Interactive digital books and interpretive play

Focusing on installations, programs for desktop computers, and apps for mobile devices, this article debates tensions between the experience of text on screen and on paper in order to distinguish the significance of “playing” with works in electronic media. Rather than considering the digital book as a dematerialization of the codex, it is argued that interactive digital books extend aspects of European book history and engage the reader’s body in innovative ways for the purpose of expanding the range of “performances” that can be generated by a text. The act of reading is identified as an essentially open practice in which meaning is created from a work’s multiple recombinations