Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” iBook Experience
The Girl Who Wrote Frankenstein
On a dreary rainy night in 1816, Mary Shelley and a group of friends were sitting around a fireplace near Lake Geneva when one of her friends challenged everyone to write a ghost story. Mary Shelley was only 18 years old at the time, and that’s when she started writing what would become her first book: “Frankenstein”—published in 1818, 200 years old this year. It was the perfect book for this month’s iBook assignment being October and the 200th anniversary of its publication.
Cover Art
Since it’s been 200 years since its publication, there has been many variations on the cover, ranging from scary to artistic and everything in between. After researching different covers, I decided to showcase Victor Frankenstein and his creature on my take of the cover art. Frankenstein’s creature is nameless.
I made a negative silhouette of the creature on a dark red background, sprinkled with what resembles light red dust particles. At the bottom, I included a silhouette of Victor Frankenstein working on his creature stretched out on a table. The typefont for both author title and book title is a google font called “Creepster” that goes along with the horror theme.
Making it Extra
Like Frankenstein’s creature, chapters in Frankenstein are nameless. In iBook, a nameless chapter displays as “untitled” and that made my iBook look unpolished. I added my own chapter titles since I read the book and I’m familiar with the story.
Glossary Items
For glossary items, I went with descriptions for the book’s characters. At first I was conflicted about adding what seems like plot spoilers by adding characters’ descriptions before the readers would have a chance to read the book. I ended up leaving them. Readers might appreciate short character descriptions as they learn many characters in a short amount a time. I wrote simple, short descriptions with as little spoilers as possible. No mention of who gets murdered, for instance.
Pop-ups
Mary Shelley has her characters travel extensively through Europe; from Italy to Switzerland to Germany. She mentions lakes, and mountain peaks, vividly describing their look and feel through the seasons. The pop-ups added are of those towns and lakes mentioned in the book. It can be a bit hard to keep track of characters wanderings. The pop-ups are there to help readers learn a bit more about those places, and give them a clear visual of what those towns would look like. I use country flags for icons.
Interestingly, 3 real world people are mentioned in Frankenstein. They are book writers and young Victor Frankenstein’s influencers in the story. I added pop-ups of related icons next to their names with their pictures and a short description for the readers.
Typefonts
Body typefont is Merriweather, regular, 18 pt. Chapter number and title typefont is from google fonts, Eater. Initially, I wanted to create jpeg images with text and strings of thorns or stitches going in and out of the text to go with the stitches on Frankenstein’s creature. I ended up going with a typefont instead since Eater is very close to what I was going for.
Chapter Art
Each chapter has a black and white illustration at the top for visuals. It’s important that all illustrations have a consistent look and feel. Since I didn’t create the illustrations myself, the best option was to go with black and white illustrations for a cohesive look.
Testing
iBooks has a few quirks. For instance, I first added my chapters without pictures thinking I could easily add pictures later. It was easy to add pictures in the body text but not that easy to add pictures above the chapter number. It’s possible, I was able to add to one chapter, but couldn’t replicate it on the following chapters. I had to redo my chapters all over again, this time making sure I added chapters with pictures to begin with. After that, it was easy to replace the placeholder with an actual illustration.
After initially copying and pasting the chapter text, spacing looked off, even after adjusting the spacing to a 1. There remained some extra stubborn space in between chapters that took me a few minutes to figure out I would have to go to adjust it. Fixing the spacing in between chapters made it look like a real book.
After fixing the paragraph spacing, I checked my pop-ups, illustrations and glossary items to make sure they were all in good working order.
I also had to turn off hyphenation so it would’t hyphenate some of my chapter’s titles and text.
In the End
In the end, iBooks was fairly simple to use despite a few quirks. I enjoyed the experience working with iBooks. This Frankenstein iBook has extra features such as pop-ups and illustrations that enhance the original book and provide readers with a more immersive experience.
