Digi Novel !!

  

When a book is authored by the creator of CSI (which is a personal favorite of mine since 2006 when I first encountered some episodes); it doesn't take long to jump into it and devour it quickly. But once I started reading it, I realized it was not so simple. I read while I travel and I prefer to remain off-line when travelling (or when away from laptop) so I don't really use internet on my phone. This book makes you go to a website every 50 pages or so to experience the story in a different media (audio-video).

This book is a new concept of DigiNovel … a multi-platform experience that moves the reader from passages in the books to videos on Level26.com … so you read the book and watch engaging videos shot in the style of a movie. This website is an interactive extension of the books series (a trilogy) and put together they form a "Digi-novel".

What I find interesting is the marriage of the 2 media (text + video) to create a more engaging experience for the 'reader'. I was reading a physical book but imagine reading the iPad/Tablet/online version of the same book where the story is interspersed with videos. This could easily be taken to the next level by introducing some interactive elements. Hope this marks the beginning of an interesting genre of 'reading'.  

 The interactivity aspect reminds of the 'Make Your Own Adventure/Story' kind of books I had read in my school days. The story would move a few pages and then you would be offered a choice / a decision. The choices would lead you to different pages in the book where after a few pages you would come to a decision point again. This gave the books the feature of having literally 'different' storylines and you could read the same story again and again with slightly different storyline. It had a high level of interactivity. DigiNovels could bring back that era of books again with greater ease.