What’s a book, and what’s a movie, and is there a risk we’ll confuse the two at the expense of readers, writers and publishers alike? The dangers aren’t just literary.
They’re also commercial, and e-guru Mike Shatzkin has a beaut of a warning for publishers to remember the CD-ROM debacle. One example of the pitfalls: ”Sometime in the middle of the CD-Rom craze, I learned that McGraw-Hill had a big animal encyclopedia on which something like 60% of the cost went into the sound.”
Something to think about, right—when high book costs are enraging so many students and faculty?
I’m not saying multimedia books don’t have a place, such as for auto repair manuals, and of course I love the text to speech that the Kindle offers for plain old-fashioned books, publishers permitting. But let’s be realistic. Publishers should also experiment with, say, the use of wikis to help develop low-costs texts in partnership with the academic community.
If you want cost-sensitive dogs to eat the dogfood, then plan accordingly.
19th c. books were actually quite multi media with features of foldouts and a huge range of illustration and printing technologies, but they all were constrained by the paper based delivery. Hand-held screens are not as restricted and the book construct is less imposed. You can add to this the incompatibilities and functional diversity of hand-held reading devices. Then overlay the dissolve of the bibliographic unit as a result of word and phrase parsed searching and wiki volatility and the concept of the e-book looks to be at risk of another kind of Babel.
Gary, the format should be appropriate for the book. I can see all kinds of color in, say, a novel for young children. And every book should have an attractive cover. But words first! As for wikis, remember this isn’t literature I’m talking about—just information optimized for specific groups.
Thanks,
David
Something else to consider. One of the really wonderful things about the eRevolution is that it allowed dozens of small publishers as well as self-published authors to participate. If books must take on the costs of extensive multimedia, the book business will look more like the movies…with dozens rather than thousands of releases each year and just a small number of conglomerate publishers.
Now this wouldn’t matter so much if there is a lot of value in the multimedia. For what I read, if I want multimedia, I’ll go to the movies. If I want story, I’ll read a novel.
Rob Preece
Publisher