A New Creation: Wright’s King David is First of its Kind

King of DavidAssociate Professor of Hebrew Bible Jacob L. Wright has ushered us further into the internet age with the publication of King David and His Reign Revisited (2013), an enhanced e-book on Apple iBooks that includes hundreds of full-color images, multimedia links, a new system for footnotes, texts that are cited at length in scrollable windows, and a host of other special features to engage your senses and your intellect.

Billed as the first publication of its kind in the humanities, King David was a “labor of love” for Wright, who was inspired by his own frustrating experiences with academic e-books, and a conviction that scholars must rethink the ways they make their research available to the public.

Most of us learn and recall information in relation to space and place. When it comes to books, if we know where to find a passage after many years, it’s because we remember its approximate place in the volume and its position on the page,” he explains. “Because our activities of learning are so spatially determined, the shifting pagination and reflowing text of conventional e-books can be very frustrating. We used a fixed-page format in King David to solve that problem.

But that’s only the beginning of the innovation. Each page has been designed as a unique folio, a visual format suited to our innate need for orientation. Wright likens it to the illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages, with rich visuals that pique the reader’s interest, making it easier to recall the book’s contents.

Other “enhanced” features? You can scroll through sources and pull up lengthy footnotes right next to the body of the text; follow links directly to articles, books, websites, and videos; highlight lines with a palette of colors, and share them via email and social media.

“These features make for a richer and more dynamic reading experience, which should promote more engaged learning,” says Wright. “That’s the goal.”

And if you prefer to do your reading the old-fashioned way, King David and His Reign Revisited will be published in a traditional print format by Cambridge University Press this spring.


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