gear diary choose adventure photo

Remember Choose Your Own Adventure Books? Of course you do. They were awesome; you’d be given a scenario, and after some background you would flip to a certain page for one outcome, and another page for a difference outcome. They were out of print for a bit, having returned in paperback a few years ago, but they are making a comeback…on the Amazon Kindle.

eBooks are the perfect format for these books; hyperlinks take the place of flipping through the pages, and if you don’t like your choice, it’s easy to use the back button to flip to your options again. Or you can cheat and bookmark the choice pages like I did.

Aside from the awesome nostalgia, there’s another reason this is so cool. It taps into a unique ability of eBooks to present a story in a non-linear fashion and still make it easy to read and follow. Imagine bringing this kind of experience to a more adult mystery, where you can choose to switch between following the hero and the villain’s points of views by choosing a hyperlink during a chapter? Or reading a non-fiction book where ancillary information gets it’s own section, instead of being relegated to a footnote, all because it is available as a hyperlinked “extra” area to a book. Not to mention the potential benefits to reference books…

As of right now, though, all those are pipe dreams. All we have are the choose your own adventure stories to keep us busy.

So now you must make a choice:

Do you download a Choose Your Own Adventure book?

Or

Do you do nothing and return to your adventure-less life?

Via Teleread

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