Stephen Fry‘s new iPhone app MyFry has already received a lot of blog coverage… but I wanted to quickly post it here because it looks like such an interesting experiment in publishing.

The app’s content is Fry’s new book “The Fry Chronicles” — but it’s been made non-linear. The primary navigation of the app/book is a large circular wheel. Readers can scroll around the wheel’s spokes for the different sections, which are color-coded by themes within the section. Then, within a section, readers can explore by additional tags. Unfortunately, the app isn’t currently available for purchase in the US. But the video walk-through gives a good overview of how it works.

The app may not be perfect. It doesn’t appear to mark sections as “read” — so readers may find themselves having trouble knowing where to go next. I’d love to see additional views of the content and how it’s all interconnected. And I question the scalability of the approach — could it work for other content with more categories, chapters, tags, etc?

Still, it’s great to see fresh approaches like this — where content can break free of its traditional paged structure. Hopefully it’ll encourage more authors and publishers, who are struggling with the future of digital publishing, to keep experimenting and pushing forward.

Below are a couple images of the app, along with some great sketches (via the Eye Magazine blog, where there are more) by designer Stefanie Posavec.

Early development screenshots

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Just released for the iPad, Inkling looks fantastic. It’s designed as an e-textbook reader — and has beautiful layout and typography. It’s also got support for a wide range of multimedia content such as movies, 3D, and quizzes. But I think its real killer-feature is the way it can integrate your social network into the reading experience. You can embed notes within the pages, share them with others, even follow them as streams. It makes books feel social and alive.

My gripe with Inkling is that it’s a closed ecosystem — you can only read books that you purchase through the Inkling store. Wouldn’t it be way-cooler if Inkling was a wrapper that you could use to read e-books purchased from Amazon and the Apple iBookstore, too? That way you could use all the social features in, for example, a cookbook or travel guide.

Inkling is a free app and comes with a demo version of The Elements of Style. Give it a try.

Link via Daring Fireball.

Interesting scroll bar detail.

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When I first saw Peter Greenaway’s film “Prospero’s Books” I was drawn to the innovative use of layering and multiple images to visualize the 24 books that made up the film’s arc. I was inspired. I wanted to explore ways to create interactive books with the richness and complexity as the books in the film… Books that felt handmade — full of magical, detailed, mysterious content.

So what about some examples of interesting digital books?

In 1997 Corbus released the CD-ROM Leonardo da Vinci. It contained images of da Vinci’s Codex Leicester with an innovative viewer that allowed readers to view Leonardo’s manuscript in 1) the original mirror-script Italian, 2) a reversed “normal” view, 3) a transcription of the original Italian, and 4) a modern English translation.

Leonardo da Vinci, Corbus

An early digital books was that I was semi-obsessed with was a 1990′s CD-ROM pop-up book of the alphabet from a [I think] Japanese design firm. On screen was an image of a 3D book. You could turn the page and a new crazy popup scene would unfold. One for each letter of the alphabet. I even think that the pages did crazy stuff — like the “r” page had a rocket ship that flew up off the page. (Unfortunately I can’t find an image of this project. I’m searching – and will post it when I do. It was either a CA or ID magazine award winner – in case anyone knows it.)

Moving from pure digital experiences to augmented reality, this book, “Le Monde des Montagnes – Give Me More”, by Camille Scherrer, is a beautiful vision of the semi-physical.

And lastly, the actual physical book, “Electronic Popables,” built by Jie Qi — a graduate student at the MIT Media Lab’s High-Low Tech Group. Full of wires and material magic to make the book come to life.

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