Brooklyn based Melville House Publishing has launched a new program, HybridBooks, that lets a customer scan a QR code printed on the back of a book to access supplemental material in digital format. Here’s a sample of the related content, which it calls “illuminations,” for the novella “THE DUEL by Giacomo Casanova.”

The New York Observer has more details:

“For example, The Illumination for the HybridBook version of Anton Chekhov’s The Duel contains an essay on dueling by Thomas Paine, poems by Lord Byron, philosophy by Nietzsche, an anti-dueling church sermon, an argument in favor of dueling by a U.S. Senator, and the rules to the game of vint–a game that plays a role in the plot,” said Dennis Johnson, the publisher of Melville House, in a statement. “In the Illumination for Giacomo Casanova’s The Duel you’ll find a comic essay by Mark Twain on French dueling and an account of a famous duel fought from hot air balloons. And there’s so much more–maps, cartoons, recipes, photographs, paintings–to enhance the reader’s experience.”

The paper notes that Melville House is also offering a QR program to indie booksellers, where a customer can buy an ebook from within the store by scanning a QR code.

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