I find the collision of books and technology to be both an exciting and frustrating place. Frustrating because the vision of the possible tends to be driven by the technology people without any connection to what a reader might actually want. Exciting because the technology makes so many things possible.
Take, for instance, augmented reality. You have very likely seen it without knowing what it was especially if you are an American football fan – those yellow first down lines that appear on the TV are augmented reality. Turn you minds now to augmented reality and books. What can it do? Well, here is one beginning example a site called Zooburst that I found out about via the Academic Commons news aggregator at Cogdogblog. You’ll need a webcam to get the full effect of being able to turn the book around for a 380 degree view. It’s still kind of flat but it’s a start.
Someday students might be reading books like this:
those little cards will be lost within days and then you just have a book
I know I’m hopelessly conservative on this issue – try not to think too badly of me! I like books just as they are. But maybe someday someone will produce something and I’ll think wow! I mean, it could happen.
Ann, so cynical!
Litlove, but think how useful something like this will be for students. It takes textbooks to a whole new level. I don’t expect novels to employ augmented reality, but who knows, there might be a sort of mixed media novel in the future that could make things interesting. It wouldn’t replace the novel as we know it but might become an additional genre like graphic novels.
This is a very interesting idea that I’m about to float past my publisher Véhicule Press for my next book. It’s about the Portuguese, their history, and their amazing influence over nearly 600 years around the world. One of the chapters is called Saudade and Samba, and compares the way that Portugal and Brazil both had fascist-style governments–Estados Novos–for decades in the 20th century. In both countries music was used as a tool to shape public opinion, but fado in Portugal and samba in Brazil are very different. How cool it would be to have links that could take you to examples of each! Similarly in the chapter about the way that the Portuguese language unites (or separates) Lusofonia, I love to have links to videos from Sri Lanka, where a Portuguese creole is still spoken in a few villages.
The print version of Making Waves: The Portuguese Adventure is due for publication in Canada in the fall, with US release next spring. At what point the e-version will be ready is up in the air, but I’ll see what the boss says about the links.
Cheers
Mary
I think I would love this! I agree with Ann Klein, though. The first thing I thought was, “How’s a Mom…teacher…kid..going to keep track of those cards?” But like every new technology, I’m sure they’ll work that out eventually. Oh, and I love the new look of your place here! It’s very Zen.
Very cool. I want the novel to stay pretty much the way it is, but for nonfiction, I’m ready for this sort of stuff. I had such a hard time as a kid with those two-dimensional maps of the world. Already, I was thinking, “what a much better way to illustrate a cell” (something else that gave me problmes in school). It’s true what ann says: lose the card, and you lose that special content, but my guess is that there will be pockets in the books for those cards, and even I (someone who is as absent-minded as they come) have always been able to hang on to bookmarks, which aren’t that dissimilar from the card. Maybe the books could even have tassle-like bookmarks with the cards attached to the end of a string instead of tassles. (God, I am such a geek.)
Neat! I had no idea the technology was this far advanced. For reference and textbooks, the advantages are huge.
As for the novel, it’s hard to improve on what we have. There have been previous attempts at multimedia lit (online lit with images and links; and remember Nick Bantock, with pullout postcards and letters?; I had a Laura Esquival novel with accompanying CD) — but I think it’s really hard to pull it off. People will try, but the novel as we know it isn’t going anywhere.
Interesting! I’ll admit that this kind of new thing makes me anxious and I respond by wanting things not to change, but in my better moments, I’m curious about what will come. And once I am able to play around with something new, I quickly figure out it’s nothing to be anxious about at all. So let’s see what happens!
Hmmm. I admit, I’m in the cynical cateogry. Why is that better than just reading a book via a computer, with three dimensional graphics, hyperlinks to link to more information? It seems rather ridiculous from my perspective. I’m with the commenter who says the card would be lost in days. What a bother to have to carry it around.
Mary, the e-edition of your book sounds like it would be perfect for extra features! Good luck!
Grad, heh, I obviously don’t have children because it never once thought about those little cards getting lost
Glad you like the new look!
Emily, you are a thinker! I like your ideas. I was thinking how cool it would be for illustrating in three dimensions things like atoms. None of my teachers ever had those little models so I always had to imagine the protons and electrons circling around. Textbooks might be about to get really interesting!
Isabella, I loved the Nick Bantock books! He also did some pop-up books that were fun like Coleridge’s “In Xanadu did Kubla Kahn his mighty pleasure dome decree…” I’ve got that Esquival book and that one, I have never read. It seemed too much work to have to be near a CD player.
Dorothy, take a few yoga breathes, no need to be anxious. Just wait for the virtual reality books when we’ll get to walk around inside the novel!
Rebecca, wow, you are cynical!
since I have never gotten to play with augmented reality anything before I’m not sure how it is better than a computer. Perhaps the better part is that you aren’t tied to a computer screen? I think it also offers a different kind of experience. That experience may or may not be better but just different, another tool in the educational arsenal.