The rise of the enhanced e-book

On FutureEBooks, Sam Missingham has posted a brief article by Neil Ayres, Web Director for Creative Review magazine and author/producer of the The New Goodbye appbook that I covered here.

Ayres talks about a new effort by Quark, maker of desktop publishing app Quark Xpress, to create an extension for its software that will allow it to create multimedia-enabled appbooks by directly exporting the Quark file—similar to Adobe’s development environment which was to be used to create the Wired e-magazine (and that was blocked from access to the app store for several months by Apple’s no-thirty-party-IDE policy).

But Ayres notes that this is going to be pricey, because Quark Xpress is pricey—not something that a lot of small independent writers and publishers are going to be able to afford. He hopes that someone will come up with an ad-funded or freemium model that will let people do the same thing less expensively.

So-called “enhanced” multimedia e-books are becoming more popular, and more discussed. Over on Publishing Perspectives, there are a couple of pieces today looking at this fact.

Alex von Rosenberg looks at the way that new media evolve out of being direct transcriptions of older media to take advantage of the full capabilities of the new form. He uses as an example the way that TV shows were originally nothing more than filming people doing radio shows or stage dramas, etc., but subsequently developed more cinematography because just filming people doing stuff is boring.

von Rosenberg draws the comparison to e-books, which are currently just a direct transcription of printed books, but hastens to explain that he does not expect “plain old” e-books to go away.

In terms of classic fiction and some non-fiction I believe publishers will very much have the freedom to keep the written word sacred and to render it near the original book form on a wide range of elegant, portable, digital devices without hesitation or apology. That said, there will be those across all genres that will begin to blend media. More importantly, much of what has traditionally been communicated through print has much less to do with the art of the written word and much more to do with the cut-and-dried objective of transferring knowledge, aiding learning, developing skills, or providing perspective.

Meanwhile, Siobhan O’Leary notes that a German e-publisher is reporting its “enhanced” e-books are far outselling its more traditional offerings. This company, textunes, estimates that enhanced e-books are five times as popular as conventional e-books (though the article doesn’t provide a whole lot of figures to back that up).

I wonder if there comes a point where an “e-book” can be so enhanced it doesn’t really count as an “e-book” anymore. Where do you draw the line between “e-book” and “multimedia application”?

Maybe you don’t. As von Rosenberg says, in a lot of cases books are about transferring knowledge. People read fiction books to be transported by the story, but they read nonfiction books to learn about things. People learn in different ways, and a multimedia book might be able to touch more of the different methods of learning than dry text on a page. Perhaps a multimedia learning app can still be an e-book after all.