LOS ANGELES—Emma Teitgen, 12, thought the chemistry book her teacher recommended would make perfect bedside reading. Perfect because it might help her fall asleep.

Then she downloaded “The Elements: A Visual Exploration” to her iPad. Instead of making her drowsy, it blossomed in her hands. The 118 chemical elements, from hydrogen to ununoctium, came alive in vivid images that could be rotated with a swipe of the finger.

Tapping on link after link, Teitgen was soon engrossed in a world of atomic weights and crystal structures. Three hours later, the seventh-grader looked up to see that it was 11 p. m., way past her bedtime.

“It was like a breath of fresh air compared to my textbook,” said Teitgen, who lives in Pittsford. “I was really amazed by all the things it could do. I just kept clicking so I could read more.”

Sound, animation and the ability to connect to the Internet have created the notion of a living book that can establish an entirely new kind of relationship with readers.

As electronic reading devices evolve and proliferate, books are increasingly able to talk to readers, quiz them on their grasp of the material, play videos to illustrate a point or connect them with a community of fellow readers.

The same technology enables readers to reach out to authors, provide instant reaction and even become creative collaborators, influencing plot developments and the writer’s use of dramatic devices.

Digital tools are also making it possible for independent authors to publish and promote their books, causing an outpouring of written work on every topic imaginable.

“There is not a single aspect of book publishing that digital won’t touch,” said Carolyn Kroll Reidy, chief executive of Simon&Schuster. “It is transformational.”

“The Master of Rampling Gate,” a novella by Anne Rice published in 1991 as a paperback, illustrates some of the possibilities. The work tells the story of a brother and sister who inherit a remote mansion occupied by the undead.

The out-of-print title was given new life in March, when it was reissued in digital form by Vook (the name is a mash-up of “video” and “book”), an Alameda, Calif., start-up that sells titles for the iPad and iPhone. As a$4.99 application sold through Apple’s iTunes store, “The Master of Rampling Gate” comes with video interviews with Rice and others. Rice speaks about her inspiration for her works and about the Gothic genre in which she writes.

Within the text are links to Web pages that elaborate on events and places in the story—a description of the Mayfair neighborhood in London where the protagonists live orahistory of the Black Death plague, which plays a key role in the fourth chapter.

“For me, this is a way to communicate with my readers, establish a connection with them and build a community around them,” Rice said in an interview.

In addition to displaying pages from a book, digital e-readers can read them aloud, opening up a literary trove for the blind and the visually impaired who have long had only a thin selection of audio and Braille books to choose from. Devices made by Amazon.com and Intel Corp. are able to convert text into speech.

“You now have the ability to make a book talk,” said George Kerscher, head of the Digital Accessible Information System Consortium in Zurich, Switzerland. Kerscher, who studied computer science at the University of Montana and is blind, has spent two decades lobbying publishers to make books more accessible to visually impaired readers.

Digital technology is also transforming reading from a famously solitary experience into a social one.

The newest generation of readers —the texting, chatting, YouTubing kids for whom the term “offline” sounds quaint—has run circles around the fusty publishing process, keeping its favorite stories alive online long after they’re done reading the books.

At online fan communities for popular fantasy series like “Harry Potter” and “Twilight,” young enthusiasts collaborate on new story lines involving monsters, ghosts and secret crushes.

On Scribd.com, writers and digital packrats are building a huge swap meet for written works of every length, many of which once existed on paper.

Visitors can browse digital versions of novels and nonfiction books —some by established authors, others by complete unknowns—along with recipes for spinach calzones and 1950s-era manuals for building transistor radios, nearly all of which are free.

Whereas printed texts often are linear paths paved by the author chapter by chapter, digital books encourage readers to click here or tap there, launching them on side journeys before they even reach the bottom of a page.

Some scholars fear that this is breeding a generation of readers who won’t have the attention span to get through “The Catcher in the Rye,” let alone “Moby-Dick.”

“Reading well is like playing the piano or the violin,” said the poet and critic Dana Gioia, former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. “It is a high-level cognitive ability that requires long-term practice.

“I worry that those mechanisms in our culture that used to take a child and have him or her learn more words and more complex syntax are breaking down,” Gioia said.

But Larry Rosen, a psychology professor at Cal State Dominguez Hills, said it was a mistake to conclude that young people learned less simply because “they are flitting around all over the place” as they read.

“Kids are reading and writing more than ever,” he said. “Their lives are all centered around words.”