Does the Novel Really Need Improvement?

Interesting story on ReadWriteWeb on an online novel in a new publishing format called “Quillr.”  The book is a supernatural thriller called Here Ends the Beginning.  The book is basically a mashup of text, video, photos and music.  How is this different than HTML? Do we need another format on the web to tell a story?

I think a blog, which is mostly just text, would make a much better novel. Blogs are also written in the first-person and are often very personal. You could read post by post as if they were chapters. I’m sure someone has done this before.

I’m a writer and a web person.  I love words, whether they’re on a printed page or a glowing screen. However, reading a novel is really an intimate experience that you create yourself, one that requires focused attention to enjoy. A web site with all sorts of bells and whistles detracts from that experience. I’m all in favor of the web but there’s a reason why novels have been with us for hundreds of years – it’s a format that works.

Comments

One response to “Does the Novel Really Need Improvement?”

  1. Govy Avatar

    I agree completely. The web is a great medium for a lot of products and services. But the novel is not one of them. I find it interesting how they’ve gone about syncing images and/or video with the text as you read it from page to page but it’s distracting. It’s a novel concept (pun completely intended) but it won’t last. Maybe the Kindle will try to do something like this down the line and maybe, then, there will be a larger audience for it. But, not right now.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *