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‘Moxyland’ said to be ‘the first e-book’ with a music soundtrack embedded—but is it?
October 31, 2008 | 9:54 am
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By David Rothman
How many e-books exist already with embedded music soundtracks? I’ll guess that some are out there despite a claim by Electric Book Works that Moxyland is the first e-book with one. But I could be wrong.
"The soundtrack was compiled by African Dope Records to suit the mood and feel of the book’s storyline," says Arthur Attwell, EBW’s publishing director.
Futuristic plot
The plot is set "ten years in the future" in Cape Town and brings together such characters as "a roguish slacker living off his mom" and "a brilliant corporate programmer and AIDS baby" who is "just bored enough to risk everything by hacking the system that makes her privileged lifestyle possible." Author is Lauren Beukes.
Less Flash, please
I wish EBW luck, and the writer, too, but meanwhile I hope it will stop relying so heavily on Flash for the promo site for Moxyland. Come on, folks. The cool cyber people adhere to relevant tech standards.
Had it not been for the abominable .SWF, I could have pasted in some character descriptions and picked up the large graphic without resorting to a screen capture.
PDF format for book itself
The format of the book itself is PDF, into which the soundtrack is embedded. I’d be curious to know if the ePub standard—either the present incarnation or an enhanced one—could be eventually be used. Might some of the same technology for the disabled also work for coordinating music and text via ePub? To EBW’s credit, ePub is already among the company’s main formats. I hope the International Digital Publishing Forum will listen to suggestions from EBW and other innovation-minded publishers as the group develops ePub.
Meanwhile if you want to enjoy Moxyland on your Kindle (iffy with converted PDF and lacking native ePUB), forget it. Same for most cellphones, I suspect. The Tower of eBabel still looms high. I wonder if the PDF will serve up music on the Sony Reader PRS-505 and PRS-700, which can handle PDF text reasonably well. Can the Sony machines at least display the words from Moxyland?
Some wrinkles in Moxyland: "Scaleable pages for easy reading, embedded music controllers, suggested tracks, electronic bookmarks, hyperlinks and sticky notes." These features are hardly unique, but interesting.
Fun question: What music would you like embedded into your favorite book (book title?), and why? Or do you hate the idea for file-size reasons or others? Think that text and music should stand by themselves? And what about the royalty issue? The more trimming a book has, the less for writers in most cases or at least many.
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Comments:
All I’m thinking about after i noticed that is to read the Lord of the rings with its wonderful soundtrack in the background. WOW — That would be amazing.
Just for reference, the greatest soft drink ever created “Moxie” is the basis for anything with “Moxie”, “Moxy”, etc. in the title.
It was more popular than Coke when Coke decided to spend $$$ on advertising during the sugar shortage and cheapen its’ product and Moxis dropped advertising to ensure the quality of what they produced.
Some audiobooks have included incidental music for years. In essence these audiobooks have soundtracks, though usually the musical selections are not lengthy. The Daisy (Digital Accessible Information SYstem) Consortium has developed standards for rich synchronized text and audio that could be used to coordinate a soundtrack with e-book text. One of the original motivations for the development of these standards was serving vision-impaired people; however, many uses are possible.
An individual who wants to switch between listening to an audiobook in a car and reading the same book as an e-book at home would profit from the Daisy standards. DAISY 2.02 is based on XHTML and the Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL). There is an ANSI/NISO DAISY standard that was approved in 2005.
exvaxman, just a quick note. I read Moxyland and think you might find it interesting that the book is about a girl that is addicted to a softdrink – of course, the addiction is due to a nanotech marketing campaign. Great book. Lauren Beukes takes a lot of near future (and already possible) technology and turns it into a scary reality.