STEPHEN ELLIOTT, a 38-year-old from San Francisco, just introduced his first piece of software for sale: an app for the iPad and iPhone called “The Adderall Diaries.”
He’s not exactly a programmer — better to call him a writer. And the app that he conceived looks a lot like an electronic book. That is, most people who buy the app will do so to read the text of “The Adderall Diaries,” his “memoir of moods, masochism and murder” based on his childhood in Chicago group homes, which was published in hardcover last year by Graywolf Press.
But Mr. Elliott says he has good reasons for producing his own iPad app, separate and apart from the e-book version of “Adderall Diaries” that is for sale, say, for the Kindle or the iPad reader from Apple. But those reasons are not the artistic, meta-fictional ones you might suspect — you know, so that when characters enter a bar, you suddenly hear music and a glass dropped by the waiter, or more fancifully, you can make them turn around and go somewhere else.
More from The New York Times.
Not one thing
I read the article and not one thing about this app interested me. There is absolutely nothing new here.
Somebody speak up!
From the article: “People want to talk about the books they are reading with other people. Why, with everything we know, wouldn’t you include a chat room with your e-book?”
Seriously please speak up. Someone stand up and say, “I want to chat electronically when I am reading a book.”
And if we suspend reality for a moment and actually find someone that wants to chat electronically about a book trying to do a chat on the touch screen of an iPhone or iPad is just lame.