The Tower of Jezik. Remediating a Hypertext Narrative: When Digital Literature Meets Publishing Models

Many publishers – pure players or “traditional” publishers – are now exploring the field of digital literatures by producing enhanced e-books aimed at young readers. Be they ePub3 e-books or apps for mobile devices, more and more of these digital works are created for commercial purposes and try to settle on the cultural industry market by adapting to the evolution of digital reading.This new generation of publishers is only discovering now the poetic potential of hypertext narratives and the endless possibilities that derive from the hybridisation of text, image, sound and video. Yet, they find themselves facing many obstacles throughout the design process. Psychologically, digital reading is often associated with disorientation, cognitive overload and discontinued ways of reading (as opposed to the immersive reading experience known with printed novels) (Gervais 1999 ; Baccino 2011). Economically, few examples of profitable models exist. Technically, many constraints emerge, on the one hand from the open and standardised ePub format, on the other from the ideology imposed by the software and harware industry. Bearing these elements in mind, publishers remain reluctant to offer hyperfictions to their readers and prefer investing in “traditional” models inherited from the print (i.e. models that still rely on pages, tables of content and linear reading) as well as fun, educational games, all of which tend to standardise new reading experiences