Not Quite Video Games, But a Format Discussion

Like most English majors -- and like most of the book-buying public, still -- I had scoffed at the idea of a novel translating to digital format. Reflexively, and over many waves of e-books being touted but failing to catch on, I insisted that only i-books would do.

If it didn't have ink stuck to paper, paper glued together, it wasn't anything that could rightly be called a "book."

But we have learned in recent years that great songs can thrive without being pinned to a circular platter; that news writing and television shows can migrate to the Internet and convey all the information they did in their traditional formats, in some cases more.

This knowledge, plus my tiring of spending commutes in numbing e-mail maintenance, led me to look for something more to do with my BlackBerry, one of the new categories of so-called smart phones that are more like mini-computers than long-range walkie-talkies.

I have a chess game on there, but not the patience to play. Brickbreaker, BlackBerry's native time-wasting ball-and-paddle game, bores me. I eschew sudoku.

So why not try a novel? . . .

The experience taught me that a book is not what I had thought it to be. It is not, in any important sense, typeface, paper stock or cover art. A book is, foremost, the arrangement of words in sequence, and they are, to borrow a buzz-phrase from the digital folk, platform agnostic. . . .

Steve Johnson: Hypertext