Van Helsing

Some academics cringe while other see readers’ direction of plots as the future of reading

What if Romeo and Juliet lived happily ever after, or Van Helsing decided Dracula wasn’t worth the trouble? In a high-tech twist on Choose Your Own Adventure, “active fiction” imbues readers with precisely that kind of power.

Launching this month in Amazon’s Kindle Store, Coliloquy e-books are peppered with “choice points” that allow readers to take the story in the direction most appealing to them — whether it’s experiencing a critical moment through another character’s eyes, setting the protagonist on a new path, or seeing what a

After several reboots, e-book publishing is seeing signs of growth. Recent sales figures compiled by the Open eBook Forum (OeBF) have given publishers an indication of what the future holds. And that future might be now. For the first quarter of 2004, e-books posted double-digit growth (28 percent), and though revenue is projected to be a modest $13 million for the year, sales are rising, and the OeBF, an international trade and standards organization for the electronic publishing industry, began tracking sales of trade titles via a monthly bestseller list in March. Given all the optimism, publishers have taken a harder look at their