Monday, June 18, 2012

Reimagining Books: How Citia's iPad App Compares to a Paper Book [ReadWriteWeb]

From an overview of Citia, a hypertext nonfiction social reading app for the iPad
"Kevin Kelly's book has been deconstructed into what Holliday called a "thesis." It's been divided into 7 topics, totaling less than 20,000 words - much less than the 400 pages of the original book. The app also includes multimedia, such as images and video.
The HyperCard concept was used, Holliday explained, because they wanted the app to have modular content. This allows the reader to re-organize the information and consume it in a non-linear fashion. The reader can also theoretically share bits of it, via Facebook, Twitter and email. However, that part seems to be buggy, as neither Twitter nor Facebook worked for me in my tests. A really interesting concept that Citia hopes to introduce soon, when it has more books in its collection, is to show connections between ideas across books. If you have prior knowledge about a particular topic from reading another Citia book, the app will recognize that and you won't have to read about it again."
Reimagining Books: How Citia's iPad App Compares to a Paper Book

No comments: