Swipe to Turn the “Page”: Metafiction in the Story App The Monster at The End of This Book

Some children story apps have incorporated a reflexivity typical of the metafictive picturebook but this reflexivity is altered in the digital medium by the possibility of interaction – as the reader is addressed by the story, there is in interactive texts the possibility of a response that affects the narrative. The construction of metafiction is also changed by the extended multimodality of these texts, that now incorporate movement and sound, for example, creating a different kind of immersion from that promoted by the image-writing dynamics of the print picturebook. In this paper, I will discuss the realization of metafiction through the participation of the reader in the app The Monster at the End of This Book (Stone & Smollin, 2011).

(Source: Author's Abstract at ICDMT 2016)