ebookporn

luckysipe:

The more you touch, however, the more strange the rain becomes: layered skies, visual anomalies and shifts in speed and color, even the occasional cataclysm if you’re not careful. Before your eyes and beneath your fingers, the familiar becomes strange, and the strange, familiar.

http://opertoon.com/2010/11/strange-rain-for-ipad-iphone-ipod-touch/

A LOT of press for the new entertainment/game app, Strange Rain. A lot of folks are going nuts for the meditative experience and immersive narrative. I am too.

I was really kinda shocked this isn’t being regarded as a book, but the experience  offers achievements and rewards in keeping with the ongoing gamification of our lives.

This makes me want to play with text and image in a way I haven’t since leaving art school. It really gets at the heart of what I think e-publishing is. Not just reformatting material for the screen or devices but working with narrative in new ways that weren’t really possible before.

Folks still bitching and moaning that the iPad is just a big iPhone and it is a useless gadget are missing a larger point about the transformation of the book and our relationship to it.