Alice for iPad

April 19, 2010
Stacey Mason/Mark Bernstein

It hasn’t taken long for interesting reading formats to reach the iPad, though I must admit I wasn’t expecting anything beyond eBooks and perhaps Vooks for a little while. However, Alice for the iPad has landed, and faliing somewhere between Voyager’s electronic edition of Martin Gardner’s The Annotated Alice and a children’s game, the work offers something different.

Interactive illustration with a small element of puzzle-solving is a cute way to make literature more engaging, and it certainly does seem particularly well-suited to children’s literature. It also attracts media coverage, since it’s easy to grasp and you don’t need to read the book in order to write a story about it.

One could certainly envision an original work that takes these ideas and expands them, with the puzzles and interactive illustrations actually influencing the outcome of the narrative. The trick is to make the narrative immersive and engaging without the interactivity feeling gimmicky—and this may be harder than it sounds.

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