On the imminent publication of the first alt-x critical e-book.
(Source: EBR)
As publishers of children’s e-books – the first publishing house of exclusively digital books for children in Brazil – we are part of an editorial market consolidated for centuries and, at the same time, we participate in the production of digital contents, which puts our hybrid production in a point of union between past and future. (…) The experience we are building with this publishing house of children’s e-books in the present political, social and cultural context in Brazil unites transdisciplinary pedagogical and editorial knowledge, using them as instruments that allow the maintenance of what historically is understood as children’s literature: a space for varied languages and many authorships.
(Source: Abstract ICDMT 2016)
E-books, e-book readers, touchscreens and other types of displays do not belong to the realm of fantasy any more, but are an indelible part of our reality. Interactivity is becoming a key ingredient of electronic publications. There are several projects dedicated to children that allow the practicing of important literacy skills, such as language development, story comprehension, sense of the structure, and collaboration in storytelling by playing and experimenting. These activities are crucial to a child’s development.
During middle childhood the most important seems to be a process of development involving increasingly creative use of playing to develop plots and episodes, the transition from individual to group play, the growing importance of language in plot development and the strengthening of links between play and social life. It is important that a child interacts with a book, not just by passively following a story but by participating in its creation upon every encounter. Graphic design should aim at facilitating the linguistic and social development of a child, at the same time stimulating his or her creativity and abstract thinking, as well as supporting the development of fine motor skills, which are all necessary to self-sufficiency.
Therefore this project’s key requirements involve the following aspects – educational, emotional, ergonomic as well as more detailed objectives:
Using gestures to facilitate a child’s development (the development of brain hemispheres, eye-hand coordination, developing abstract thinking).
The opportunity of constructing a variety of stories – a child builds a story by himself or herself, deciding on the plot development.
The use of randomization and surprise elements, where the book becomes a new story, explored by a child at every encounter, but within the preprogrammed framework (beginning-development-ending).
Body mechanisms, which are necessary for the development of handwriting, are autonomy in dressing etc., a proper grip by hand and three fingers (tripod fingers grip), as well as the use of the non-dominant hand to hold paper. Proper positioning of the thumb and two other fingers is crucial for the correct holding of a pencil. This type of grip plays a key role in the mechanisms using fine manipulation.
Autonomy is based on the development of movements made in specific directions: up and down, inside and out, as well as circular. These are the same directions a child must master in order to write letters and digits. In dyspraxia therapy it is advised that “finger games” are used, such as the manipulation of puppets put on fingers, paper clips and clothes pegs (by manipulating these objects a child practices the opposition of a thumb and strengthens the three fingers participating in the pencil grip).
This paper presents the results of a qualitative user study conducted on a group of early readers (aged 6-9) in a primary school in Krakow, Poland, on a sample of 20 children. The presented solution is a new type of plot construction in a publication – an open structure that is not chronological but has some key points (like the beginning and end) predefined. It is also an attempt at using gestures, which are native to software in a way that is beneficial from the point of view of developmental psychology.
The prototypes of a paper and a digital tablet-based book made it possible to check children’s reaction to non-chronological storytelling application and aimed to verify the design principles along with fine motor skills needed to manipulate the objects on touch screens.
The aim of the study was to evaluate whether the paper book might help children learn the use of a more complex, tablet-based book, built using the same principles, but considering the usage of touchscreen and touch gestures. The test also aimed to verify the speed of mastering a user interface when little or no visual hints were provided.
The paper also explains how open structure designs, based on randomized elements, allow the expansion of the genre with educational books, aiming to help develop the young reader’s eye-to-hand coordination and make more engaging stories based on new content.
(Source: ELO 2015 conference catalog)
E-books for kids are one of the few areas in which commercial publishers are creating innovative literary works for tablets and smartphones, but most of the apps available do not explore the rich traditions of electronic literature, instead opting for a more linear “enhanced book” approach that strongly borrows from the tradition of picture books and in particular pop-up books. Scholarship on and criticism of children's’ book apps tends to be in the fields of literacy studies andchildren's literature rather than in the field of electronic literature, and this paper aims to bring the two domains together, looking at picture book apps aimed at young children.
Early childrens’ electronic fiction, such as Amanda Goodenough’s Amanda Stories which was published on CDROM by Voyager in 1991, was well known in hypertext literature circles, and the novelty of being able to click on pictures and have the computer respond is still be a dominant trope of current book apps. Many apps use the added possibilities of modern tablets - Atomic Antelope’s 2010 iPad adaptation of Alice in Wonderland famously allows readers to tilt the tablet to make Alice grow and shrink - but the simple click-response structure generally remains firmly linear. Mo Willems' Don’t Let the Pigeon Run This App (Disney 2011) is a rare example of combinatory fiction for children. The app builds on Willems’ children’s book series that is scripted around a set formula: the pigeon wants to do something and must not be allowed to do it. In the app, the child reader either supplies words that are woven into the story or shakes the phone or tablet to create a random story. I will discuss a variety of examples ofchildren's book apps, particularly emphasising those that go beyond the linear pop-up book style of interactivity.
If narratives are important in shaping our understanding of the world, it is very interesting to see to what extent children are being exposed (and thus taught the structure of) non-linear or combinatory narratives. Clearly children are learning to use game structures to interpret and re-tell their experiences, but can the more experimental forms of narrative we know from adult electronic literature work inchildren's literature? What might these works look like?
(Source: Author's Description)
The e-book has been launched several times during the last decades and the book’s demise has often been predicted. Furthermore networked and electronic literature has already established a long history. However, currently we witness several interesting artistic and literary experiments exploring the current changes in literary culture – including the media changes brought about by the current popular break-through of the e-book and the changes in book trading such as represented by e.g. Amazon’s Kindle and Apple’s iBooks – changes that have been described with the concept of controlled consumption (Striphas, 2011, Andersen & Pold, 2012). In our paper we want to focus on how artistic, e-literary experiments explore this new literary culture through formal experiments with expanded books and/or artistic experiments with the post-print literary economy. Examples of the first are Konrad Korabiewski and Litten’s multimedia art book Affected as Only a Human Can Be (Danish version, 2010, English version forthcoming) and our own collaborative installation Coincidentally the Screen has turned to Ink (presented at the Remediating the Social conference, Edinburgh 2012). Examples of the second are Ubermorgen’s The Project Formerly Known as Kindle Forkbomb which will be released in January 2013 and is an intervention into the Amazon Kindle book production and distribution platform with a new form of literature generated from YouTube comments. The paper will discuss how such projects explore how literature currently becomes part of a post-capitalistic production process through controlled consumption platforms. If the printing press was the first conveyor belt and thus an integral part of developing industrial capitalism (such as famously argued by Elizabeth Eisenstein and Walter J. Ong), then this paper will aim to sketch out how contemporary literary technologies is integral to develop and reflect critically on post- or semio-capitalism, and furthermore we will discuss how literature functions in a post-industrial software culture such as the one presented by Apple, Amazon and Google.
As a cultural phenomenon, the book is caught in between being, on the one hand, an
endless maze and a ‘garden of forking paths’ (as Jorge Louis Borges reminds us), and on
the other, singular objects with clear and copyrighted authority. The digitisation of text
has often been associated with the maze, and a networked, hypertextual infrastructure.
In this panel, "Reconsidering Electronic Literary Artifact," theorists and artists take a look at some of the assumptions that have informed scholarship surrounding electronic literature and offer alternative visions about reading, the notion of “born digital,” and archiving electronic artifacts.
A short essay about the digital future of books that focuses primarily on various e-book formats, constrating the failures of early experiments by publishers such as Voyager Expanded Books with more recent digital-publishing trends -- such as Touch Press's app version of T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland and meta-analytic tools, such as Amazon's X-Ray, which is bundled with the Kindle Touch -- that suggest the promose of expanded e-books. Electronic literature, in this narrative, receives only cursory attention. After noting that the "electronic literary vanguard tends to dislike e-books because they are too much like real books," Moor provides a brief account of electronic literature that, regretably, equates the field almost exclusively with the hypertextualists who built and wrote using StorySpace. While Moor is aware that a multiplicity of e-literary forms exist, he neglects to describe the "dreamy new places" that author-programmers have subsequently built. For those interested in digital-literary aesthetics, the essay is best read as a guage of the suspicion about electronic literature that, as of 2012, persists in the wider literary culture.
The early hypertextualists—Joyce, Moulthrop, Judy Malloy, Shelley Jackson, Rob Swigart, J. Yellowlees Douglas—wrote about interconnectedness, flux, immateriality, and sprawl, themes that reflected the structure of StorySpace, the program most of them used to craft and publish their work. Yet the hyperfictionists also managed to bend the technology to their own political and artistic whims, using its disruptive nature to splinter notions of linearity and authorship
This cadre of author-programmers, clustered around a handful of progressive universities and museums, continue to engineer word toys, interactive fiction, and various forms of digital poetry—poems that shiver and collapse; poems that read themselves; poems that crawl across gallery walls; poems encoded within poems; poems randomly generated by algorithms; poems fully abstracted into constellations of floating individual letters. The end result has been a corpus of texts so hard and shiny they could chip a tooth.
Words have shape and musicality. They almost have a flavor. But they are too easily drowned out by stronger stimuli.
Kate Pullinger thinks the Digital Fiction International Network is too hasty in dismissing e-books as "paper-under-glass texts."