@JaredAbrahamWSU
Shy Boy by Thom Swiss is engaging. It is engageing because it manages to pull you in with the dull horns in the background and the falling text accentuated by grey and black elements. While this could also be seen in an old fashioned hard bound book, what cannot be reproduced on a physical page is the way the text moves and fades in and out. The music in the background is also unique to E-Lit. Although you could play music on a separate device while you read, in order for it to be considered E-Lit the device and source of the text must be the one and the same. All of this, the sound, the text decorations, and the massive amount of white space helps make the story more dramatic, just as Hayles said. another way that one could guess that Shy Boy is electronic literature is in the source code. If you use Firefox you can look at the page source and see that both HTML and Flash were used to create Shy Boy. In a book the poem wouldn’t make any sense if it were surrounded by HTML code. In fact it would make it very difficult to pick and chose what is actually the poem and what is in the code. Not only would HTML make it difficult to read in a book, cut the addition of Flash makes it impossible. The inclusion of Flash brings the Shy Boy story to life in a way it could never be in print.