(image copyright The Bradfield Company)

Readers of this blog will know I’ve had a long interest in the wonderful digital fiction series Inanimate Alice. Recently the producer of the series, Ian Harper, wrote an editorial for Publishing Perspectives, about the transmedia storytelling business. It is definitely worth a read, and I especially like the way he concluded:

I believe that Inanimate Alice is a breakthrough project demonstrating a new kind of reading-from-the-screen experience. Is it a billion-dollar story? Perhaps…Our vision, a package that addresses movie, game, on-line and print outcomes from the outset, is designed with this in mind. It sets out objectives and addresses issues from the beginning. It would have to be successful, but not on the scale of a Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings to achieve that.

The team’s commitment to this project far exceeds the six-figure sum that has been spent thus far. Completion of the series will take the budget north of a million dollars, a considerable sum for a digital novel. But then, as CTV reporter Kris Abel succinctly put it, “there is nothing else like it on the Net.”

Alice has become a bridge with the ability to connect technologies, languages, generations and curricula.

I’m looking forward to the next episode