The oldest public-domain book in the world is leading the way with interactive electronic publishing formats. Some niche electronic editions of the Bible are so sophisticated compared to what’s available on Kindle, according to this wry and fascinating piece in the Boston Phoenix, they are leaving the usual leaders in advance technology – the porn industry – in their ashes.

If you want to see what a 21st century reading experience should look like — one that enables you to bookmark, notate, listen to, and share passages instantly on Facebook and Twitter — the marketplace you’re looking for is e-Bibles.

At a party on the weekend I was speaking with technologist Deanna Zandt, who is no fan of either the Kindle or the iPhone/iPad. The author of the forthcoming book on social networking, Share This!, explained that the Kindle and Apple’s products, in very different ways, operate as closed shops – limiting or prohibiting online interactivity and conversation. Ironically, the new approach to one of the world’s oldest texts could not be more different:

At the time of this writing, six of the top 20 most popular paid e-books in the Apple App Store are Bibles. Likewise, the Washington State–based company Olive Tree’s Bible Reader is consistently one of the most downloaded free books. Users have left thousands of comments praising e-Bible serviceability; one version with a social-networking component even allows believers to search for other folks who want to chat about specific chapters. More so, it can tap a smart phone’s GPS to locate local prayer groups with similar affinities.

And it is e-Bibles that have helped push technology forward, by allowing users to seamlessly flip between scanning on an iPhone and reading on a laptop (without losing their page). Ditto the ability to switch, mid-stream, between Standard English and dozens of translations, or jump to an audio-book version, while keeping place to the sentence. Learned readers can even teleport from one particular chapter/verse in the King James Version to the same place in the New International Version.

For the secular, this reads like a telescopic view of the future – at least when it comes to works of non-fiction long in the public domain. Perhaps the Epic of Gilgamesh or the hieroglyphics on the Egyptian tombs will be eligible for this e-treatment (if they are not already). I can imagine spontaneous book clubs forming around individual titles, maps of cyberspace connecting the dots where users are all reading the same work/s, and the endless possibilities for teaching texts using this interactivity. I’m yet to see how fiction could benefit from a similar treatment, however, other than to connect readers who are interested in specific themes or authors … something that is already happening to a great extent online. As ever, the commercial potential of this technology seems largely skewed to the business, research and education sectors, though I might be missing something.

What do you think?

Roads less traveled - in winter

By now The Guardian’s Ten rules of writing fiction has been well distributed virally – I stumbled across it over at City of Tongues, in which James Bradley also confesses to having neglected his blog lately. Well James, not as much as I have neglected mine …

So as of ten days ago I’m back in self-imposed isolation in my second home, Brooklyn’s Prospect Heights, working on my manuscript. The proximity of the snow-covered Prospect Park (pictured) to my Brooklyn ‘closet’ is one of the most attractive parts of this neighborhood for me (btw my spelling changes depending on which country I’m in).

I was happy to see that many of the writers included going for a walk as one of their ‘rules’ to write by. I used to be a walking snob, refusing the possibility that moving more quickly would be any better for me than my fast-paced walking style. (Some friends call me ‘the greyhound’). My opinion has changed completely since beginning to run regularly, and boy have I toned up. As a late starter to running, I don’t run quickly or terribly far, but I do know that it clears my head like little else. Running in zero degrees in Prospect Park is quite wonderful, compared to the sickly stickiness of a Sydney summer run, spectacular waterside views notwithstanding. Dressing for the occasion takes me almost as much time as the run itself, although after my fourth run I’m getting quicker at preparing, and I’m now taking a longer route to see if I can increase my stamina. Reading that Malcolm Gladwell is a lifelong distance runner, and learning about Haruki Murakami’s late-starter status as both a runner and a novelist, has been very encouraging.

Still, running is not writing, and a lot of writing I must do. The other snippets from the Guardian list that spoke loudest to me were these from Rose Tremain:

In the planning stage of a book, don’t plan the ending. It has to be earned by all that will go before it.

Respect the way characters may change once they’ve got 50 pages of life in them. Revisit your plan at this stage and see whether certain things have to be altered to take account of these changes.

Damn, that’s exactly what’s happened to me on the weekend. My plan? Well, my plan is now to create a new plan. The old plan bears only a tangential relationship to what’s evolved. I have decided not to panic about that. Happily I decided long ago not to worry about the ending. There are too many other things to decide and worry about before I approach the end.

And from the remarkable Jeannette Winterson:

Turn up for work. Discipline allows creative freedom. No discipline equals no freedom.

Discipline generates freedom – I love that. I love it because it’s true. It’s so much easier to talk about writing, to blog about it (!) and to complain about how hard it is, when the simple but difficult thing to do is to write. Which is what I will do now I’m about to finish this post.