The Great Wipe hath irrayzed much of world culcha, butta few bits of licheracha haveth bn found - pleez help mi choose most bestest 2 exxibit - the curator of a history of the book 2/2/3010

This message will be beamed from the future to secondary students in the UK via the HOTBOOK, a ground breaking and free digital resource created by if:book, the think and do tank.  This was launched yesterday at the Free Word Centre, Farringdon Road, London, with the aim to ignite a passion for literature (past, present and future) by introducing and exploring fragments of great works and presenting them in a way that will excite an audience that is more at ease with an electronic game or gadget than a book and with people who spend time social networking rather than reading.  
 
In the HOTBOOK poems and extracts from plays, novels, non-fiction texts and broadcasts are presented as short films, Flash animations, podcasts and HTML web pages. They include Macbeth's "Tomorrow and tomorrow" speech as stop frame animation, Christina Rossetti's poem "Spring" performed by cartoon rabbits, a rap version of Chaucer's Prologue, an animated version of Benjamin Zephaniah's "Talking Turkeys" and a story of computer gamers by cult sci-fi author Cory Doctorow.
 
The HOTBOOK includes rebooted classics and new commissions from award-winning contemporary writers such as Daljit Nagra, Kate Pullinger and Naomi Alderman, who were asked to write examples of the literature of the future.
 
Funded by the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, The HOTBOOK is aimed at year eight and nine students, and was conceived as a way to help less confident readers stay interested in literature at an age when many young people start to switch off from books.

The HOTBOOK has been piloted in four schools and evaluated by the Research Team at Booktrust.  A teachers' guide and classroom activities for each of the 40 digital texts have been co-written by a team of secondary English teachers led by Daljit Nagra.

This looked like a really enjoyable and successful project, which had certainly engaged the pupils at the launch event.  It was great to hear that the use of Frankenstein as one of the texts had sent the pupils to the library demanding copies of the book to read in full.  For a taster of the HotBook and to sign up for further information follow the links. Photos and information about the launch can also be found at http://www.bookfutures.com/