3 April 2008

A step into the future

Penguin Books, in collaboration with online media company Six to Start have undertaken an exciting new project to re-write 6 classics novels. The We Tell Stories project is an attempt to find new ways to tell stories in the age of Web 2.0.

The first title in the series is John Buchan’s pre-World War I espionage thriller The 39 Steps. The novel is given a revamp by Charles Cummings who called his homage to Buchan’s classic The 21 Steps. The interactive story is told wholly through Google Maps. Readers can click on Google’s pointer icons to progress through the story and watch the path traced by Richard Hannay as he travels from London's St. Pancras train station to Heathrow Airport and then to Edinburgh.

The story is makes for entertaining reading and it’s great to see publishers embrace digital technology in such a revolutionary way. I have to admit I’ve never actually read The 39 Steps, but now having finished The 21 Steps I’m going to go back to the original… well almost. We’ve got a unabriged audio recording of the book from the BBC, read by Robert Powell, so my next step will be to download that today!

No comments: