enhanced e-books

Digital literature is enjoying profitable and exciting times, made possible by emerging trends in digital publishing, as well as a growing enthusiasm on behalf of readers, publishers and authors for all forms of digital literary productions. These new players, who often come from traditional publishing, are discovering with great interest the literary and creative potential offered by touchscreen mobile devices. They are also exploring emerging new ways of writing and conceiving literary objects designed to be read on tablets, defined as “digital books”.

While homothetic books for e-readers such as .pdf and .epub files only imitate the characteristics of paper books, digital books conceived as “augmented” or “enhanced” combine text, sounds, and fixed or animated images in order to create a heterogenous work meant to be read, watched, handled, listened to and experimented with.

The contents of such digital books and the forms they can take – augmented fictions, digital artists’ books and exhibition catalogues, etc. – take the reader into account, aim at meeting his/her expectations (Jauss) and come from mainstream considerations, clearly stepping away from the digital literature avant-gardes. The “book object” (Claire Belisle) raises some interesting questions when it is considered alongside the digital. Works created by authors and artists that tackle these issues also try to explore the tensions between printed books, visual book-objects and digital literature.

But should be presume that these works which often are experimental, yet destined to a commercial use, belong to the field of digitial literature as it has previously been defined (ELO, Katherine Hayles, Landow & Bolter, Aarseth)? How should such textual and multimedia productions, conceived especially for digital environments, be defined, if not as digital literature? Is some new field in digital literature materialising?

This paper seeks to examine these tensions as well as to explore how (and when) content designed for digital environments becomes a book. We shall consider the visual stakes of the forms displayed on screen, “down to the last pixel”. We shall also reflect on the characteristics of digital, hypertextual and multimedia reading, looking specifically at a collection of “augmented texts” for tablets and e-readers offered by traditional publishers and collectives: Juliette Mézenc’s Poreuse (Publie.net), Conduit d’aération (Hyperfiction.org collective), Célia Houdart and André Balinger’s Fréquence (P.O.L.), Jules Verne’s Voyage au centre de la terre (l’Apprimerie), the digital catalogue Hopper, d’une fenêtre à l’autre (Réunion des musées nationaux), Thierry Fournier and J. Emil Sennewald’s Flatland catalogue (Pandore Édition), the editions Art, Book, Magazine, together bookstore, library and digital book reader specialized in contemporary art.

(ELO 2015 conference catalog)

Many publishers—pure players or “traditional” publishers—are now exploring the field of digital literatures by producing enhanced e-books aimed at young readers. Whether they are ePub3 e-books or apps for mobile devices, more and more of these digital works are created for commercial purposes and try to settle in the cultural industry market by adapting to the evolution of digital reading. This new generation of publishers is only now discovering the poetic potential of hypertext narratives and the endless possibilities that derive from the hybridisation of text, image, sound and video. Yet they find themselves facing many obstacles throughout the design process. Psychologically, digital reading is often associated with disorientation, cognitive overload and discontinued ways of reading (as opposed to the immersive reading experience known with printed novels) (Gervais 1999 ; Baccino 2011). Economically, few examples of profitable models exist. Technically, many constraints emerge, on the one hand from the open and standardised ePub format, on the other from the ideology imposed by the software and hardware industry. Bearing these elements in mind, publishers remain reluctant to offer hyperfictions to their readers and prefer investing in “traditional” models inherited from the print (i.e. models that still rely on pages, tables of content and linear reading) as well as fun, educational games, all of which tend to standardise new reading experiences. The first part of this paper will present the results of an empirical study carried out with a dozen of digital publishers of children’s literature (Tréhondart 2013). The study tries to define how publishers conceive hypertext and their expectations and fears towards interactivity: the fear of losing the reader, the belief that animations might be preposterous, etc. It also aims at defining the socio-technical and socio-economic aspects that hold back the development of “commercial” digital literature.
The second part of this presentation will present the creative research project The Tower of Jezik , a hyperfiction for young readers initiated during the 2014 Erasmus program in Digital Literatures held in Madrid. Originally designed for web browsers, this project is being remediated in ePub 3 by one of the author of the article, as part of the Textualités Augmentées research and creation workshop at Paris 8 University. Through the semio-pragmatic (Jeanneret, Souchier 2005) and semio-rhetoric (Saemmer 2013) approaches of the work (design models, hypertext rhetorics, features of reading) and the presentation of its script, we will try to suggest a hyperfiction model that steps away from the standardised models used in the digital publishing industry, while simultaneously exploring the semiotic, cultural and ideological constraints imposed by the ePub 3 format.

(source: ELO 2015 conference catalog)