A new system, called Literatronic, has been created for hypertext authoring. Rather than using links to connect the passages of their stories, authors can assign numbers to tell Literatronic how much affinity one passage has with another. A reader will be presented with choices of what to read next, based upon these affinities. Once a reader has read a passage, it will not be available again as a choice to read next, unless the reader goes back to the map of already read text and marks the text as unread. The system goes further than this, in that it uses artificial intelligence to adapt to a reader’s previous choices and to use information about them to compute the next set of choices. A much more detailed look at Literatronic, and how it has the potential to change the way the way that hypertext literature is written and read, is available on the WRT blog.

In July, the Institute for the Future of the Book will release Sophie, which they describe as “an open-source platform for creating and reading electronic books for the networked environment”. The beta release will be available even sooner, for readers of the if:book blog. It will be interesting to see what Sophie allows a writer of digital documents to do. Of course, writers for the web can always use Flash or any number of other tools, but the lower the learning curve, the better, in my opinion. Not every good writer has the time or inclination to learn XHTML, CSS, Flash, ActionScript, etc.

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