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The Drood Review Mystery's Second Century A forum on the future of the genre Original essays Our thoughts Follow-ups This site is copyright (c) 2000-3 by The Drood Review. The Drood Review
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Beth Thoenen In the 21st century, technology will transform everything from the structure of the mystery story to the way it’s delivered to readers. You’ll have an electronic book — just a reader, actually — that will be able to store the text of several full-length novels, display the text on a screen the size of a paperback page, run searches and mark important passages. You’ll download new books (or newspapers, magazines — even mystery newsletters) over a wireless Internet connection. The electronic book’s backlit screen will allow you to read in the dark, and its compact size will let you carry in your pocket enough reading material to keep you happy for a week or two. Physical books will increasingly become collectibles, and once you can search back through a text to remind yourself of who a character is or what happened in that scene at the airport, you’ll wonder how you ever managed to read a book without a search function. The changes in media and distribution methods will have far-reaching effects on the publishing industry. New, nimbler players will emerge who can bring books to market more quickly while offering authors and readers better deals. As publishing grows cheaper and easier more books will be published every year, but publishing brands will mean even less than they do now (…which isn’t much. Ever decide to try a book based on who published it? No, me neither.) Some of the mysteries you read with your electronic book will not follow the traditional linear story structure. Hypertext allows elements of a story to be linked in such a way that you can choose your own path through the material, rather than taking in the narrative as the author has laid it out. Reading a hypertext mystery, you become a little more the detective, a little less the passive bystander. Here’s the kicker: most of the pieces that make up this new model exist today. NuvoMedia’s Rocket eBook, though not yet wireless and slightly larger than pocket-sized, is otherwise identical to the electronic book I describe above. Electronic publishers are proliferating on the Web. The Mystery of Cliff (http://macmom.com/cliff/), though unfinished and flawed, is worth a look: it’s a hypertext mystery whose structure fascinatingly mimics that of the community in which it is set. It offers a tantalizing taste of what a hypertext mystery can be. All these pieces are coming together, with tremendous momentum behind them, perhaps faster than you think. Are you ready? |