Week One Thoughts

As I mentioned in class today, the balance between the interactive components and the actual text/story of the narrative is very important to me.  Too much or too little of the other can over or underwhelm the reader and damage the quality of the final product.  While chapter 7 "Designing Books in the Digital Age" doesn't deal with the balance in design aspects of an ebook, it does bring up other aspects of the creative process we will all have to consider.

"Formless Content" is content that will exist easily in multiple formats and will retain its effectiveness.  The words that create a story will still be the same regardless of where you read them. The Harry Potter books, for example, can be transferred from paperback to digital formats and the story stays the same with little disruption to the reader.

The second type of content we should keep in mind is "Definite Content." For me this is going to be the most important aspect to keep in mind while designing our interactive ebooks.  Definite Content (graphs, charts, images, etc) will not transfer from one medium to another without a few growing pains or change in quality.  They (the content) are aware of the page/canvas on which they are created.

This way of thinking about the iPad as a canvas upon which we construct our ebooks is really interesting.  The Infinite Content Plane in this example understands the vertical limits of the iPad, but the horizontal plane of the content extends far beyond the borders of the iPad itself.  I love this idea, and will probably find a way to incorporate something like this in my project.  It's going to be very difficult for avid readers like myself to break away from the traditional book format.  Instead of comparing my ebook to a more traditional form of text, I'm going to take the advice of our reading and think of my ebook as an entirely unique digital entity.  

While the ways of thinking about content were interesting, I did not enjoy the sections of the book that criticized the traditional book system.  I understand that readers today want to post their own thoughts and opinions about a book or other form of written entertainment (they do a lot, that's basically what social media is all about), but their importance in the writing process is overly exaggerated in my opinion.  How would the Harry Potter series have ended if too much consideration was given to the fans of the series?  Also, Wikipedia is an amazing source of information, but it still is not as credible as other sources (that's why you can't use it in academic papers).  The idea of communities creating works of literature together is interesting, but at what point does the original author lose their own voice?  Either way, this chapter was very informative and by far my favorite for the readings this week.  I look forward to seeing what the rest of your thoughts are. 

-Cory