22 June, 2011

Finally, An App I Can Get Behind

If I had an iPad, I'd definitely get this "living book" edition of T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland".

It has tons of features in addition to the basic text of the poem. They include a video of Irish actress Fiona Shaw reciting the poem plus multiple audio readings, various drafts of it, and annotations aplenty. The reader can skip around the text and move into and out of any section at will, jumping between text and recitation. Also helpful are videos of various literary types giving their takes on the work. Pretty slick.

It'd be neat if Umberto Eco or Thomas Pynchon got this kind of treatment. That'd take a lot more space, however, but I'm unsure if this e-book is installed entirely on the hard drive or whether it grabs content from the web dynamically.

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