We’ve been talking about e-books, most recently this week in “Book Marketing in the Digital Age” (but also here and here, for starters) … but to my mind they’re still just books. Words. Reading.
This article from the New York Times points out that some folks had other, bigger ideas for e-books:
Social Books, which let users leave public comments on particular passages and comment on passages selected by others, became Rethink Books and then faltered. Push Pop Press, whose avowed aim was to reimagine the book by mixing text, images, audio, video and interactive graphics, was acquired by Facebook in 2011 and heard from no more. Copia, another highly publicized social reading platform, changed its business model to become a classroom learning tool.
The latest to stumble is Small Demons, which explores the interrelationship among books. Users who were struck by the Ziegfeld Follies in “The Great Gatsby,” for instance, could follow a link to the dancers’ appearance in 67 other books. Small Demons said it would close this month without a new investor.
“A lot of these solutions were born out of a programmer’s ability to do something rather than the reader’s enthusiasm for things they need,” said Peter Meyers, author of “Breaking the Page,” a forthcoming look at the digital transformation of books. “We pursued distractions and called them enhancements.”
Me, I’m not really interested in the comments of people I don’t know on particular passages; I disabled the function on my Kindle that showed what other readers had highlighted in books I was just then reading. The Times and other online magazines have pursued the text/image/audio/video interactivity on long-form articles—and I find those articles fascinating—but the idea of working my way though a novel like that exhausts me. I like reading, just plain reading. No one needs to jazz it up for me. I’ve got my imagination for that.
That said, there’s a whole lot more in this article—“Out of Print, Maybe, but Not Out of Mind”—about the function of story and what happens to it as it migrates from print to the web. You might find it interesting.
Tweet: I like reading, just plain reading. No one needs to jazz it up for me. My mind does that.
Tweet: E-books: to my mind they’re still just books. Words. Reading. I like it that way.
Disclosure of Material Connection: I have not received any compensation for writing this post. I have no material connection to the brands, products, or services that I have mentioned. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”