Translation: Jon Alkorta Martiartu, PhD (UPV/EHU)
Digital Literature
A cultural discipline that is experiencing an unprecedented expansion since the advent of the Internet is literature. Classics in the public domain are free at the click of a button and contemporary books cost less (though sometimes not enough) than the paper edition. Until a few years ago we were prisoners of a handful of devices: the giant Amazon launched the Kindle, a low-priced digital reader that allowed reading through digital ink technology, while competitors developed other devices for digital reading from other online shops. But for some time now those devices have been universalised and books from shops such as Amazon or Rakuten Kobo can be read on any tablet via native apps. There are also third-party apps that allow you to read books in ePUB or PDF format in an enriched form.
The creation of digital books
Moreover, this democracy has come to the aid of those of us on the other side. Those of us writers who believe in our work have at our disposal the tools for creating digital books: whether it is a simple, well-labelled Word document, a slightly more precise document produced with Sigil or multimedia books that are very easy to produce with Apple’s iBooks Author tool. However, it should not be forgotten that books, electronic or not, must pass an editorial reading, proofreading and spell-checking, so that the extra quality of each title is guaranteed. And one more important thing that should not be left aside: the cover, which, whenever possible, should be left to a professional. With this, in shops such as Amazon, Kobo, La Casa del Libro or Apple iBooks, you are in a position to publish your manuscript. However, the author must also take care of promotion and sales. But that is another matter.
Tales made app
Let’s go back to the other side, the reader’s. Apart from the universal formats we have just discussed, there have also been companies that have opted to create storybooks through native apps. This is the case of the company iClassics, which has enriched the reading experience of great writers in applications such as iDickens, iDoyle, iLovecraft, iWilde or iPoe. The truth is that the experience is magnificent and all the design and programming work behind it can be easily appreciated. The creators call it “immersive reading” and also offer exercises and activities to accompany the applications. They cost €3.99 for each story and are available in the Play Store and the AppStore. Here is a video where you can see the result:
Antique books
From modern literary Apps we move to the other extreme: the reading of incunabula. The world’s great libraries such as the National Library of Spain, the National Library of France or the Bodmerian Library are some examples of great institutions that have set to work to digitise their collections. With this we achieve several things: democratic access to authentic jewels of the history of world literature, as well as the conservation of books that continue to be kept in optimal conditions of humidity and temperature so that they do not deteriorate.
Then there are the websites that offer you millions of books, either for free or for a small fee. This is the case, for example, with Scribd, which they call the YouTube of books. Be careful here, because these folks are pretty piratey. One of the conditions for downloading books for free is that you upload five documents yourself. That’s why people carelessly upload all the digital books they have. They don’t worry about rights or anything else. I have seen that there are books of mine there and nobody has ever contacted me. In this sense, I should also point out that there are tools such as Telegram groups where you can download all the latest titles from the main publishers for free. Yes, piracy of the good kind. I was also a victim of this in the Mistérica magazine project, which, as soon as it was uploaded on different platforms, was already pirated in a thousand places. Anyway.
The other side of the coin is Archive.org. Here we do have good material with rights compliance guarantees. There is an infinity of multimedia resources, but here I would like to focus on their section of digitised books, which is spectacular. I highly recommend this site for researchers.
And last, as another tool for researchers, we have a kind of social network of academic articles, Academia.edu. It is very good because, depending on your searches, they recommend papers that might be of interest to you every so often. They also take care of assigning the academic papers you have authored and, if you are a paying member, you can see all the times you have been cited. Granted, this is a purely academic tool, but the papers, for the most part, are of very high quality.
OpenEdition le sugiere que cite este post de la siguiente manera:
Dr. Pedro Ortega (6 de febrero de 2023). Literatura digital. El blog de Tartalo. Recuperado 19 de marzo de 2025 de https://doi.org/10.58079/unvd