I feel like I'm becoming an internet stalker. When I was looking up information on "Kind of Blue’s" author, Scott Rettberg, I saw that he received his PhD from the University of Cincinnati. I'm from Cincinnati, and although I don't love my city, I get oddly excited when I hear others mention it, so I decided to pursue him. I found a link to his blog, and from there the stalking began. There was a link below to a site called "Jill" and, lo and behold, it was Jill Walker's. From looking at the sites, and his intrigued me in particular, you can read how they teach at the same university and about their adventures traveling to, say, a Turkish bath. Or you can scroll through his photos, posted on Flickr. That's right, you can see pictures of his dog, his vacations, his family on Christmas. Or you can look through an album of 10 photos of Jill, which has the heading "This set is mostly for me. Sometimes I want to see my girl." That didn't stop me from looking.

I experienced it almost exactly as I might a novel, and it sounded today as if at least part of you agreed. I'm not sure whether receiving it as emails would have made much difference. I'm willing to entertain the idea that it might have, but I'm suspicious.

It seems novelistic in several ways:

• Clear unilinear sequence
• Advancing plot that builds to crisis
• Defined sense of where one is in the story (just scroll down)
• Ease in rereading or flipping ahead

I'm not convinced that it engages readers differently than do novels. After all, novels have purported to be lost diaries or manuscripts, sets of letters, all sorts of things, really. One holds the book and knows that it is a book. One views Kind of Blue online and knows it's not an inbox.