I have an iPhone 4 and am always trying apps but find most of them a disappointment. I would never think of attempting to use the phone to read a book; the iPhone is just too small. But I can’t help but feel a little disappointed that the wildly popular new app, Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” is only available for the iPad.
Introduced Saturday, the app has rocketed to the fourth most popular app by Tuesday. Not bad for a book that has been hated by book snobs for most of its life but revered by artistic revolutionaries and misfits of all medium and stripes. The book has a particular resonance for people like me, for whom books have never held any particular fascination. The linear aspect, the telegraphing of emotion and the predisposition for brainwashing of books have always gotten in the way of any takeaway. I just found them pedestrian. Until “On the Road” books to me walked, they didn’t run.
“On the Road” broke the mould of what a book should be, what it should do. To me, and to many others like me, the type and the mechanics, the sentences and paragraphs of books, disappeared. What was left with Kerouac’s book was only the emotion, the dreams, the author’s intent. The art overcame the artifice of construction. That to me was revolutionary. I forgot I was reading; instead I was living the words. One should never see the medium for the message. It changed my life and breathed new vitality into an art form I had left for dead.
So, I’m excited to hear that a bold, inclusive app has been built that celebrates the best aspects of the “On the Road”, to enhance it and celebrate the best aspects of its living, breathing narrative.
“On the Road” aspires to all of this, functioning both as an e-book and also as a source of ancillary information. Open the app, and you’ll find a home screen with several subject areas: “The Book,” “The Author,” “The Trip,” “Publication” and “The Beats.”
The first, and most important, of these sections features the text of Kerouac’s novel, which has been designed to match the feel of a print book. “We were very conscious,” Morrison notes, “of page layouts. We wanted to see what would read the best, to make the technology enhance and not distract.”
To that end, there are no direct links in the novel, just light blue tabs on the left side of the page to signify the presence of notes. Touch one and a sidebar appears, featuring material on characters, locations, settings, historical details — bits of context that help to open up the book.
That’s part of the idea, Morrison points out, to reflect the fact that “we’re in a moment where everyone wants context; we’re constantly Googling this and that.” What sets the “On the Road” app apart, however, is that so much of the context it offers is exclusive, drawn from the archives of the publisher and from the Kerouac estate.
