One of the apps on my phone concerns a work of literature. Not the Kindle app (though I have that too), but Chaucer. The app features the text of the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, and a reading of it in the original English. Is this the future of the book? Or one of its futures?

In his book A Little History of Literature, which I’ve reviewed, John Sutherland discusses the future of the book. As it happens, although he alludes to interactive literature, he doesn’t mention apps. He mentions fan fiction, but not shared annotations and highlights, or reviews by “ordinary” people (as opposed to professional reviewers, on sites like Amazon and Goodreads (which is owned by Amazon, by the way).

A point he makes in the book , which I’ve often made myself, is that when new technology comes along it tends to re-create what went before before starting to be used in ways that were not possible before. To a large extent I think we are still at that stage with the book. Certainly, there have been experiments with interactive books, and, as Sutherland explores, film and stage adaptations that can take a work of literature in new directions, but even so….

Perhaps before we can see any major and widespread developments in books (beyond the innovation of audiobooks) we need to rethink what exactly we mean by “literature” and “book”.

See also my review of A Little History of Literature.