Frankenstein is alive!

There's enormous intelligence behind the reworking.
-- Dale Townshend, quoted in The Independent

Frankenstein, by Dave Morris and published by Profile Books, has gone live on the App Store today.

Superb
-- Tim Harford, senior columnist for The Financial Times

The story

Dave's re-telling of Frankenstein is something worth getting excited about - a reboot, if you like, with a new setting, richer characterisation and more depth than the original, but still drawing on the deep conceptual well that Mary Shelley created.

The Modern Prometheus gets even more modern
-- Stephen Jewell, SFX Magazine

The publisher

One of the best things about the project for us has been working with Profile Books in London. A traditional book publisher might not seem the most obvious partner for an app, but with years of experience working with authors to develop great content, and a strong sense of what works, they've made for great collaborators, both in business, and creatively too.

Marketing an app isn't easy - there's virtually no shop-front, it's hard to get adverts in front of people, and with the colossal number of apps released daily it's difficult to get drowned in the shuffle. But thanks to Profile, we've had coverage in The Observer, The Independent, SFX Magazine, several blogs and podcasts online, and we've got at least one other major newspaper making column space right now. For a new developer, that kind of exposure is useful - and for a project like Frankenstein, it's essential.

Frankenstein is lovely to look at
-- Anna Baddeley, The Observer

The design

This is a great moment for us here at inkle: Frankenstein isn't just our first release, but we're hoping it'll also be the first of many inklebooks produced using the platform behind Frankenstein. Interactive stories offer an enormous scope for fiction, from re-inventing classics, to game/book hybrids, to new original fiction. We want to do all of these.

There were two major components to it - the bit you see, and the bit you don't. The bit you see is how it looks, and feels, and crucially how it moves. It took us several iterations to get the flow just right, so that the choices you make aren't a distraction from the reading process. We wanted to be certain that reading interactively was as smooth an experience as reading from a normal book. We think what we've ended up with is one of the best e-reading experiences yet.

Then there's the bit you don't see, and that's the authoring format Dave used to write the content. That's what let's him branch the story, and weave it back together; that's how he can weave a story that incorporates every choice you make. The ink format is flexible, light-weight, and clear. Just like the app itself - the functionality gets out the way so you can concentrate on the story.

So grab an iPod, Pad or Phone, settle back, and enjoy Frankenstein!