In the Media

A Novel Reality - The Hindu

Would you like to see your name figuring as the hero and your ladylove as the heroine? No. We are not talking about publishing a novel, but about the latest trend in Net editions of novels. It all began with Stephen King, the pioneer of the concept of e-Novels. But now, it's the turn of Hyderabad-based website to feature what is being termed the first multi-lingual 'interactive novel'.

While Stephen King's e-Novel is a non-interactive read only file for which the browser has to pay some money, here comes the first free novel on the Net — 'Beautiful Enemy', authored by G.V. Amareswara Rao, who has some 280 movie scripts to his credit. The novel is being made available in Telugu, English and Hindi on the city based portal, www.HamaraShehar.com. And the interesting part of the site is its interactivity.

You can choose the name of the hero, heroine and the villain and the system would remember and use them throughput the novel. That's not all. The browser can also upload a picture per character and display it on the online album. The Webmaster have done a good job by introducing various facilities like the last page read option. The system would remember where you have stopped reading the e-Novel. So when you login again, the novel would open at exactly the same page.

The e-Novel split into 20 parts is to be updated every week and at the end of the final chapter being featured, the browsers can download a PDF version of the novel. And here comes the best part of it. The PDF version, which has names chosen by the browser, is given free of cost.

The e-Novel is said to be having most reader friendly features also. For those elderly persons who find it difficult to read the small print, there is an option of reading it in larger print. And if you do not like the way the story is developing, you can even change that by opting for some choices given. That way you get to read what you want to. Some development this?

By K. Srinivas Reddy

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