Since the tools available to publishers grow more sophisticated, it 's up to us to experiment and see what sticks

The Edinburgh International Book Festival begins this week, with two weeks of storytelling and literary self-promotion. Packed with a view of the 17 days of a program filled with discussions, lectures, readings and lectures, notes I 've that there is practically no reflection on the cards for the "dead tree" version of history that threatens to shake - up publication 's century-old foundation. More than that, it is surprising, since the "digital first" bent his main sponsor, the Guardian That it 's no mention of applications, digital enhancements or new, to tell multiformatted way that' s new with a new crop of talented content creators of innovative storytelling and encourage risk-taking sales opportunities.

But I admit, is unfairly picking on the Book Festival, linear stories still dominate the site, our TVs, our radios, our games consoles and the theater. But the process of telling a story doesn 't have unidirectional.

Stories are memory aids, manuals and moral compass. When recruited by charismatic leaders, and turned into manifestos, dogmas and social policy, they 've laid the foundation for religions and political systems. If a storyteller has an audience caught on fire, a movie screen or place on the side of a bestseller, strengthened ", local and universal standards of where we 'it \ was ve and where we' go re. And if they ' ve divided into the store on the corner, in the pub or at dinner, they 've helped us define who we are and how we fit in.

The human experience is a series of never-ending, overlapping stories come together in expected and unexpected ways. Our days are made from personal narratives of good and evil, joy and conflict, potions and angry dwarves. They are naturally co-creations based on a push and pull of projection and interpretation. We interpret, analyze and synthesize the characters and events in our lives who help us the meaning of the world, and these have been translated by professionals in folk tales, myths, legends, pantomime, bestsellers, soap operas and Hollywood blockbusters. Storytellers are simply curators of information that the elements of a thread finesse in a beginning, middle and end.

But the tools they use to tell tales are evolving, becoming more modular and tailored, more participatory and more engaging than just the printed word or the moving image. The new form of storytelling that's coming from a digitally enabled cabal moves beyond reinterpreting a text for radio or screen. Some creatives have taken their inspirations from Kit Williams's 1979 picture book Masquerade , The motivated a generation of people to pour over symbols in illustrations to find a treasure buried in the Midlands, from their stories everywhere - whether online or offline. They weave tales of seemingly innocuous phone blogs, magazines, TV slots, fashion labels and public. Search for clues in the alternate realities are created by authors in the physical and the virtual dotted; consumers only need to be tuned in to see her, and willing to participate in the unfolding narrative.

Frank Rose, author of The Art of Immersion: How the Digital Generation is Remaking Hollywood, Madison Avenue and the way we tell stories, believes that this is exactly what people want to see from their history. "The type of multi-way conversation that allows the web is what we 've always wanted to do," he says. "The technology allows the end."

Rose celebrates the way that the new form of storytelling brings together the public to pass through to land, acknowledges, however, that it challenges for consumers and for the creators: "It 's quite different if you are a medium that They are involved with other human forces, "he says, what the arc of a narrative that is necessarily more complex, diverse, and demanding more flexibility. "You don 't know if you' \ re going to have to tell a story for one hour, two hours or 10 years."

Other creatives are using digital media to extend their storytelling palate in a similar way to what Tom Stoppard did for Shakespeare's Hamlet in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead . George Lucas, Matrix Directors the Wachowski brothers and Lost Creator JJ Abrams have each taken their cinematic storylines in other media, exclusively developed secondary characters and subplots in these different formats on the original story for the people who choose to improve the management of water in.

Rose believes the stories are in an exciting period of change. "We 're in one of these 50-year window when an entirely new medium is created, and nobody knows what to do with," he says. "All we can do is to throw stuff out there and experiment." And some are. If at Penguin Publishing, Jeremy Ettinghausen was a leader in this context, a story in the crowdsourcing wikinovel A Million Penguins in 2006 and the commissioning We tell stories from a number of pieces in the physical relationships with the help of GPS-enabled devices in 2008. Increasingly, other innovators who can do what connected media, and measures taken to interpret the new hero 's journey in a way that the reader / viewer / consumer is to have the central role. Think Choose Your Own Adventure when there are millions of ways, not only turning to page 33

Granted, multimedia storytelling isn 't for everyone - consumers and creators - it is still attached, all the time. Some people naturally see Twitter as an opportunity to tell Romeo and Juliet , While others feel more comfortable with pen and paper. The Edinburgh Book Festival has decided to celebrate this. I wonder what will happen if the former gets its own festival.

Multimedia Storytelling

Online Caroline: This early 2000s experiment in interactive storytelling drew consumers/participants into an immersive drama about Caroline and her boyfriend. Created by the UK-based XPT(Rob Bevan and Tim Wright), it told its story with the reader, sending personalised emails and narrative video clips based on feedback to the site. Split into 24 parts, the whole story took a minimum of 24 days to complete.

The Lost Experience : The TV drama Lost his premises littered with puzzles, but few people knew that there was a lot of artistically woven plot in the real world, told through information on websites, advertorials in American magazines and newspapers, TV commercials and recorded messages.

The Blair Witch Project : The 1998 horror film, apparently stalking a group of friends from a vicious enemy showed was most remarkable for the enthusiasm that built it online before its theatrical release. The main elements were online, leaked a forum was set up, new material was filmed and the rumors about the veracity of the so-called "Documentary" spread like wildfire. His storytelling approach has been replicated many times, but never with such success.

We tell stories : Penguin Publishing commissioned London-based company Six to Start to six authors tell stories with digital media in compelling ways. More than six weeks, notable authors with Google Maps, charts, blogs, Twitter, e-mail and reader-driven plotlines played. This project came hot on the heels of Penguin 's crowdsourcing wikinovel, A Million Penguins (2007).

Conspiracy for Good : Tim Kring, the creator of the TV series Heroes "Did a story that spilled onto the street to create". In 2010, with Nokia and the company P, he produced a social benefit storytelling experience, "take on real-life action and positive change in the world". Players into heroes and villains, literally running through the streets of five countries, and participating in fundraising drives to the next mission. The project has sent more than 10,000 books to libraries in Africa and supports 50 scholarships.