I’m doing some research on an issue I’d prefer to keep vague right now, and I came across some interesting books for it for which I was dismayed not to find an e-version. The books were extremely large, bulky and full of illustrations. They offered a ‘day by day guide’ to this certain health topic—you were meant to open the book up, start at Day 1, and read one section a day.
I am familiar with reading-a-day types of books, and enjoy them. I previously have read several, on various topics. But what distinguished these books were the wealth of multimedia—photos, diagrams, charts, table sand so on.
This is, sadly, e-books’ Achilles heel. The minimalist in me wanted an electronic copy because we just don’t have the shelf space for a behemoth like this. I can only imagine the Beloved’s face if I brought home, in paper, a shelf-hog like this. Why don’t you just get it in e-book, he’d ask me.
But it just wouldn’t work. There really isn’t a tidy way to organize a media-rich book like that into an e-copy. I checked the Kindle store just in case—and found nothing. So then I checked the app store, and found more of what I was looking for. The apps I looked at didn’t have the full equivalent in content to the book, though. It seemed I would be forced to choose—a book if I wanted the textual information, an app if I wanted the multimedia. But neither solution had both.
I may yet cave and get that paper copy. But I admit, it blows my mind a little that this digital embracer can’t find such a seemingly simple thing—words and pictures—in e-form.
Image credit: Here.
To me, this sounds like something that could only be found in the iBookstore in the form of what Apple calls a “multi-touch book.” That’s no guarantee you’l find it though.
Perhaps your research will allow an investigatory journey using the iBooks Author app (OS X computer required). The hypothesis would center around whether iBooks Author could create such a reading experience. You might want to engage other iBA users in the quest via a challenge of some sort. Here is a Goolge+ group that might provide a few confederates” https://plus.google.com/communities/112862452781960201400