The most creative minds in publishing are racing to develop iPad app editions of upcoming titles that will utilize the new device’s unique audio, video, interactive and social networking capabilities.
The excitement is contagious!
As a writer, you may want to start looking at how these apps can extend and expand the creative canvas of your book.
[These multimedia book apps are available only at iPad’s App Store, while regular ebooks are available only at iPad’s iBookstore. Confusing? Yes! Listen up, Apple. Put all the books in one place where we can find them. Ok, onward.]Hang on to the good stuff
Has this ever happened to you? You’re writing at a furious pace and your brain’s teeming with an overflow of information and ideas that can’t possibly all fit into your book.
But you’ve got some wonderful stuff that you’d love to use somehow. Maybe it’s some great backstory information like an FBI dossier on a principal character in your novel, or maybe it’s a terrific old newsreel that could help illustrate a key point about the Battle of the Bulge in your history of WWII.
The end of slash-and-burn editing?
As a developmental editor, I work every day with writers who have more material and imaginative ideas than can be contained on the printed page. It’s my job, however, to help an author maintain the forward acceleration, rhythm and pacing of the book without tangents or digressions — and to avoid including material that isn’t crucial in the moment.
That means that there’s frequently no solution other than slash and burn.
So I’m really excited about the technological advances underway that will provide writers with new channels for this kind of material. The iPad book apps in particular may offer outstanding opportunities to resolve backstory and other creative problems by embedding and linking to that additional content, adding informative and entertaining elements to the book that help tell the story and enrich the experience of reading.
The iPad is a game changer
In Publisher’s Weekly the other day, Stephen Prothero, author of the recently released God Is Not One described how his publisher suddenly requested an autobiographical video and other “bonus” materials for the forthcoming iPad version of the book.
“For my next book, I won’t be able to get away with traveling to Jerusalem or Bali with pencil and notepad, searching for a few choice quotes,” Prothero wrote. “I’ll need to bring an audio recorder and a video camera, and figure out how to integrate into my ‘book’ the sights and sounds of this Hebrew prayer or that Balinese cremation.”
Authors take note! The iPad book app will require a new kind of creativity to realize the artistic and commercial value of these potential elements.
What would Shakespeare do?
Imagine if William Shakespeare were living today. He’d written those wonderful 14-line love sonnets from the bottom of his heart and thought they were some of the best work he’d ever done. Because he’d been in the theater both on the stage and as a playwright all his life, he knew his poetry needed to be heard aloud, to be read by actors who could understand and illuminate the meter, rhythm, and beat of his iambic pentameter.
So maybe he’d hire some talented friends and direct them in a series of short videos, one per sonnet, set in urban locations with lots of cool effects. It could be brilliant.
His legions of readers, on their digital devices, could watch the actors recite the sonnets, hearing the wonderful rhythm, while reading along with the lines. Unusual words linking to dictionary definitions could help interpret the layers of meaning.
This has actually been done, using a multimedia application called the vook. It’s titled Love, Love, Love: Shakespeare in the City and it’s one of the best examples of new-form publishing I’ve seen. For me, the visual experience gives a whole new dimension to understanding and appreciating these perfect gems in verse. The vook, a term coined by the application’s developers, is described as “a new innovation in reading” that blends writing, video and social networking. The company got a lot of press recently when author Anne Rice decided to publish a Vook edition of her story The Master of Rampling Gate. Vooks are available as computer downloads, or as iPad and iPhone book apps.
What would Hunter S. Thompson do?
I wonder what my old pal, the late Hunter S. Thompson, prince of Gonzo, would do if he were able to join with me in publishing a 40th anniversary edition of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas as an iPad book app.
I bet he’d have a lot of fun with the iPad’s built-in features like shaking and tilting images, distorting, blowing up and shrinking illustrator Ralph Steadman’s wild drawings of his hallucinogenic adventures. We might also think about including some of our midnight audio tapes, where we dissected his manuscripts and plotted future tales of dread.
Maybe we’d embed a video game we could call “Shoot the Sheriff,” with stop action animation of Hunter taking aim at all those sheriffs he was covering as a reporter at their Las Vegas convention; dispatches that later became the basis of the book.
Oh the possibilities!
For the best examples, check out the kid stuff
The wildly popular Alice for the iPad, created by the tiny design studio Atomic Antelope, uses the device’s special technology for readers to tap, tilt and turn, shudder, and shake it so that Alice, the mad hatter, the jabberwocky, and Red Queen are all tossed around, changing sizes, and otherwise become the movable creation of the reader’s imagination in the moment. Hopefully a future update will include sound, a surprising omission (aside from an occasional trumpet note) in this otherwise beautiful and exciting interpretation of the children’s classic.
You get the feeling that this is just the beginning of great things to come in book publishing for all ages.
Disney, meanwhile, has produced a delightful version of the book Toy Story. This free iPad app includes extensions, enhancements and interactivities including the ability for kids to record their own voices while reading the book, plus finger painting and a video game where you tilt and turn the iPad to send a soldier parachuting through deadly obstacles.
YA publishers are seeing great possibilities in these emerging technologies. A new interactive iPad version of Vampire Academy is launching this week, which will feature built-in live chat between readers. And they’re just getting started. John Makinson, the CEO of Penguin UK, said “We will be embedding audio, video, and streaming into everything we do.”
A great tool for self-publishers
For self-publishing authors, iPad book apps look like a logical way to provide exceptional content and added value to their books and also as an effective tool for marketing their titles not just to readers, but also to agents and publishers. Although the Apple iPad is one of the best tools for reading audiobooks, but there are many other uses for them too, you can buy outdoor home security cameras to place around your property and monitor them from anywhere as long as you have an internet connection in order to keep your home secure!
Only one thing’s for sure. Change is coming rapidly and smart writers, publishers, agents, and booksellers are trying to figure out how it can work for them.
What would you do?
Let me have your thoughts about this, please, and how you think an iPad book app might apply to your own work. Let your imagination run!
As a musician, writer, film maker, artist, animator and many other things I find these new opportunities very exciting. I am not unusual apart from being a bit older. For most kids today having multi-disciplines is the norm. My ten year old makes movies, takes photos, and animates for his school projects. His elder brother teaches it in high school. It’s all just story telling.
I worked as an illustrator on one of the first non-linier electronic books back in 85. We were considered very strange and foolish back then. Today the non linier experience is simply a choice. We all do it every time we visit a website. We are used to it. These new ideas simply blur the media boundaries.
It’s no longer possible to specify legal rights and concessions using conventional models. I favor anarchy (not being told what I can or cannot do) to establish models that work. Publishing is changing with the media it publishes. Once created electronic media cost virtually nothing to print.
It is certainly interesting and cool to see these things, especially in the younger reading market, where these things, at this point anyway, appear to have greater appeal. I have to wonder at this point how big the younger market is with the ipad. I’ve a hard time imagining that a great number of teen and younger folk have ipads right now or how many adults are going to let their kids play around with an ipad. However, this is just the start of things. I can see this market growing as the tablet market expands and they get cheaper. Personally, too expensive for me and I have no incentive to buy one. I also can’t imagine publishers doing this kind of thing with very many books, as the development costs for this stuff isn’t cheap. Of course, I’m a fiction writer. While I can only see this being done with a few select fiction titles, it certainly has lot more potential in non-fiction. If costs come down to develop these things (and maybe I’m wrong on development costs here)then I can see them becoming a more common marketing tool. Until then, I don’t expect we’ll see this kind of thing except on the most popular titles.
Very interesting post. It is kind of scary, but also exciting.
Ever since I learned about the Kindle I have been pondering how it and other similar technologies might affect how books are written and read. I love how the Kindle contains a linked dictionary for example and know it would enhance my understanding of what I was reading. However, in the current discussion I find it interesting that no one has commented yet on how these “diversions,” “additions,” or “reinserted omissions” presented as links in an e-book might affect the reading experience. I think they could become huge distractions that interrupt the flow that comes from focused attention and thereby impact the reader’s overall understanding and appreciation of the story. I think that for many books these kinds of links should probably be found in a reference section or at the end of chapters. The book’s web site is a natural place for them. But of course, this is just my opinion. I’m sure there are many people (particularly younger folks who grew up with the internet) who will be able to handle the glut of information without suffering from e-book induced ADHD (or will they?).
I loved Anne Rice’s VOOK of Rampling Gate. I loved seeing her life story in video — authors spend so much time behind the scenes and are often alone yet many of us have and have had rich lives. I would have loved it if Shakespeare had a VOOK.
If you have to be a computer programmer to use these things though, a lot of us will left high and dry.
I thank you for your article about iBooks. I’m an independent novelist, a professional print and interactive designer and have been an apple user since 1987, but I’m disappointed in the iPad.
The idea that an indy author can simply “create an iPad app” is unrealistic. Even if a writer has the design skills and decides to stray far enough from his course to learn how t program in Objective C, there’s absolutely no guarantee that Apple will accept his content. There’s no wonderful PDF-to-iApp conversion utility available.
Moreover, the iPad itself, while a visually inspiring piece of technology, offers little other than another portal to another proprietary iShopping experience exclusive to Apple.
As a designer, I work very hard to choose typefaces, control line-breaks and do what I can to add subtle touches to a book that make it comfortable to read. See http://fontfeed.com/archives/ipad-typography/ for some critique on how badly the iPad manages these important aspects of design; typographical concerns echoed by the famous cover designer Chipp Kidd.
Fore me, as a designer,a design educator and writer, the promise of the internet is that it gives the common man the power to publish. Proprietary technologies and censored stores such as the iPad and iBookstore are an important step towards on-screen display of books, but they violate that promise. See indy author Richard Geller’s eBooks hidden cleverly within http://www.aSiteAboutSomething.com (one of the books is free to download and experience). They preserve the exact formatting of his printed books and can be read offline on any computer. When Flash and AIR come to android devices in the near future, new tablet devices will make this platform universally available to anyone with modest skills and a small budget.
Unless I’m overly idealistic about the internet’s promise (and I’ll remain that way regardless), the future of publishing is in the brokering of a direct relationship between the writer and his audience. Sites like eBay and MP3.com have already proven aspects of that model, and as technologies like Android and Adobe AIR penetrate deeper, I believe we’ll see much better alternatives than Apple’s latest iCanShopWithApple devices facilitated with tools that can be managed, if not by the common man, at least by a competent creative professional.
Hi S. Spencer Baker-
Thanks for the excellent examples of your own creativity in action. Your hotlinks and invitation for readers to vote on story lines are some of the many options for using new technology to open up writing and enhance the reader’s experience.
I appreciate your warning that professional-level audio/visual production requires rigor and expertise. But I believe there’s also room for home-video type material that has purpose and utility as enhanced content.
Book publishers may indeed start to resemble film studios in managing the production of extended multi-media book content. HarperCollins, for example, has its own book trailer studio in Manhattan.
Most of all I appreciate your comment that despite all the complexities and uncertainties of the future, it’s going to be fun!
Hi Garth-
The content for an Ipad book app can’t be the junk you threw out of the print version, but rather the kind of terrific creative materials you’ve dreamt up: the goofy Enzo video games, the author’s commentary explaining where an idea came from (“Why did you want to tell the book from the dog’s point of view anyway?”), and the GPS coordinates to locations from the book.
Please do produce these materials right away for the millions now reading your book, and also write that next one as soon as possible. Got it?
This is the most insightful article about the opportunities these technologies are bringing to creators that I’ve read to date. It was precisely because of the all the “wonderful stuff I’d like to use somehow” that I had the idea of building a website for all the back-story, spin-offs and irrelevancies I was dreaming up as I was writing my new book. I knew the narrative would be bogged down if I included all these diversions in the printed version, and I can’t abide footnotes and glossaries, so I’ve used wikipedia-style software to build interlinked pages which can be hot-linked from an ebook or an iPad app. It’s been an interesting experience and I’ve uncovered a few wrinkles.
First, the online ‘companion’ is NEVER finished. This is because every time I write a page about a character, term or technology I’ve invented (I’m writing satirical science fiction which I think is ideal for this style of publishing) two or three more ideas pop up which demand more articles. This can be a lot of fun, but it can also be a concern that too many articles are left undone. I think I’m just going to have to live with this because if I wait until the online version is finished, the first book (of a trilogy) will never see the light of day.
Second, the way the online story takes shape is fascinating. We are used to controlling the pace and flow of narrative when it comes to the printed word, but when it’s up to the reader to choose which links to follow and which to ignore (or even press a ‘random’ option and see where it leads) then the author loses the ability to direct things. We’re all familiar with looking something up on Wikipedia and finding ourselves following trails of curiosity-driven investigation – finding that a simple query has led to 30 minutes of side-tracks and the Mongolian qazan – the same thing happens with online stories. It won’t suit everyone, but I’m excited by this and can see that I’m only just scratching the surface of what is possible.
Third, online wiki-style publishing is designed for multiple authors to contribute to the resource. I’m building a future universe filled with its own technology and unique characters – if other writers buy into it and want to extend the canon, it will be a simple task to allow them to do so (under editorial control of course). Fans of the series can submit articles and readers may be able to comment, vote for story-lines, link to the articles and become active promoters. I expect this will open up a can of worms, but handled properly could wind up with consumers becoming producers and sharing in some of the royalties.
I’m calling my book a webback. It’s designed so that it can be read as a stand-alone book, but the curious reader will find much more online if they choose to follow the embedded links. The iPad is ideal for this style of publishing and it feels like I’ve been waiting for this technology to arrive in such an elegant package.
I’ve worked in music and advertising for most of my career and I would caution that while an ‘enhanced’ book may offer many exciting opportunities, sound and vision creation require rigour and expertise and are easily mishandled. It could become prohibitively expensive to produce a professionally made cross-media work and I suspect that the publishers may need to become more like studios in order to manage and finance this type of work. Rights issues are going to get even more complicated, but it’s definitely going to be fun!
I call this just plain fantastic. I LOVE the idea of music, video, chat, and alternative endings to creative efforts. Let the thing sprout wings and take off!
Future, here we come…
There’s the question of added content versus enhanced content. I mean, the bottom line is that if I let you convince me it should be cut from the book, it should be cut. Why should it reappear someplace else simply because it can?
BUT: The enhancing…..
With The Art of Racing in the Rain there could be fun goofiness: A racing game in which Enzo tries to avoid rain puddles and hit crows. An Enzo Trivia game. A Stump Enzo quiz game.
I like the idea of having links throughout the text to video snippets as “Authors Commentary,” in which the writer explains where an idea came from or why something is the way it is.
With The Art of Racing in the Rain I would provide GPS coordinates to various locations in Seattle where the book takes place so someone could track them. OR, I could do that as a game: a “Track Enzo” game in which the reader has to find certain landmarks and take photos of them. OR I could make it a scavenger hunt in which certain details must be noted, e-mailed to me, and if you get them all, you get a prize!
Certain books would lend themselves better than others, of course.
I think, though, to answer previous questions, this is the kind of stuff that would be turned over to a Content Developer. You write the book, the Enhanced Book publisher develops all of this app stuff, you go write your next book.
Speaking of which….
Garth
I’m excited about these apps! Technology, ahem…Apple is turning another industry on its head and changing the rules. Reading is a gift that should be passed onto generations, let them decide which mode they wish to experience-interact-view-read-listen to your stories. As long as they’re interacting with your story – does it matter that is not on paper? I don’t think these apps will replace the printed word entirely, however with busy lifestyles of today – this way of interacting with an authors work is another choice for readers, and I like that. I agree, very contagious and exciting!
My instinctive reaction, as I began reading, was “no, no, a thousand times no!”
But I got over it. I echo Jon’s concern regarding the talent range that is demanded by this kind of publication. We have all suffered through enough home movies (or the YouTube variety) to be wary of an author’s handheld camera vlogging while researching the next greatest historical novel.
“Love, Love, Love: Shakespeare in the City” works very well, but it married the talent of videographers and actors (plus a few “persons in the street” unless I miss my guess) to that of the Bard to create something other than the simple(!) poetry works. A derivative work, if you will.
And then rights and ownership come into the fray, and I find myself siding on the “Over our dead bodies…” side of that fence.
My belief, and it is only “belief”, is there will always be reading as we know it – reader, there with the words, co-creating worlds, the story, with the author. But, even absent technology, there are performances of story and verse today that extend the written word and add dimensions of sound and image.
The technology of iPads, and everything to come after that one particular device, expands realizable creativity. Some may be able to realize the entire “experience” by themselves. Others may collaborate, bringing together the talent set required. This is additive and does not take away from existing creative forms.
I do agree, however, there is a whole world of negotiation (a much nicer word than “conflict”, don’t you think?) around rights that is going to fall out of this. Stay tuned, indeed.
– KjM
I think mixed media is going to spring some new art forms. “Alice for the iPad” is not really a book anymore; it’s got elements of literature, but also of animation and videogames. Platforms like the iPad invite experimentation, and I like the idea of expanding a property into new forms (we already adapt books into film and TV series, comics, toys, and have been adapting literature to paintings for centuries). The audio/visual rights contract thing is the biggest problem. If we could nail down iPad arts as their own entities, contracts would be a lot easier – so long as we got content designers playing fair with the film industry, and vice versa.
I have mixed feelings about this. I am sure there will be a market, but I’m not sure I want to play in it. I write. I feel I have talent in that area. I don’t produce movies, or do voice recordings, as I don’t have any talent in those areas. So to be a successful writer in the future you suddenly have to be some sort of multitalented superstar? I sure hope not.
Don’t get me wrong. I think for those with the talent and expertise there is great opportunity here. I just hope it doesn’t mean the door has been slammed in the face of those who simply write, and write well.
Like Elle says, exciting and terrifying indeed.
~jon
Hi Carolyn –
I checked out Kristin Nelson’s blog and she’s right. There will be lots of conflicts and intense negotiations related to potential revenue that may be generated by the iPad apps, and other derivative multi-media electronic products.
This kind of problem has been growing over the years, and at an accelerating rate. It began back when book publishing first absorbed radio, then audio tape, film, TV, now iPads and who knows what may come next: holographic brain wave books, projected onto your arm?
There’s currently, as we speak, contentious unresolved debate on the constantly changing “industry standards.” On the one hand publishers want to share in “any electronic rights now or in the future developments,” while authors naturally take the opposite view: “Over our dead bodies….we retain everything!”
It’s a matter of patience, good will, and fair-minded negotiation. Stay tuned for future developments.
It’s exciting and terrifying.
This really blurs the lines between reading and “viewing” to some extent. The links to appendices etc will really work well in children’s/fantasy books where entire new worlds will be created. Imagine a google maps for Narnia!
Over at Kristin Nelson’s blog (Pub Rants) she points out the language for Film Rights directly conflicts with the Multi-Media you’re talking about. In effect, if you want to sell film rights — and she typically retains these rights for her clients, you can’t do these extended ebooks if they include video or audio. It’s an interesting issue.
Here’s a link to her post:
http://pubrants.blogspot.com/2010/05/how-enhanced-ebooks-will-cause-havoc.html