Spotlight Digital media offer unbounded opportunities for writersto experiment with form and conventions. So why do so many stillallow themselves to be imprisoned by the traditional codex format ofthe book, asks Joy Lo Dico
Last month, for the first time, The Bookseller trade magazine'sannual forward-gazing FutureBook conference was sold out. Theprevious year, only 150 people from the world of publishing, writingand technology had gathered to lecture and gossip about where thebook goes next. Last month, 400 crammed the halls. Publishers, itseems, have finally clicked when it comes to the digital world. Butwhere are all the writers?
Kate Pullinger used to be a regular key speaker at such meetings.An acclaimed author in the traditional, codex format of books,Pullinger is currently longlisted for the Impac Dublin LiteraryAward and the winner of the Canadian Governor General's Award forFiction for her book The Mistress of Nothing, the story a Victorianlady and her maid who set sail down the Nile. She has mastered thecodex form, with six novels to her name, but over the past 10 yearsshe has also been pushing the boundaries of digital fiction. "But Ihaven't been to many conferences in the past three years," she tellsme. "I was almost always the only writer there, and I got tired ofthat."
In the past year, publishers have leapt at the chance of findingways to make the digital book work. Taking advantage of theinteractivity of platforms such as e-readers, iPads and smartphones,they have found considerable success with non-fiction. JamieOliver's "20 Minute Meals" has been a chart-topper among the apps.Stephen Fry released a version of his autobiography as an app,"MyFry", for the iPhone, which invites users to scroll around a dialto access different segments of his life. Another runaway successhas been "The Elements" by Theodore Gray, a science book that wasadapted for the iPad and provides in-depth descriptions and imagesof every element in the periodic table. Since Touch Press launchedit in digital form in April, it has sold 160,000 copies andgenerated $2m in revenue.
But fiction has not found the transition to anything other thanthe e-book format so easy. "Fiction seems not to be grasping thepotential," says Pullinger. "Many of the apps and enhanced e-booksare just codex books with videos and notes shovelled in - like DVDswith their added extras."
Pullinger started working in online fiction with the TrAce OnlineWriting Centre, based at Nottingham Trent University, a decade ago."I was asked to teach online creative-story writing," she says."Back in 2001, this was new to me. I only really used the internetfor booking flights and sending emails. But after teaching thecourse, I found that it's a useful environment for focusing on thetext, and that I had a kind of affinity for it."
Since then she has been experimenting, often in collaborationwith the electronic artist Chris Joseph, on several major projects."Inanimate Alice", which came out in 2005, is a sequence of storiesabout a young girl who exists between real and digital worlds. Thewritten narrative is deliberately minimalist and built into a richaudio-visual experience. Then came "Flight Paths", begun in 2007,which Pullinger describes as a "networked novel". It was inspired bythe news story of an illegal immigrant who had stowed away behindthe landing wheel of an aircraft, only to fall to Earth in suburbanLondon. In addition to her own resulting short story, Pullingerinvited others to contribute their own takes on the theme. "Thethird phase of 'Flight Paths' is now about to come together indigital and print," says Pullinger. "The first phases were open todiscussion; the third is about closing it."
Her most recent project, "Lifelines" - autobiographies of youngpeople around the world put into historical and geographicalcontexts - has been specifically made as an educational tool.
Pullinger and Joseph have delivered stylish advances to the worldof digital fiction, but they still exist in a rarefied atmosphere.What hasn't come along yet is a proper commercial success in themedium. Pullinger puts that down to two hindrances.
The first of these is that publishing houses lack the drive tofund and develop new online writing and, as a result, mostexperimentation happens either in groups or at universities. PooleLiterary Festival, in partnership with Bournemouth University, heldthe first New Media Writing Prize this year; Leicester's De MontfortUniversity's creative writing department, in which Pullingerteaches, produced three of the shortlisted authors for that award.
The second hindrance is the reading public's love affair with thebook. "The codex book is a kind of prison," says Pullinger. "It issuch a dominant idea in our culture, such a beloved thing that wereplicated it digitally as an e-book, even though we could and canlet it change and evolve."
So what happens next? Will fiction ever break out of the codexprison? Salman Rushdie, talking recently to the online interviewsite Big Think about his latest book, Luka and the Fire of Life,written for children, seems to have realised that there's more tofiction than the book. He was watching his son play the videogameRed Dead Redemption, from Rockstar Games, the makers of Grand TheftAuto, and became entranced by the daunting possibilities of multiplenarratives.
Rushdie is not the first to have spotted that it is the gamesindustry, rather than publishers, that is making the greateststrides in creating digital fiction anew - albeit on its own termsand often with guns involved. Max Whitby is the founder of TouchPress, which made "The Elements", and is bringing out Marcus Chown'sequally non-violent "The Solar System" with Faber, again for theiPad, early next year. He eagerly references Red Dead Redemption.So, too, does Pullinger, who has watched her teenage son play thegame.
"Not all games are that clever, or good for you," says Pullinger."But what is amazing about them, when they work, is the story worldsthat they create. It has echoes in TV, in the novelistic long-formseries such as The Wire or The Sopranos. Those kind of literaryforms are having a profound effect on their culture."
What does seem to be in consensus is that technology, inparticular the iPad, has finally provided a platform that couldchange the world of fiction. Now all the publishers need is thatelusive digital bestseller. *
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