JohnMakinson
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Dear John Makinson and Penguin, please don't "reinvent" books
"Reading literature makes you a more well-rounded individual." That's what an author told me once. Notice he didn't say "watching literature." paidContent:UK has an article on a presentation Penguin Books' CEO John Makinson gave here in London on Tuesday. Makinson presented ideas on how publishers might approach Apple's iPad and the iBookstore. Makinson revealed "We will be embedding audio, video and streaming in to everything we do. The .epub format, which is the standard for ebooks at the present, is designed to support traditional narrative text, but not this cool stuff that we're now talking about." "This cool stuff" includes turning books into applications with "online communities" for fans with live chat between readers and other multimedia effects. "The definition of the book itself is up for grabs," Makinson said. A copy of Pride And Prejudice might conceivably come with videos of Keira Knightly or Colin Firth (the various movie adaptation's cast). "We don't know whether a video introduction will be valuable to a consumer. We will only find answers to these questions by trial and error." An electronic format with live chat, community forums, audio and video is called a web site. Or maybe an interactive Blu-Ray disc. Books are words arranged on a page (whether paper or digital) that are meant to be assimilated through the eye and processed in the brain with the reader adding much to the story itself – like what a character looks or sounds like.
