jean-Philippe Pastor

Ergodic Literature

The shortcomings of importing theoretical assumptions developed in the context of print into analyses of electronic media were vividly brought to light by Espen J. Aarseth's important book Cybertext: Explorations of Ergodic Literature.

Rather than circumscribe electronic literature within print assumptions, Aarseth swept the board clean by positing a new category of "ergodic literature," texts in which "nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text". Making a different analytical cut through textual groupings that included computer games, print literature and electronic hypertexts, among others, Aarseth established a grid comprised of eight different operators, many of which have purchase mostly with electronic texts rather than print. The grid yields a total of 576 different positions on which a variety of different kinds of texts can be located. Although the method has limitations, notably that it is blind to content and relatively indifferent to the specificity of media, it has the tremendous virtue of demonstrating that electronic texts cannot simply be shoved into the same tent with print without taking into account their different modes of operation. These innovations have justifiably made Cybertext a foundational work for the study of computer games and a seminal text for thinking about electronic literature. Markku Eskelinen's work, particularly "Six Problems in Search of a Solution: The challenge of cybertext theory and ludology to literary theory," further challenges traditional narratology as an adequate model for understanding ergodic textuality, making clear the need to develop frameworks that can adequately take into account the expanded opportunities for textual innovations in digital media.

Proposing variations on Gérard Genette's narratological categories, Eskelinen demonstrates, through a wide variety of ingenious suggestions for narrative possibilities that differ in temporal availability, intertextuality, linking structures, etc., how Aarseth's ergodic typology can be used to expand narratology so it would be more useful for ergodic works in general, including digital works.

By N. Katherine Hayles

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