Exploring the Narrative Possibilities of the E-Book

Jürgen Neffe has had a lot of crazy ideas. Some of them have become bestsellers, Neffe's journey following in the footsteps of Charles Darwin, for example.
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The new format, which Leffe ended up designing himself, is called Libroid. It is similar to an e-book, but avoids the standard digital book format which involves manually "turning pages" by clicking through. And in just two to four weeks, the program -- which cost a low six-figure sum to develop -- will appear as an iPad application. Last week, Neffe presented the Libroid format to the public for the first time.

The concept of Libroid is easy to grasp: If you hold the tablet vertically, you only see text. If you turn it horizontally, two narrow columns appear on either side of the main central text column. In the example of Neffe's Darwin book, the left hand column is used for photos whereas the right contains a world map with the current location, a list of additional reference sources, and -- importantly for this book -- links to the appropriate places in Darwin's own records of his travels.

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