ien nivens, editor

when she's ten feet tall

One of the first concrete steps I’m taking in order to learn Objective-C (a prerequisite for learning how to design apps for the iPad, is to go ask Alice. Alice is a free downloadable 3d environment application that demonstrates the execution of simple “OOP” or “object-oriented programming” functions in order to animate objects. So far, I’ve learned how to get an animated skater to perform a new routine, taught a rabbit to squash a cell phone, and re-created the first lunar landing with two astronauts and two lines of dialog.

I feel like such a grasshopper. I sit at Alice’s feet and wonder how this paint-by-number animation program is supposed to teach me X-code, so I can learn Objective-C, so I can create useful apps.

Alice says, “Baby steps, kid. Wax on, wax off.”

I just want the keys to the car.

If anyone’s interested in taking this journey with me, I’d love the company. I’m working my way through Objective-C for Absolute Beginners: iPhone, iPad, and Mac Programming Made Easy by Gary Bennett, Mitch Fisher and Brad Lees and iPad Application Development for Dummies by Neal Goldstein and Tony Bove.

In the meantime, I’d like to suggest a couple of very simple embeds that a novelist might choose to include in an e-book.

• How much warmer would it be to replace the standard acknowledgments page with a brief video of the author expressing thanks to the people who helped make the novel possible?
• What about a trailer embedded at the end of book one of your series to entice the reader to buy the sequel?
• Remember the classic text intro to the first Star Wars movie? What if you turned that around and set up the situation of your novel with a brief video introduction?

The novelist is a hypnotist and must first take a reader out of the everyday experience of the “primary” world and transport her or him to the world of the fiction at hand. As any hypnotist knows, distractions break the trance. Books have become so familiar over the past several centuries that they serve to reinforce the hypnotic state. Tablet computers will do that, too, eventually, but there’s a learning curve ahead of us both as readers and as writers.

The challenge for the novelist is to know what a tablet can do to reinforce and enrich the reader’s suspension of disbelief. To date, the iPad offers the most sensual reading experience of any tablet on the market, so I will focus my attention there. I intend to learn everything I can about the development of apps for the iPad that will benefit writers of fiction. I need your help. I expect to be asking a lot of questions. I may or may not know the best ones to ask.

Let’s start with a definition.

For our purposes, an app is a piece of software designed to allow the user to interact with electronic content that is either stored within a device (the iPad) or in some way accessible to it (by connecting to the web or syncing with another device–computer, cell phone, another tablet, etc.) For example, an app might allow you to listen to audio, watch video, import data, navigate the physical environment or an imagined one. There are more than 100,000 apps available for the iPad already. It will soon prove more difficult to think of something that apps cannot do than what they can.

So the first question is an open-ended one. What would you like your electronic novel to do that a paper one can’t do?

How might you use an existing app–one that allows a reader to pinch open an image file, say, or to activate an audio file–to enhance your reader’s experience of the fictional world without taking him or her out of that world?

What could an electronic reader do to keep your reader immersed in your story? Failing that, what might it do to ensure the reader’s return to your world?

How permeable to the outside worlds–both physical and virtual–can a novel afford to become without sacrificing its integrity? (but let’s forget about the word “novel,” since electronic media will inevitably change the forms of fiction, though they won’t eliminate our hunger for it) How do apps affect the cohesiveness of a story?

Apps are market-driven, of course, and there are more than enough marketers trying to figure out how to distract your readers away from your story. The electronic novelist needs to think in the other direction. How will you use the bells and whistles that come with an e-reader to keep your readers…reading?