Customer Reviews

The Interactive Book: A Guide to the Interactive Revolution

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Celia Pearce's, The Interactive Book, is certainly an interesting and unusual book. The author tries to demonstrate interactivity by having the book written in a non-linear fashion. This book is not for those who are particulary interested in learning about the various topics that are addressed in this book. The contents of the book are certainly not what makes this book for most of the random articles are written in her opinion and personal experiences, nothing too beneficial to the reader. But what does come through to the audience is her idea of allowing every reader to "choose" their own unique experience with the book. The format of the book is quite interesting and Pearce does accomplish her task somewhat successfully, but the mere fact that the book offers a different method of reading is not enough to keep the reader "interactive" with the book.

This book is a vast overview of all of the subject areas that have been affected by the changing technology. Although the author does not delve into each of these topics, she does a good job of briefly describing them. This book was written with a very personal spin. Ms. Pearce has a tendency to include her opinion in most articles of the book. This book was written much like a "choose your own adventure" book from childhood. However, not all of the links are truely connected to the main article. The idea of jumping from piece to piece is an interesting one, but it still needs to be perfected. The Interactive Book is a good attempt at the reading of the future; however, it may have been better off on the web.

It is clear through reading the introduction alone, what Celia Pearce is trying to do here. It seems she, in the format of a book, is trying to give us all a taste of the wonders of the internet. And to get us as pumed up about it's social benefits as she is. What she fails to notice, and this addresses only the preface, is that whether a family is watching a tv screen or "building a family room in cyberspace," they are still staring at a blinking screen, and still missing many opportunities to enrich themselves through the real world around them. Not that the internet is not enriching. The internet is an amazing cultural and technological advancement. It is quite a feat, and the ocean of knowledge and information it presents us is staggering, to say the least. But do we really need to be told this again? The layout of the book is as such: Preface, wherein Miss Pearce tells us all about her excellence and the mammoth contribution to the evolutionary and cultural minds of readers that this book represents. Introduction: much of the same, except that now she begins to tell us (assuming that we live in hovels and are still pecking away at the keyboards of our 1985 IBM PC's, and that we have never even heard of Windows 98, much less used the internet) the many wonders of the internet on a cultural level, and with a voice that somehow manages to make an obviously brilliant woman seem uneducated and overly-enthusiastic. Eureka! she cries as she rediscovers an already existant, already manifested product of human evolution. In the Forewqard, we listen to more praise of Miss Pearce, except someone else is writing it, and it is a little less annoying that the rest of the introduction. Right off the bat, I am thoroughly annoyed with this book. Whether it is by an unprecedented enthusiasm that seems to be years late, or a sheer lack of modesty makes no difference; the voice of the author is and remains as irritating as a 112 degree day in summer with no shade to be found anywhere. Sunburns aside, her intention does seem to be a good one. The rest of the book comprises a series of generally unrelated essays, followed by what she calls "hyperlinks" to other essays, that are supposed to (although few actually do) have something to do each other. It is an attempt to encourage the reader to create their own linear paths through the incoherent string of essays and treatises presented. There are two main problems with this. One; the essays are non related in every sense. I began this book by reading an essay called "The ADD Generation," and wound up, 3 essays and some 100 pages later, reading a piece called "Digital Socialism." No amount of thinking i could do, aside from perhaps writing my own in deoth book on the subject could relate these two things. The second problem is in the essays themselves. The "wealth of information" presented to us here is nothing more than one womans opinions. There is no alternate arguement, no other view of similar or same topics at our disposal. Unless the reader is willing to take her word for it with no questioning, which I certainly am not, the reading is entirely unsatisfying. Another annoyance is that what she is doing, no matter how vehemently she claims it to be, is not by any means ground-breaking. This sort of interactivity in a book has been around since the mid eighties. Remember the "Choose Your Own Adventure" novels we used to read in grade school? It is exactly the same thing, only less interesting and with larger words. At the end, this book was a waste of time. The author's voice predominates the entire reading in an irritating, pushy sort of way, and the information is poorly presented and badly timed. If she published this concurrent to the introduction of the internet, her enthusiasm would be understood and appreciated. But at this point, it seems out of place and irksome. It's like getting really excited every time you see your chair. It is a household fixture. You deal with it everyday. It must be exhausting to waste so much energy singing the praises of something which we all well know the worth of. What is the point? Final analysis: If you are up for a scattered, bothersome tour of one womans opinions and excitement about various well-known cyber-related topics, by all means, buy, read and enjoy this book. If you are looking for substance and not novelty, it may be wiser to simply get on the internet and explore an ever greater expanse of information in an even more interactive way.

This book annoyed the crap out of me. The author is completely entranced by herself, her career, and her self-image as a member of the digerati. THE INTERACTIVE BOOK is long, boring, and appears to have been released without benefit of editing.

The Interactive Book is fascinating and lluminating. Celia Pearce has a long experiential history in virtual reality and cyberworlds. She was also SIGGRAPH 98's panels chair, an artist, architect, designer and producer. The Interactive Book covers a range of design and technical issues while blending Celia's own history and experiences with the key contributors of this industry . The book is insightful, mind-expanding and takes one to that next level of knowledge.

As an instructor of 3D Media on the Web at UCLA, UC Irvine and UC Berkeley Extension, "The Interactive Book" is my highest recommended book to my students

Flipping through pages to get bits of information scattered about is more annoying than interactive. It disrupts the flow of information and order. Reading it straight through is fine but when you do that how can it be interactive? What make this book different from any other book ever published? Nothing. The writer claims to be an expert or pioneer in this field yet the irony is in the title of this book! If she truly wanted to make this book interactive, she should have published it on CD-ROM links and all and made the plates in the back of the book interactive.

A detailed expedition through the history of interactive design theory and practice, with many examples, both high-tech and otherwise (good and bad), and the kinds of thinking behind it. Just the names of the people whose work is described comprise an excellent set of bookmarks for further study.

The Interactive book by Celia Pearce is an endeavor to metamorphasize the printed book form into a hyperlinked website and to eliminate the traditional linear reading method. The book is indexed from "A" to "Z" and it discusses a wide range of issues from A-life simulations to Cybersex to the author's own childhood to... Readers could start at any point within the book and (if they wish to do so) follow "go to" links between paragraphs to jump to other parts of the book, essentially selecting their own trails of interests. Readers who are not erudite in the lingos of computers and the internet might find numerous portions of this book hard to digest. Celia Pearce makes her points repeatedly through references to computer programmers and various new innovative technologies to a point where she often sidetracks and loses track of her original point, at which point also the readers are most likely bored and wonder "who cares". The entire book seems to be a conversation without direction made by the author, and parts of the book, such as Celia's autobiography, especially resemble the "stream of consciousness" babbling of a lonely old lady who has no one to talk to. Does "The Interactive Book" really interact with the readers? The answer to that question is depend upon one's definition of "interactivity". The "interactive book" fails to live up to its title if the readers expect real-life level of interactivity. The book in this sense is not a conversation, it is a diction. There is no way for the readers to express their arguments against Celia Pearce. ( Unlike a real website, where one could express opinions by clicking on the email icon to give the author a piece of his/her mind.) The most one could do here is to skip around the parts of the book that one does not feel comfortable with, kind of like fast-forwarding a lecture tape. "the interactive book" is only "interactive" in two ways. First, it provides non-linear access through a vast amount of information. Second, the materials in the book are outrageously opininated in such a way they easily elicit yearnings from readers to "interact" with the author (but at the same time, the book does not provide ways for that interaction to take place). Overall, "the interactive book" offers a number of interesting topics to excite the mind. But its non-linear form possesses little, if any, real-life interactivity more than the traditional book form. The annual edition of "Wired" magazine could easily achieve what this book is trying to accomplish.

Fascinating. The book contextualizes what the interactive revolution is about. How much did I like it? I teach New Media at UCLA Extension and "The Interactive Book" is the required text for my new course, "Fundamentals of New Media for the Entertainment Professional".

If you don't know anything about technology before reading this book then be careful -- it conveys a very hyped up view of it (you'll need a serious reality check when you're done). For anyone who IS technically savvy this book will probably be more "annoying" then anything else: it constantly tries to draw analogies between technology and other aspects of life that simply don't hold up under any sort of scrutiny.