Free (iTunes) Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England: A Sensory Ride [History]

[ATDrake]

The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England: A Sensory Ride by British historian Ian Mortimer (Wikipedia) is a multimedia-enhanced companion to his eponymous highly popular accessible overview of life and times and culture during the last Tudor reign, this supplement containing all-new material taking you through each of the senses in turn as they would have been experienced in Elizabethan times, such as fashion and lighting under Sight, food under Taste, and a decided number of lapses in hygiene under Smell, illustrated with period line drawings and paintings, as well as video clips from behind-the-scenes of the adapted BBC TV series, and links to online-accessible sound recordings of Elizabethan music (requires internet connection), free courtesy of publisher Random House.

This is amazingly nifty, and while each section is objectively a little on the short side, they're actually fairly information-dense and give you a lot of background and context and interesting trivia bits in a relatively brief number of pages, with bonus audiovisual extras to help flesh out your edutainment.

Currently free exclusively @ iTunes (available to Canadians and all the places worldwide that I spot-checked ETA: minus the US, apparently, as the series seems to be handled by the Penguin branch of the Random Penguin House who have not yet seen fit to release this there; but free in Japan and Denmark and Brazil) as a Made for iBooks title which will require a certain level of compatible iDevice/Mac to experience.

This is a ~200 meg file which you probably don't want to transfer over 3G if you've data plan limits.

Should you happen to wish to look up the original Time Traveller's Guides or any of Ian Mortimer's other history books and historical novels, it turns out that in Canada at least, they're couponable @ Kobo via Random House's Vintage Digital imprint which is one of the few which allows DIY discounting. NB: the cheaper Medieval England TTG with the black cover is the older abridged 2010 edition, which is superceded by the updated full-length 2012 version.

And this has been the (late!) selected 3rd (non-repeat) free ebook thread of the day.

Because not only do I love quasi-academic quality non-fiction freebies and interactive multimedia content used in a genuinely text-enhancing fashion and contrast-and-compare cultural exploration stuff, this one happens to cover one of my long-time favourite periods of history and it's done really quite well in a way that will make it very easy for you to learn about Almost Exactly What It Says In The Title (disclaimer: does not contain actual time travel, though they certainly encourage you to imagine doing some).

And there's a whole bunch of partially-discountable tie-in materials you can look up if you're moved to find out more.

Seriously, this is very nearly the perfect platonic ideal of an official publisher promo free ebook offering that's Relevant To My Interests™ and I hope they eventually make one based on the TTG to Medieval England as well. In the meantime,

Enjoy!

Description
Are we the same as our ancestors, or are we completely different?

This is the question at the heart of this short multi-touch ebook of new and exclusive material to accompany The Time Traveller’s Guide to Elizabeth England, now a major BBC series. Historian Ian Mortimer takes us on an immersive journey through the five senses of the Elizabethan era – seeing, hearing, smell, taste, feeling - and the sixth: Fear.

Why can so few Elizabethans afford to wear bright red clothing? What are the loudest sounds you might hear in a world devoid of extremely loud noises? Why might you occasionally wash your mouth out with sulphuric acid? And how does it play on the lone traveller’s nerves to be walking under the constant threat of imminent attack on the highway?

Using a selection of unseen clips from the television series, rich imagery and a feast of contemporary music, The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England: A Sensory Ride puts the reader onto the Elizabethan streets and shows that although we might have the same senses as our ancestors, how we experience sensation is another matter altogether.

[TrevorViking]

Not US.