What can you do with an e-book on the iPad that you can’t do with a normal book? In some cases, you can enhance the book’s purpose. The novel Composition No. 1 by Marc Saporta is a “non-linear book”, meant to be read in any order. The iPad version of it enhances this by building a random shuffle feature into the book: it flips through the pages faster than you can read them, and stops on a random one when you touch the screen.
This echoes the physical nature of the book, which is a box of loose pages each with its own self-contained narrative. Yes, it’s a gimmick, but it’s at least one that goes with the gimmicky nature of the non-linear book itself.
