Reading Online

Reading Online can mean:

1. Reading books online

2. Discussing books online

3. Web literacy: reading online-specific work

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1. Reading books online

 

• Full texts of a variety of books are available online,
  from classics collected by Project Gutenberg

• through those available in ebook format e.g., onlineoriginals.com
  to the latest downloadable Stephen King

• This is really electronic delivery of print,
  essentially the only difference from reading a normal book
  is that you're reading it on a screen—
  it may or may not be divided into pages.

2. Finding out about books online

• publishers' sites , Virago, Little, Brown,

• authors' sites, e.g., Michèle Roberts,

• book discussions online (reading groups, forums, communities)

• purchasing actual printed books online (e.g., amazon.co.uk)

• general readers' sites : Book Forager (Find the kind of read you like)

• reading groups: How to start a reading group,
  Advice on running reading groups from Lincolnshire Libraries

• readers' communities to discuss books (WebBoard)

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3. Reading works specifically written and designed for the online or electronic medium

The Web and other electronic media involve non-linear writing.

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Hypertext can be linked to:

• text

• pictures

• animations

• sounds

• interactive elements such as forms

• etc.

It's not linear. This isn't new.

• John Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman (2 endings in the book, 3 in the film)

• The film Sliding Doors (Helen's life forks)

• Lawrence Sterne's Tristram Shandy

• The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins

• Hopscotch by Julio Cortazar (which has 155 short chapters and several recommended reading routes)

• TV series Sliders

 

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The Web is a whole new artform, and makes reading even more fun!

 

To start, look at

• trAce

• Winners and shortlist for the first trAce Alt-X Hypertext Competition

• Carolyn Guertin's Assemblage the women's hypertext gallery.

Problems with reading online

• I don't like reading on-screen, it isn't comfortable/gives me a headache

• You can't take a screen to bed with you like a book

• Writing on the Web is disjointed and there isn't really a story

• The writing isn't as good online

• You have to work too hard to understand it

• A book is REAL: the Web will kill the book

• Reading on-screen will damage your eyes

• I can't afford the online time to read a Web hypertext

• It's not real literature

"What counts is no longer the 'result' or content of the reading, but rather the process of reading in itself".

(Elizabeth Klastrup, Hyperizons: A study of interactive reading and readership in hyperfiction theory and practice, 1997)

New ways to look at reading

• Acknowledge that a reader can be "empowered" by a very physical involvement with the work

• Accept that it may no longer be possible to read everything in a work, and enjoy different subsequent readings.

• Trust that the author will provide a satisfying reading experience.

• Discard print-derived expectations and knowledge of established reading practices and literary conventions.

• Approach hypertext and web-works in expectation of a different kind of experience.

• Be satisfied with a different type of "closure".

What stays with you when you finish reading a book?

The words?

or the meaning?

The problem with getting inside the act of reading, is its ubiquity - there's no escaping it, and, like any environment that we are overly familiar with, we no longer see it. When we read print narratives we arrive already equipped with a full repertoire of reactions and strategies....We never come face to face with the ground zero of reading

 

(Michael Joyce, Of Two Minds: Hypertext Pedagogy and Poetics, Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1995. p. 227, quoting Jane Yellowlees Douglas)

 

Start simple

 

• Lies by Richard Pryll

• Mirror, Mirror Helen Whitehead

• Jenny Weight's trAce/Alt-X prize-winning Rice

• Geoff Ryman's 253

• Noon Quilt from trAce

Now have fun!