Often, I hear the lament that digital literature is has yet to come into its own, or is under-appreciated. To some degree this is true, but very soon new technologies (e-books (advanced versions of the Kindle) that offer multimedia content directly from the web, and cell phones that can accommodate Flash and other applications) will provide new forms of literature on demand.

But, as Michael points out, in many ways, digital literature is already a mainstay of our everyday lives, at least in the form it takes through multimedia presentation in anything from news sites to Facebook to personal blogs. People are reading digital literature, probably more than we think, and more importantly, many more are getting used to the idea. In a few years, particularly among readers who are in their teens now, digital poetry and fiction will be an expected item on the reading menu.

Here’s a mention of some more examples of digital literature that go beyond traditional hypertext:

“Searching for a New(er) Digital Literature” is an exhibition of twelve multimedia works that offer readers representative examples of new digital poetry and fiction on the web. Curated by Alan Bigelow, it includes work by Jim Andrews, Marvin Bell & Ernesto Lavandera, Sommer Browning & Mark Lomond/Johanne Ste-Marie, Andy Campbell, J.R. Carpenter, Chris Joseph & Kate Pullinger, Tammy McGovern, Stuart
Moulthrop, Alexander Mouton, Jason Nelson, Victoria Welby, and Jody Zellen.

The online exhibit is available at http://www.terminalapsu.org/exhibitions/digitalliterature/index.html

The exhibit is both online and offline. The offline exhibit launched on January 15th at Austin Peay State University in Tennessee.

Eoin- yes there are lots of troubles with formats, and I utterly agree that all this confusion is needlessly harming ebooks at a critical juncture in their development. However I think that ebooks, as in the ur-format, are here to stay, and already constitute digital books, regardless of the smaller format troubles. I guess the analogy is not so much Bluray/HD-DVD but rather the whole concept of having films on discs.

Walt- actually I don’t really play computer games, I don’t own a games console and haven’t for years. On the contrary an alarming amount of my free time is spent reading books. As Peter points out I never once suggest that games might be “better”, only at some level (narrative) similar and therefore important. Generally I regard computer games like a minnow might regard a whale: as vast, slightly monstrous and incomprehensible.

Peter- couldn’t agree more on the cognitive aspects of games and reading. I wrote a piece on here a few weeks back that expressed concern for our brains as there is a transition to more visual media; it’s one I still have in fairness, but I definitely agree that not everything is bad in games. Simply because computer games do not resemble traditional literature does not mean we can write them off as digital fiction. They occupy the same leisure story telling space. That they do not resemble books makes them more difficult to identify as existing in that space; and I think slowly we may see a shift, and games may come to occupy a bigger portion of the literary arena as our expectations of what can be done with games evolves. When people are tired they turn to the TV or the computer before they do a book.

I do not, however, necessarily agree with the assertion that computer games ought to be be categorized as a kind of “digital fiction” any more than I believe that, in the digital age, a film recorded in entirely digital form should be called something other than a film. The perceived interactivity and fluidity of Twitter fic, etc., remains literary: the author is not projected into some visual representation of the self for all to see, as is the case with World of Warcraft or some other MMOG, or the insular single-player game, but remains separate and hidden from the reader/observer. All that has changed, really, is the method of delivering the same milk. Computer games certainly have garnered some deserved attention for the increased depth of their narratives, and the potential for the player to shape their denouements and define one’s experience therein, but they remain a different beast entirely. The potential of the ebook to integrate certain interactive elements into the reading process is as close as the two will get for some time. (And even then, the “interactive” elements will merely be surrogates for the experience of reading a print book with illustrations–the sound of paper and other forms of sense stimulation.) You put it best, Michael: “Digital is meant to be good precisely because it breaks with print; however I believe the success of the ebook is because it resembles print. People don’t necessarily want a radical break. They want the same but easier. People like books because they offer a very usable experience that has a USP over other forms of media: it offers the undiluted communication of one mind, one vision with another. If we mess this basic formula too much then reading will not work.”

It is true that “the future is here,” and new forms of writing and reading, and technologies devised to such ends, have given the processes of composition and creation a more democratic bent. That will, in terms of lasting effects, be more significant than the forms themselves.