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In a relatively short time, apps have become highly popular as a platform for children’s fiction. The majority of media attention to these apps has focused on their technical features. There has been less focus on their aesthetic aspects, such as how interactive elements, visual-verbal arrangements and narration are interrelated. This article investigates how a reading of a «picturebook app» may differ from readings of the narratives found in printed books and movies. The discussion will be anchored in an analysis of the iPad app The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore. This app, which is an adaptation of an animated short film, relates the story of a book lover who becomes the proprietor of a magical library.

Nowadays the relationship between cyberliterature and traditional literature is very complex. Despite there is a number of digital works and the increase of using the Internet, cyberliterature does not appeal easily to readers, editors and critics. The general public, even though active on the Net, does not seem to be interested in this new narrative form that hypertext uses, multimedia and interactivity. In this situation we wonder: To what extent digital genres inherit from the printing machine or its hybrid modalities -transmedia, crossmedia, multimedia, mash-ups, pastiches- from successful genres of the 20th century -photography, radio, cinema and television?And to conclude, the main question is: Can we talk about literature when most of the digitally born works have made of words (LITER) a "litter", a waste element substituted by the NET and its images, sound, videos, animations, digital art, graphic design, etc? To sum up, is LiterNETature, LITERature?

In my paper I would like to propose reconfiguration of “literariness” through the concept of liberature formulated by Zenon Fajfer and Katarzyna Bazarnik (Bazarnik, 2005), updated to some extent with the theory of affordances (Norman, 1990, 2004). The term which according to Bazarnik (2005) denotes a transgenre where content (text) and its medium form a whole, seems to offer rich theoretical possibilities – especially if “literariness” is to be conceived also as a media-specific, embodied yet emergent and contigent phenomenon (Hayles, 2002). However, the concept of liberature - set from the ouset as both a theoretical tool against a form/content dualism and means to study multimodality of a literary text – still offers an interesting proposition when it comes to instances of e-literature developed for touch screen devices. A particularly interesting example to illustrate such interrogations is The Humument App by Tom Phillips. It is a part of the ongoing project coming from the artist known, among others, from his cooperation with Peter Greenaway on TV Dante. In 1966, inspired by Burrough's cut-up technique, Phillips started working on the print of a late Victorian novel, A Human Document by W.H. Mallock. Graphically enhanced, collaged and reconfigured, the artwork has been published in 1970 by Tetrad Press as The Humument Book: A Treated Victorian Novel with subsequent editions from Thames & Hudson in 1980, 1986, 1998 and 2004, each of which modified the precedent versions. This part of a project has already been interpreted by N. Katherine Hayles (Hayles, 2002). However, in 2010 The Humument has been released as a tablet application, enhanced with a few interactive features: “the oracle” seems to be the most interesting as the case of remediation of oral communication mode. Apart from questions that had already been asked (eg. about word/image interplay, the book as artefact and the narrative as the case of “interiorized subjectivity”) this particular instance of the Phillips' project inspires as well to pose a set of new inquiries. What constitutes “literariness” of touch screen device application? How – if ever - does it differ from its print (or remixed multimodal for that matter) incarnation? Does the notion of “literariness” exist independent from media into which it is inscribed? Could the protagnist of The Humument App – considering the common social media plug-ins included within it - be seen as an instance of networked subjectivity?

K. Bazarnik (2005), What is liberature. [in]: Bartkowiak’s Forum Book Art. Compendium of Contemporary Fine Prints, Artists’ Books, Broadsides, Portfolios and Book Objects. Yearbook no 23. Hamburg: H.S. Bartkowiak, pp. 465-468K.

N. Hayles (2002), Writing Machines, Cambridge and London: MIT Press

D.A. Norman (1990), The Design of Everyday Things, New York: Doubleday(2004), Design as Communication, http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/design_as_comun.htmlaccessed 19.12.2012

(Source: Author's abstract at ELO 2013 site: http://conference.eliterature.org/critical-writing/humument-app-tom-phi… )

Andrew Klobucar argues that a new iPad app for The Waste Land demonstrates, despite the developer's intentions and Eliot's fears, that the symbolic form of the database is irrepressible. According to Klobucar, Eliot bemoans the cultural impact of new media and technological innovation, though his poem--particularly through Pound's editorial notes and Eliot's added annotations--employs the structure of a database. The app for The Waste Land attempts to mitigate this tension by promoting a single legitimate version of the poem, though the app's structure ultimately works against that model, as it frees readers from the imposed authority of singular narrative.

Our linear expectations of digital presentations (and the scorn associated with “Death by PowerPoint) have been transformed by the availability of tools such as Prezi, an editor that allows for the juxtaposition of images, text, and other media on a telescoping canvas that relies on linear paths for exploring nonlinear content. Prezi acts an infinite canvas, recalling Scott McCloud’s model for a future of sequential art on the web defined not by pages but by the screen as portal to an expanding and linked storyspace, allowing for continual layering of meaning and data using the methods of what Henry Jenkins describes as environmental storytelling. Alexandra Saemmer's use of Prezi as a space for experimenting with electronic literature breaks our expectations of a tool originally designed for presentations. The adaptation of tools of this kind towards the development of literary experiences reveals the fundamental transformations of procedural expectations and linked structures in online spaces: the co-location and linking of ideas to create meaning is now a matter of course. A similar limited model of the expanding canvas is used in Jason Shiga’s Meanwhile, a work whose digital iPad form more clearly conveys the extent of its connected and intertwined threads than the pages of its corresponding codex can contain. In considering the evolution of text within electronic literature, the nonlinear and interactive natures of a work often make even the most textual of electronic literature defy easy translation to printed codex. I’ll examine the juxtaposition of linear and nonlinear in these works, and suggest how we can see the impact of evolving conceptions of meaning in web spaces on electronic literature (and vice versa) through probing at the construction of text through rejection of the page.

(Source: Author's abstract at ELO 2013: http://conference.eliterature.org/critical-writing/spirals-meaning-expl… )