The Jungle Book in Salon

Salon posted the feature “Why the book’s future never happened“ (very interesting piece on the hypertext book’s failure to launch) earlier this month, and we’re happy to report The Jungle Book for iPad was given a mention. Squee.

The Wikipedia entry for hypertext fiction lists no works published after 2001, and although Wikipedia isn’t the final word on anything, you have to think, if someone had written a hypertext fiction, this is where they’d want to tell you about it. The form’s seeming demise is puzzling, given that the last 10 years have seen the rise of the e-book and the e-reader, lavishly animated projects like Electric Type’s Jungle Book, and innovative publishing ventures like Richard Nash’s Red Lemonade — and, perhaps not coincidentally, a crisis in traditional book publishing. You can’t swing a cat on certain blocks of Manhattan near Union Square without it asking, “What about the future of the book?”

— Paul La Farge

And, it must be noted, that we sympathize with the following quote more than Paul might imagine:

At the same time, it’s impossibly hard to create, one of the only modes of fiction I know of which is more demanding than the novel. (And then add to that the need to create a user interface, and maybe a content-management system, and is it going to be an app?…)

(via Salon)