Hypertext Novels & eBooks

Over the summer I've been rereading several pieces that I used as supplementary materials for an independent study I did in the spring on Serbian author Milorad Pavić. Recommended by my advisor, these pieces included three hypertext novels (digital hypertexts, not printed hypertexts like Pavić's Dictionary of the Khazars):

• Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl
• Michael Joyce's afternoon: a story
• Stuart Moulthrop's Victory Garden

All three are beautiful and intricate in ways only hypertexts can be. All three are also laborious to read. This is not, as one might think, an indictment of literary hypertexts; as both a reader and a writer I am incredibly sympathetic to the idea. It's more a complaint about the archaic technology used to display these hypertexts - Eastgate Systems' Storyspace Reader.

Now, I should be fair. I bought the CDs (yes, not DVDs or eBooks) with these hypertexts from an Amazon seller, as opposed to directly from Eastgate. It's entirely possible that I'm simply using old versions of their software, that when I run it on either my laptop or desktop (Macs running Leopard & Snow Leopard, respectively), I'm having an experience that was optimized for much older machines and operating systems. But this is the dawning of the age of the eBook, of dedicated eReader hardware. Hypertexts like those of Jackson, Joyce, and Moulthrop were ahead of their time in some part because they anticipated reading becoming a digital activity. Today, them seem to be well behind the curve.


On my iPhone right now, I have 5 pieces of eReader software (7 if you count the comic eReaders from DC and Marvel). If Barnes & Noble, Borders, Apple, and Amazon are prepared to sell me digital versions of printed texts, those pedestrian bodies of work we used to read from one printed cover to another, resplendent in their linearity, why haven't authors and publishers of digital hypertexts made an effort to get their works into such formats? I'm not sure.


Maybe the creators of such hypertexts view them as works of art that are somehow separate from the evolution of the book. That's fine by me. Frankly, it seems a shame to me that eBooks must sit in the shadow of their printed progenitors, and readers should be asking for if not demanding creative works that treat the eBook as a macro-genre unto itself. But if each author of an artistic hypertext views their work as being so unique as to be unclassifiable within the current framework of book-dom, what hope do such works have of reaching a larger audience? (And, yes, a larger audience should be reading such works. At the time of their first publication, these works may have been experimental, but nowadays they should be used to broaden the so-called "main stream".)


Maybe there just aren't enough of such hypertexts in existence to warrant making eBook technology compatible with them. In fact this one probably isn't a maybe. Writers of creative hypertexts like those of Jackson and company are clearly part of a minority group, but I wonder whether this isn't because the perceived threshold of entry for creating such works isn't rather high. Software like Storyspace is supposed make the experience of writing hypertexts easier, though I have the distinct feeling that far less time was spent by developers on making the experience of reading as pleasant as that of writing. Catering to readers is something the folks that made the Kindle or iBooks software do quite well, establishing a standard form that is much the same as the standard cover-pages-binding form of printed books. The real difference between the eReader experiences offered by Barnes & Noble, Borders, Amazon, Sony, and Apple has almost nothing to do with software and everything to do with book selection. If Eastgate poured some more thought into the reading side of their hypertext experience, or if the new pillars of eBook publishing would take the time/money to enhance the user experience of eBook writers (not just readers), the number of hypertext works available for eReaders would boom.


My mother has a Kindle and she loves it. I've been ogling the iPad since it came on the market (admittedly as a laptop alternative instead of an eReader, but I'm not opposed to using the device for books). But I have a hard time convincing myself that, despite the extra physical space I'd gain in my apartment by switching to eBooks, the benefits of using an eReader instead of printed texts are all that great (I already read slowly; should I even risk slowing down even more?). Hypertext novels of the past, as well as new works written expressly to take advantage of an eReader's capabilities, would convince me that this new technology is worthwhile to me both as a writer and a reader, as opposed to it being the next link in a technology chain that includes eight-track tapes, Betamax, HD DVDs, and netbooks.