Imagine a book forcing you to pause after reading a passage. Or playing a song at an extemely low volume just as you encounter it in the text. Or cutting up the narrative flow and restructuring it at random—like some sort of AI William S. Burroughs. All those things and more are possible with ebooks, which will redefine the flow of a narrative just as surely as it was redefined when we moved from scroll to codex. And yet the internal restructuring is just the beginning.
Over on Rdio, I’ve been building a collaborative playlist of all the music that appears in 1Q84 in the order that it appears. It was only after I started doing this that I learned about Small Demons, which basically scrapes the objects from books—places, music, characters. You can then appreciate them across multiple titles. Not only does it help you understand the context in which they are used, but it can even clue you into homages of earlier works. Meanwhile Steven Johnson’s new collaborative community, Findings, lets readers share their favorite passages from various books (which was precisely how I discovered that 1Q84 doesn’t support public notes)
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