1984: Creating an Immersive eBook Experience
Using iBooks Author to enhance George Orwell’s classic
George Orwell’s 1984 is the increasingly relevant tale of Winston Smith, a lowly government employee in the land of Oceania, where no one can escape the sinister gaze of Big Brother.
Though this book was written 70 years ago, its themes of surveillance, authoritarianism, censorship, propaganda, and gaslighting have never been more pertinent than in the last decade. Despite its relevance, though, many younger readers could fail to see its importance due to its age, and miss out on the important messages it contains. For that reason, I wanted to enhance the book in such a way that the reader is more immersed in the story and is able to see parallels between Oceania and our modern world.
So What’s the Plan?
In order to create a more immersive and educational experience, I wanted to include:
- Visual elements that suck the reader in
- Interactive experiences that give readers additional context
- A glossary detailing some of the odd vocabulary
Features
Cover Art
For the ebook cover art, I simply adapted the art that I had designed for the audiobook version to fit the dimensions of a traditional book cover.
Big Brother Poster
All over Oceania, there are posters of the authoritarian leader Big Brother with the ominous caption “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU”. Orwell describes the image of Big Brother on these posters as being “so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move”. I wanted to allow readers to feel what it’s like to be followed by the watchful eyes of Big Brother, so I put my (extremely limited) illustration skills to the test and drew up a poster in Illustrator, and then animated the eyes in Hype.
Journal Entries
Winston’s secret journal is a major element of 1984’s plot. The very act of keeping a journal is illegal and could result in Winston’s execution. I chose to make the entries a handwritten font, in order to create a more immersive experience and convey the urgency and rawness in Winston’s writing.
“Real World” Pop-Overs
To give real world context, I created icons that, when tapped, provide the reader with current events that relate to what is happening in the book at that moment, accompanied by a relevant image or, in this case, tweet that drives the point home.
Location Pop-Overs
1984 takes place in a sort of post-apocalyptic version of our world. To help the reader get their bearings in terms of geography, I created icons that, when tapped, provide information about where the ‘superstates’ are, as well as some background information, such as the political system that is in place in that particular superstate.
Glossary
There are a lot of terms in the book that may be unfamiliar to readers. For example, Oceanians are required to use a sort of mandatory slang called Newspeak which is intended to limit the ideas that a person can think. These Newspeak terms, as well as other objects and events, are outlined in the glossary.
Testing
For the most part, everything looked the way it was supposed to when viewed in the Apple Books app on iPad. There were, however, some strange things that happened to some of the text styles.
For example, Italics were reverted to normal text, and chapter title text was changed from all caps to sentence caps. I experimented with different typefaces to determine whether it was a bug exclusive to the font I had chosen, but eventually came to the conclusion that it must just be a funky bug in iBooks Author.
Conclusion
This project offered some great insights into what it’s like to create an immersive ebook experience. It also converted me to the idea of enhanced ebooks as an engaging way to read a book. Before this project, I was skeptical that this type of ebook offered anything more than some animated illustrations, but I now see that, when done right, an enhanced ebook can offer the reader an incredibly entertaining, educational, and immersive experience not possible with a normal book or ebook.
Taylor Fletcher is a student in the Digital Media program at Utah Valley University, Orem Utah, studying Interaction & Design. This article relates to the ePub 3.0 project in the DGM 2260 (Immersive Authoring) course and representative of the skills learned.
