The secret dark art of Dr. Seuss: I can hardly believe I'm going to say this. Have you read the first few pages of this site? Well, click it. Okay? Just click that. Okay. Here goes: A group of artists have taken the book "The Secret Art of Dr. Seuss" and made it real. Like, it's a fucking interactive book, you stupid fucking nerds. You have to click things, dude. It's not like a regular, plain old book. It's a book that you interact with. Now I don't care how smart you are: YOU ARE WASTING YOUR FUCKING LIFE IF YOU DON'T GET YOURSELF THIS BOOK RIGHT NOW. See, it's sort of like the thing with Harry Potter. Dr. Seuss just fucking rocks out, man. And he also has this fucking awesome sense of humor. Anyway, yeah, get the book already. It all started when a guy named John Maeda got bored and couldn't sleep one night. This is only a reasonable reaction to getting a job like the one he has. It wasn't like he was bored out of his mind. Not at all. Maeda wasn't, like, stuck in traffic or anything, or even had trouble sleeping due to his chronic pain from an injury he recently sustained while driving over two hundred miles an hour at nearly a hundred degrees during a driving test. No, Maeda's problem was far more serious. He was just fucking bored. But Maeda has big dreams, so he decided to take the idea of boredom to a logical extreme: HE WAS BORED SHITLESS OUT OF HIS FUCKING MIND WITH TRYING TO EXPLAIN THE ORIGIN OF THE FLOWER KINGDOM AND WHY THE FLOWER KINGDOM IS A POWERFUL METAPHOR FOR THE DIGITAL AGE. He was fucking done! But he also found himself in a position of power. So he decided to use this fact to his advantage. Maybe there was an underlying theme in the book, a message he could bring to the masses. What if the book were more than just words on a screen? What if it were a medium that allowed viewers to interact with the book and then use that interaction to reveal secrets? Maeda thought about it. He spent days writing notes to himself on the bathroom walls of his new apartment. Maeda went on a road trip, driving around Europe and meditating on what would be the perfect place to have a giant display that interacted with his book. Then one day, Maeda showed up at a hotel for a conference and found himself staring right at it: a giant interactive billboard. He looked around him and saw that the hotel was a popular convention destination for this sort of thing. It was perfect! Maeda began scheming. He got onto a flight, got off in New York, and got in touch with a New York designer named John Keeslar. The two went over Maeda's notes and came up with a list of rules for the book: • It would be interactive • It would display multiple pages • It would require readers to click multiple links to get to the next page. The book was going to be incredible. A few days later, Keesler and Maeda made their way to a studio on Broadway and 24th Street. The studio had a giant billboard. Then Maeda remembered why he hated art. Keesler was working at an animation studio and doing drawings that could interact with the billboard. He was going to make this work, no matter what. He had a passion for this work, so much so that he once went and studied at an animation academy in Tokyo after hearing rumors about it from this guy at Sonic Youth, and Maeda wasn't about to let this opportunity slip away. Maeda didn't even see the studio. He just went to an art supply store and bought buckets of paint, brushes, and hundreds of cans of spray paint. Maeda also had this one-of-a-kind piece of paper from a Japanese design shop that he decided was his favorite. He was determined. They sat down, looked over the design notes, and just started clicking. In the midst of it all, they had no idea what they were making. They started clicking out of boredom, and the thing that they made seemed to be working. In the midst of the confusion, Keesler decided he wanted to change the book after all, so they ripped up all the pictures and changed the design in a matter of moments. The book was fucking done in a matter of hours. It was complete. It worked. It was wonderful. Then they took it to a publisher and it went to hell. The publisher rejected it. They went on Facebook and called it "The Secret Art of Dr. Seuss." The book had a catchy name, and it appealed to young adults everywhere. And then they put it up on the Internet. That's when shit got weird. People started clicking on it, and more people started to do more than just click. They were clicking things to see what would happen, and the more people clicked, the more pages would open up. So Maeda had a brainstorm: he decided he'd have people subscribe to his website and allow people to stream the book in their browsers. The idea was that the viewers could then share the book with their friends and that's what makes the book great, right? And in fact, people did like this idea. In fact, a lot of people liked this idea. But some people also found that by clicking certain things, you could access hidden videos that were only available if you clicked one or more of the icons in each page of the book. It didn't really make sense, but it was fun to look for things on your own. But then people started streaming movies on their computer while looking through the book. As far as the book publisher was concerned, this was clearly a violation of copyright. Their lawyer got involved, and soon Maeda and Keesler were facing lawsuits from an international law firm based in London called "Dude, You Broke Copyright." It was awesome. But at first, no one really cared. Then all the lawyers were mad at Keesler and Maeda, and they had no choice but to settle. So the company created something called Dr. Seuss Interactive. And it was horrible. It cost ten bucks a month and it was horrible. The user interface wasn't that great, and there were only two choices for you to click: up or down. It was the only choice because there were no choices left. And then everything went to hell. The website was taken down by authorities who hadn't been given the all-clear by the people they were representing. It had suddenly become illegal to access the book via this interactive website, so it's a good thing they were able to make it disappear and move on to other things. Then Maeda made a new interactive version of the book and moved his website. Then he was contacted by the Los Angeles Times, which asked him to make a book about the economy. But instead of making that book, he made his own interactive book, which he's still working on as we speak. Then he found out there's a new Dr. Seuss book. He's thinking of making a book based on this new Dr. Seuss book and making it interactive. He figures that people won't get upset that it's an adaptation of a book that they already made because people will like what he makes. So he's excited for what will be his new book, but he's not going to stop trying to make the one he wants to make. Meanwhile, Maeda's lawyers have been back in touch with him, but Maeda has no idea what they're talking about. He's completely lost track of the website that he made for the book. And he still doesn't know why anyone would need a lawyer in the first place, but one of his lawyers keeps on emailing him, so he might have to deal with that. Maeda's also dealing with the problem of a whole bunch of people who want to steal his idea for the book. So he built a copyright-protecting wall around the book. This is what Maeda's been up to since he came up with this idea and made it into a book that allows people to interact with it. He doesn't know where it will go from here. He doesn't know what's next for him or for this thing, but he's pretty sure he's not done yet. This is just the beginning, Maeda says. This is just the beginning of what can be.