Teleread has a write-up of sessions from the current O'Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing conference in New York.
The spotlight on the Enhanced Edition of
Bunny Munroe is certainly interesting, though it looks like the guy giving the talk was a bit long on buzzwords ('disruption', 'blurred boundaries', 'cyclical and iterative value chain') rather than content.
In a nutshell, the Enhanced Edition of Nick Cave's latest is the text with a synchronised version of the audio book plus some video of interviews with Cave. I don't have an iPhone so have no plans on buying this, but it seems interesting. It's certainly good to see publishers concentrating on adding value to their ebook offerings, but I don't know if this is really the way to go.
You can read the text
and listen to Cave reading it at the same time - hmm, does this have any value beyond a few minutes of novelty? Maybe it will be useful for people with learning difficulties, or whose English is poor. I couldn't really see myself leaving such a feature turned on. Extras are nice, but
video? - meh. So I get to watch Cave reading the book I just read on a 3.5" screen - does he put on a good act?. This just gets me thinking of all those DVD Extras I've never bothered to watch.
The great value of print is that you can page through it to get to something interesting. Doesn't Cave have pages from his notebooks, or early drafts of chapters? Authors tend to build up a lot of ancillary material, notes and influences, how about some of that? That would have real value.
You have to give these guys marks for trying, but right now it looks like multimedia for its own sake. For instance they have an edition of David Simon's
Homicide coming out - and the extras are, wow, video interviews. One and a half hours of talking heads (two of whom are just actors on Simon's later project) on a tiny screen that would have been far less tedious as a text transcription. If they must have video, how about going out and shooting some location footage? How has Baltimore changed since Simon's book first came out?
Of course the sorry fact is that most publishers are still having troubles getting the basics right and producing ebooks which are properly formatted without spelling mistakes. So maybe they need to learn to walk before they start to run. But they certainly need to be looking at ways of adding value to their offerings for product differentiation and premium editions. The secret is to remember that you need
value, not buzzwords. Video, especially, has to justify itself, because done wrong it's just tedious and boring. (Remember all those DVD extras? No, I don't either.)