LISA GEE || THE INDEPENDENT | DECEMBER 2011

Although industry experts predict a digital literature boom next year, a lot of inspiring work has already hatched during 2011.

Marcus Chown’s The Solar System for iPad (Faber/Touch Press £9.99) marries his lively, accessible text to Touch Press’s trademark spinning images. While solar storms flare and planets, moons, a bowl of porridge and other edible items rotate at the flick of a finger, you can read from the sun to the dwarf planet Eris and beyond, or planet-hop at whim.

Sydney Padua’s online comic 2D Goggles, or The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage is now an iPad app (Agant Ltd, £1.99 per episode). Padua has drawn her heroine and hero into an alternate 19th-century universe, where they “successfully developed the computer in the mid-1830s … and used their combined powers to fight crime and have adventures”. Huge imaginative fun, laced with reproductions of (real) historical documents.>>READ MORE

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