I’ve written about a couple of interesting apps for readers recently: Whichbook, which matches a book to your mood, and The Clean Reader, which blanks out offensive language. Here’s a quick peek at another innovative app that’s hit the headlines.

The Fictionary is a free app that aims to help readers navigate through complicated fiction read on an ereader by offering a quick-reference ‘dictionary’ of fictitious terms, places and characters in a novel.

Various books across several genres have had the Fictionary treatment. You can download a Fictionary for the works of Jane Austen and Victor Hugo, for example, and one for young adult fantasy works by Rick Riordan and Cassandra Clare. If you can’t see the fictionary you’d like, you can even request one be created.

I think it’s a great idea. Keeping in your mind a whole world of fictional details as you read can be difficult – especially if you’re not reading the book in one flow, but dipping in and out of it. Backtracking to find information is frustrating and time-consuming; this allows for informed reading in which the reader need not doubt the writer’s level of detail or their own level of retention.

I wonder whether such an innovation will allow for more complicated writing than ever before. What do you think?