A Clockwork Orange to scare you all over again

"A nasty little shocker" was how the TLS described A Clockwork Orange when it was published in 1962. Half a century on, Anthony Burgess joins TS Eliot and Shakespeare in having his work turned into a blockbuster iPad app.

Like Faber's pioneering The Waste Land and The Sonnets apps, A Clockwork Orange (William Heinemann and PopLeaf, £9.99) combines interactive text, archival documents and video and sound recordings in a lavish production that for once warrants the words "unique" and "spectacular" in the press release.

You don't have to adore the novel (I prefer the film) for the app to make you a mad-eyed evangelist, prone to shoving your iPad in strangers' faces. "Hey, check out the integrated glossary of Nadsat slang! Listen to Tom Hollander narrate it! Watch Martin Amis talk about the controversial last chapter! Hear Burgess being interviewed! Look at his doodles on the original typescript!" Yes, the Clockwork Orange app's major downside is that it will turn you into a bore.

As with other literary apps, its real value is educational: the democratisation of material once the preserve of scholars and biographers. The archive section is great fun, like rifling through a shoebox belonging to Anthony Burgess's stalker. I enjoyed the advance information sheet, where the author's hobbies are listed as "drinking, educational broadcasting, comparative philology and the occult".

Anyone who still believes new technology will turn us all into illiterate morons needs to be marched off to a correctional facility, strapped to a chair and given the Clockwork Orange app to play with. It may well cure them.