This TED video is a brief look into the future of ebooks and how they can be made interactive. The book is a new one by Al Gore and it seems well suited to the format. Take a look. What do you think?
Darn WordPress won’t let me embed it. Here’s the link: A Next Generation Digital Book
The TED video was fascinating (although I am not a fan of Al Gore…sorry). I am late to e-books, but there are many things I love about my new Kindle. This, however, makes my Kindle look antiquated. I can see kids who wouldn’t normally be drawn to books becoming dedicated readers using something this much fun. Yeah, technology. (P.S. Does anyone else find those wind farms depressing? They remind me of dementors.)
The guy giving the talk was cute! When I went to the talk by the publishers at the local literary festival, someone from Canongate was talking about the interactive book they made of Nick Cave’s novel about Bunny Munroe (cannot recall proper title, sorry) . What they’d done to it sounded amazing, although they said it was still very expensive to produce that sort of thing and you could only do it on cult books. But I’m sure it will be part of the future.
Al Gore’s voice in his educating mode makes me crazy. I think that’s what killed his chances for the presidency, which is too bad, because I’ve actually heard him giving dynamic speeches. (Yeah, I was shocked to discover who was delivering the speech. Worlds apart.)
That didn’t look so much like reading a book as looking at pictures and getting, to say it in the current venacular, a tweet’s worth of info. Oh, these kids these days. /darkly mumbles about hell in a handbasket.
Personally though, I love that in some ebooks you can click on citations and voila! no more footnotes/endnotes. Just notes as you go.
Seems great for nonfiction, but I would hate it for my fiction. I want to use my imagination and picture things the way I want, not the way someone illustrates them for me. Otherwise, I might as well watch a movie. Also, there’s a part of me that looks at this and thinks, “why call this a ‘book’ — without or without the ‘e’ — instead of a web site?” I’m with Carrie on the endnotes/footnotes thing, though. Love that feature of e-books (as well as being able to keyword search).
I love the “lift the image off the page to get to interactive features” bit – that seems really smart to me, in that the bells and whistles only become apparent when you invoke them – if you’re focused on the text, you can stay focused on the text, but if you are looking at an image and want to know more, you can find out more. (The example they gave with the picture then letting you see the map of where it was taken seemed perfect to me – I often find myself pausing in my reading to look at Google Maps to see where exactly something is.)
Emily’s comment about the question of “why call this a book?” is an interesting one and I’m curious as to what people think. I think in part it’s because a book is something that we’re culturally very used to, and very used to paying for, and very used to using for learning, etc. There’s a certain level of quality expectations that the idea of a “book” conjures up, and when you talk about something being a textbook or a nonfiction book for general readers or whatever it’s classified as, the fact that it’s a book and the kind of book it is give clues about how long it’s probably going to be, how in-depth or not it’s going to be, etc. It also seems to me like it’s pretty easy for people to grasp some of the things a “book plus extras” or an “interactive book” might be, whereas an “interactive website” maybe feels more amorphous? I think this is changing, and is changing in some areas faster than others – like, for ESL and other language-learning, the idea that you might do your studying/learning primarily (or entirely) on a website rather than from a book seems pretty common already.
Grad, LOL, poor Al Gore
I would think books like this could turn kids into readers. Though I worry that when they end up looking at a book that isn’t interactive if they will somehow find it boring and worthless. Time will tell, eh? I haven’t seen a wind farm so I can’t say I find them depressing. Should I ever see one though I will let you know what thoughts they inspire!
Litlove, wasn’t he? He was kind of shy and not your usual confident, forceful speaker. Interesting about the Nick Cave novel. I’d be interested in a glimpse. I imagine as the technology develops, it will get cheaper to produce books like that.
Carrie, Gore does tend to get a condescending monotone thing going, doesn’t he? I think they overlooked the text part of reading in favor of showing off the photos. but since the photos talk to you one does have to wonder whether people will bother to read the text or just look and listen to the photos. I do love how notes can be embeded in the text. No more page flipping!
Emily B, yes, it does seem like this sort of thing works best for nonfiction at this point. I could see it working well with historical fiction and especially detective fiction. It would be kind of cool to have a little video embeded in the book where you can actually see the scence of the crime.
Heather, oh your comment is so interesting! I like that the pictures and “extras” don’t interfere with the text as well. It limits possible distraction. I think the idea of a book is evolving into less of an object and more of a description for a kind of container. At this point a book still contains lots of text but an interactive book contains text “plus extras” as you say. I think people definitely understand that. It is different from a website in that you don’t have to go to the internet in order to read the book. It is still a self-contained object even though it is digital and has video, etc. It is conceivable that one day we might have streaming books like we do with music and movies, but I think the interactive book technology is still too complex for it to work over the internet and so it has to rely on the operating system and processor of something like an iPad.
That’s really cool actually. I can totally see this happening more and more frequently in the future–it’s amazing what people can do, but it has to be expensive to produce. I’m with Emily, though, I’d love this for nonfiction, but think I’ll stick to using my imagination when it comes to fiction!
Danielle, it probably is rather expensive right now but no doubt the cost will come down. And I agree, much better for nonfiction though I can see it possibly having a place in say historical fiction.