In the past few years there were now a new rage about using cellphones or tables as "second screens" to the TV viewing experience. In a way, it's as if the Wii U is also providing a second screen experience to video games. HBO did a second screen thing with the "Game of Thrones" TV series, which can help a lot keeping track of the many, many characters.
So I was surprised with the "A World of Ice and Fire", a kind of second screen experience for the Game of Thrones books. If the universe of a book is expansive, why not make a complete set of appendices and sell that rather than relying on fans to place all the info in a wiki? The results work quite well, akin to having to old-school encyclopedias on CD-ROMs filled with hypertexted articles.
Now that reading a book is done more and more on electronic devices, this may be the time to start exploring the original vision of hypertext applied to books rather than web sites. It's not the same as the new interactive books we're seeing, but rather a smarter way to deal with annotations and building a more complete vision than a simple linear narrative.
Published on December 16, 2012 at 21:10 EST
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