Paratexts is additional material that is added onto the author's published work by editors, printers and publishers. These can include, the inside and back cover blurb, cover art, titles, typography, authors profile, prefaces written by someone other than the author. They are supposed to form a frame for the main text, and have the possibility to change the interpretation of the readers.
Not only is it books, but Musayama, 2002 has the idea of 'The Open Product'. This is the idea that something, a film, has a beginning, middle and end, the credits role on screen and that is 'The Closed Product', therefore open means that something hasn't finished yet... His example is Pokemon cards. He says that yes, the film and the game have credits therefore they are closed, however, it is not over “…in search of Pokemon. Also, a player may use a cable to trade Pokemon with other players.”It brings the question, is there ever really a real GAME OVER?
There is also the concept of Fandom. Fan's of particular films, TV shows (Doctor Who), create something similar and of interest to them which on YouTube can often be mistaken for the real thing if they are good.
The next half -
Augmented reality. I have written a blog similar to this when I wrote about Google Glasses and Who Framed Roger Rabbit?.. As a recap, augmented reality (AR) is a view of the physical world, with elements augmented by computers. Sound, graphics, video, GPS data are all mediated reality.
So, what did we learn at school today?
We found out about a new application for smartphones that our university lecturers and techs have created. It reacts with a scanner and bar-code on a newspaper, once scanned the images come to life on the mobile phone. The images go from 2D, boring images to 3D colourful, and cartooned images. Some the them included sound, which made it just that little bit cooler! These apps are still in development, but eventually just like Google Glasses, we will be seeing people with these. Reading the newspaper has never been more fun. We have got apps on phones that scan bar-codes in magazines, so this could be our future, and it sounds rather great.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paratex
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augmented_reality
http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-paratext.htm
