My brother emailed me the other day to let me know that the first book in Steve Jackson’s Sorcery! series was now available for the iPhone. For those who don’t know the books, they were gamebooks, set up in the choose-your-own-adventure style, but with roleplaying elements such as stats and battles that required the use of 2 six-sided dice. There were a slew of them at one time including the Fighting Fantasy books (also from Steve Jackson) and the Lone Wolf gamebooks from Joe Dever.

These books were more my brother’s thing than mine, but being into fantasy and RPGs, I read them, too. They were fun – a kind of interactive reading experience that you could play by yourself, and in the case of Sorcery! and Lone Wolf, you could create your own continuity. If you found, for example, a particular item in one book, that item might come into play in a future book. But only if you had found it before (though, of course, this depended on the honor system).

Putting something like this on the iPhone, to me, makes a lot of sense. The game aspects can be automated while the choose-your-own-adventure parts are maintained. Only the first of the books is up, but I suppose more will appear if sales are good.

But this isn’t the only content from my youth that is now reappearing on platforms like the iPhone and the iPad. Point and click adventure games are making a comeback, too. Ports of old games have been reappearing with great frequency for mobile platforms. Monkey Island made a lot of noise when it was released for the iPhone. And not too long ago I downloaded an old favorite – Broken Sword – for my phone as well. It makes sense – the iPhone, iPad and even the DS are touch devices and the point and click interface scales well on them (with a few tweaks).

What I wonder, though, is whether this is a purely nostalgic phenomenon (as many of the people who have iPhones remember these games and books fondly), or whether this is simply the recognition that there is an opportunity here. What I hope is that we see some new games being developed with the same interface. Or at least newer entries in series that have long lain dormant. A new Monkey Island game, for example.

Whatever the case may be, I’m holding out for King’s Quest 6. If that happens, I’ll be happy.

Would you pay money to play any of these games again? Or new ones?

I am apparently one of those people who not only embraces eBooks, but who is now starting to prefer them. Don’t get me wrong, I love books. I have shelves of them. And I know the power of old books, with yellow pages crisp with history. But I also live in NY. Aside from the limited amount of space that I have in the apartment, I am very often out and about from the moment I leave my apartment in the morning around 6:45 until I come home at night which is often after 9 PM. Typical days for me involve lots of walking, subway rides and a bus or two. And while I have a nice big backpack to carry all my stuff in, sometimes I like to streamline and I usually like to keep the weight of my gear down.

A paperback book is not a big deal. Only I tend to buy hardcovers and trade paperbacks over the mass market size. Then there’s the book(s) I’m reading now – Roger Zelazny’s Amber series. This is one of my favorite series. I re-read it every few years. Yet it only is available (right now at least) in one massive volume collecting all 10 books in the series. No single volumes. No eBook(s). I checked. See, this is the kind of book/series that I would keep in hardcopy and in electronic form. Since I revisit it often, it would be the perfect thing to keep on my phone (or in the future, an iPad). But it’s not available. And I find that this irks me. Five years ago I had never read an ebook and such a thing would seem exotic. Today I’m bothered when I can’t find something that way.

This is not to say that print is dead, or that I expect it to die soon. But I’m amazed at how quickly I got used to the idea of having options. In this case, the option to own something in multiple formats. I expect we’ll see the Amber books in electronic format eventually. Hopefully. Because people are getting used to the idea of being able to get something instantly.

What an interesting world…

With the imminent release of the iPad, it seems the web, or at least the parts of it I frequent, are worked up into a frenzy over the device. There are the usual haters, the fanboys, the unimpressed, the eager, all weighing in on one of the most hyped technological releases of the last few years.

I’ll say it right off the bat – I’m an Apple fanboy. I have been since I bought my first Mac, a Powerbook, years ago. But I was also one of the people who was a little underwhelmed with the initial appearance of the device. Since then, though, I’ve been thinking about it and reading about applications and I think now that it’s a device that I could get a lot of use out of. Here’s why.

I have a laptop, and I have an iphone, and both of those enable me to do an amazing number of things on the go. The laptop is particularly ingenious for being able to write when I’m traveling, or stopping off at a bar or coffee shop. But the laptop is heavy and I’m not always willing to lug it around. It’s battery life isn’t bad, but it’s not tremendous either, especially when not near an outlet. And there are some places where I can’t use it – on a crowded subway, for example. I also don’t have a 3G card or Mifi for it meaning that I’m restricted on where I can access the internet.

Then there’s my iphone which is extremely portable and which I have all the time. I almost always have some sort of signal, and I can play games or read books on it while waiting for the subway, or on the subway or really wherever. Only it has a small screen. And while I’ve used it for writing in a pinch, it isn’t optimized for that sort of thing. Additionally, while the battery rarely goes dead on me in the middle of a task – reading or watching a movie – it does put a dent in the battery capacity and it isn’t unusual for me to be on the edge of complete drainage by the end of the work day.

The iPad hits a sweet spot in between these two, primarily in the areas I use any of these things for.

1. Writing – the iPad screen is bigger and the onscreen keyboard is larger and QWERTY for when I’m sitting on the subway car and want to write down a few paragraphs. When I get home or to a bar or something, though, I can pull out my wireless keyboard and get some real writing done. The release of Pages (part of iWork) for the device means that I can work with .doc format with no problems and sync to my desktop/laptop, or email the file using wifi or 3G (which is the flavor I would get).

2. Reading manuscripts – As a member of the Altered Fluid writing group and also as an editor for Sybil’s Garage, I read a lot of manuscripts, either as part of the slush pile or to critique (sometimes both). I’ve done this on the iPhone, but it’s not ideal, mostly because of the small screen size. Docs to Go gives me some functionality with the files, but at that scale it’s tough to work with. The iPad would be ideal for this. And Pages again should give me the ability to annotate if needed.

3. Reading ebooks – I’m a lover of books, including physical books, but I live in NYC and space is an issue for me. While I’ll never stop buying paper books, I am more picky about what I buy these days. Ebooks occupy, for me, a middle ground between buying a physical book and borrowing from the library, with one big exception – it’s almost immediate. If I feel like I want to read Charlie Huston’s latest right now, and I have a signal (and a credit card), I can get it within minutes. I’ve been reading a ton of ebooks on my phone. Reading on the iPad would be even better because of the size of the screen. And Apple’s iBooks application looks really nice.

4. Television and movies – I canceled my cable subscription last year and mostly watch DVDs these days on my television at home. But there are times I like to watch a current show (like Lost) and fire up Hulu or browse the network websites. I can use my laptop for this, but for some reason, I don’t. There’s something about the form factor that makes it a little incongruous for me. But I can completely see watching something on the iPad, and with ABC and CBS shows available at launch, and Netflix instant watch (not to mention Hulu supposedly coming), that means I have a myriad of options in my hands. And I can take them with me – whether it’s into the bedroom or the next borough. And you have to admit that the screen is much nicer than on the iPhone. Not to mention the television and movies available through iTunes.

These are the main things I would use it for, in addition to the usual web browsing – but then there are other possibilities due to appear – like Marvel comics on the device. I haven’t bought single issues for years now, but I might if they were stored digitally on something like the iPad (and assuming the interface is nice). Then there are the occasional one-off apps that will make the thing more fun – from games (actually the board games look really great on the device) to simulated pianos.

Is the iPad for everyone? Of course not. It doesn’t do the hard work of a decent laptop and it duplicates a lot of the functionality of the iPhone or other smartphones. But what it does do hits that sweet spot for me. And so I’m looking forward to getting my hands on one of these to see the possibilities.