According to The Times, "As e-book sales have skyrocketed in the past several years, publishers have searched for ways to improve on the digital editions of their books. In 2010 enhanced e-books with video and audio were all the rage — Simon & Schuster, for instance, found some success with an edition of its best seller “Nixonland,” with 27 videos scattered throughout the text — but sales for many enhanced e-books were dismal, and the books were often expensive to produce."
If this enhancing becomes cheaper, will it become a new fad in the year head?
Probably not. Truthfully, this strikes me as gimmicky and (as the article notes) accompanying books with music is not a new concept. Film scores work for films, but for books? I'm not sold. Still, I commend the idea of ebooks embracing multimedia technology. As noted in an earlier post, in my opinion ebooks like Al Gore's Our Choice show possible benefits of mixing media for nonfiction, if done in an intelligent way. I do believe that multimedia is the future of publishing. However, I think it will take more than a gimmick to bring ebooks into the next generation.
Oddly (to me at least), the publisher mentioned doesn't focus more on the obvious place for these books: the children's market, particularly picture books and more juvenile and middle grade titles. Maybe this is because numerous physical chidren's books already have interactive components and / or sing-along CDs, or maybe it's because those rights were harder to obtain. Whatever the case, this strikes me as something that would appeal to younger readers more so than to older sticks in the mud like me.
Otherwise, a book with a score? I'll be happy to hear the music, but not when I'm reading.
I think there's better choices than the Kindle when it comes to musical scores. Indeed, many software programs can interpret the notes and play them back via MIDI - no expensive production required.
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