App-books to "steamroll over e-books"?

[Lemurion]

Yeah, I'm not sure what an app-book is in context, either - but I am leaning toward the idea that it's more a multi-media platform than bundling each book as a separate app.

I'm not intrinsically opposed to the idea, but it's not for me. I don't like audiobooks and rarely watch TV. This sounds like it's adding things I don't like to something I do - and that doesn't work for me.

[SolRaven]

Originally Posted by Lemurion

Yeah, I'm not sure what an app-book is in context, either - but I am leaning toward the idea that it's more a multi-media platform than bundling each book as a separate app.

I'm not intrinsically opposed to the idea, but it's not for me. I don't like audiobooks and rarely watch TV. This sounds like it's adding things I don't like to something I do - and that doesn't work for me.

For fiction type books, it would probably be a book with links to activate the multimedia content. If they set it up right, you should also have the option to turn it of so it appears as a normal ebook.

[Lemurion]

Originally Posted by SolRaven

For fiction type books, it would probably be a book with links to activate the multimedia content. If they set it up right, you should also have the option to turn it of so it appears as a normal ebook.

I would sincerely hope so: I can see a lot of benefit for non-fiction, but not much for fiction.

[SolRaven]

Originally Posted by Lemurion

I would sincerely hope so: I can see a lot of benefit for non-fiction, but not much for fiction.

Two books that come to mind for fiction would be the Wicked series and The Millenium Series. Wicked has the whole fantasy land maps included with it and there is a whole new tourist industry started in Sweden thanks to Steig Larsson.

[Worldwalker]

Originally Posted by L.J. Sellers

"...transform the experience of reading into an event..."

But what about us old fogeys who don't want an event, we just want a book?

I think it's a focus thing. People who have grown up with the TV blaring all the time (often several TVs on separate channels in various rooms), cell phones, email, yadda, yadda, yadda, can't focus on one thing at a time. They're so used to constant stimulation that they have to have it, and can't manage without it. For them, "normal" is five different things screaming for their attention at once.

I suppose it works for them. But I think they're missing a lot. They're so busy listening to the external shouting that they're missing the internal whispering. They are developing colorful flowers, but no roots. And that's not a good thing.

[CyGuy]

I personally don't want the audio or video, I just want to read. I mean the whole point is that your imagination "fills in the blanks" right? I think it would take away from the experience, not add to it...

[Piper_]

Originally Posted by sufue

And I like to use MY imagination to flesh things out. I can't count how many times I've been disappointed when seeing the movie of a book and the characters or locale or whatever don't look anything like I think they should.

But, along the lines of abookreader's comment, I don't know if I'm just old, and younger folk will want other ways to interact with their content.

I hope not, but I detect possible luddite-ism in my psyche...or maybe just echoes of "when I was young, I had to walk five miles to school"

Same here, sufue. At least my experience with audiobooks has been - bleh. The narrator's emotions and voice ruin the point of books, for me. If I want an interpretation of the story, I'd rather watch the movie. It can get really squirrelly when the narrator is speaking for a character of the opposite sex.

Interactivity could be cool for maps, though it would probably be best to just link to an online version...

~Piper the mapaholic.

[ardeegee]

One of the sadest statements I ever heard came from a different forum once when someone said that they thought that movies were superior to books because movies showed you how things were supposed to look instead of you having to imagine it.

[Andrew H.]

Yeah, it's hard to parse "app books," since it could mean so many different things. But my thought is something like Gray's "The Elements."

But the market for this kind of app is pretty limited to those books which are: (1) largely visual or musical; and (2) in which the visual elements can be enhanced in the app form.

This would basically include certain coffee table books (probably the best category for "The Elements"), certain children's books, and certain other largely visual books ("Arms and Armor of the Crusaders;" or "Interactive Maps of Ancient Battlefields" or "Mozart's Pianos", for example).

The App form is probably best for these because they are doing very different things. But I don't see apps for regular e-books being popular at all.

[Catlady]

Cookbooks would be a natural for multimedia--any how-to books, for that matter.

[HistoryWes]

These app-books are the digital equivalent of the coffee table books that have pull-out maps and toys or pop-up sections. They are interesting novelties, but nobody has a library full of them. They're just not that good for reading.

[starrigger]

A friend of mine who's a writer/artist/software geek created an iThing app for one of his novels. I thought it was pretty cool: it could launch the book normally, but also had access to sketches and full-color art, side notes about the book and its world, and I forget what all. Maybe he'll weigh in here. (You there, Chris?)

[alecE]

Originally Posted by Penforhire

...How about they fix the spelling and format errors we see in many e-books first?!

Absolutely!

Possibly I'm being a grumpy old Luddite, but I *really like* reading simple, unadorned text which allows total freedom to my own imagination. So yes, maybe a limited market - kids' books being the obvious one. But why embed fixed additional content in the ebook when you could just link to the web?

[Worldwalker]

Originally Posted by Catlady

Cookbooks would be a natural for multimedia--any how-to books, for that matter.

Now there's something I'd like: a car repair manual that would let me see the parts I'm working on, move them around in 3D space, and figure out how they fit together without struggling with some half-invisible, crud-coated, and of course broken part before I actually tried to get it out of there. It would save a lot of stress and the occasional scraped knuckle.

I'm not sure that anything smaller than my netbook would work for that, though. A smartphone? Forget it. And there's the whole issue of having it around a car I'm working on -- the pbooks get replaced faster than the cars because bad things happen to them.

Oddly enough, though, I've never seen anything like this (if you know of one, let me know!). I've seen DVDs on specific repairs, and before them videotapes, and of course the Haynes manuals and their diagrams of impossibly-clean engines and unnaturally well-fitting parts, but never something that would let me grab a virtual part with my pointing device of choice and play around with the thing until I really understood how it fit in there and what I actually need to detach to get it the hell out of there.

Multimedia "books" have been around since the dawn of the home CD-ROM ... Dorling-Kindersley used to have a nice line of them (dunno if they still do). But they're more a computer program with some text content than a text with programmatic content. While the coffee-table books are certainly a possibility -- that's pretty much what coffee-table books are: pictures with some text -- and various sorts of references (everything from dictionaries that pronounce words up to history books that summon up animated diagrams of battlefields) I can't see any kind of book one would settle down to read working well that way.

As for the guy who preferred movies because he didn't have to think ... I couldn't imagine a better example of men without chests.

[caleb72]

I'm not opposed to using technology to enhance some aspects of reading. At the moment I'm happy to be clicking on footnote links to read footnotes and then navigate back to my page and this is a small enhancement in a way.

It might be fun in a fantasy book to be able to instantly recall the map of the world you're in with a "You are here" mark. Or have the map able to give more info about itself - either background information or recall of what events have happened in various places up until where you are in the book.

There is the small possibility that technology can make the experience of reading more enjoyable in some way. It doesn't have to be detrimental. I would argue now that for myself reading on my Kindle is actually more enjoyable than reading a physical book.

Regards
Caleb