How can publishers create graphical e-books without a lot of duplicated effort? That’s the question posed by Richard Stephenson on FutureBook in a post about the different approaches taken by Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Apple for displaying fixed-layout graphical content on their e-readers: Amazon's Kindle format 8 (KF8) relies on a completely separate process to create a fixed layout e-book than Apple's version of fixed layout for titles that are design-led e-books. Both are based on XHTML, but there are important differences in how pages are laid out. With KF8, each page has to be...

On Salon.com, Laura Miller takes a look at the current crop of interactive, “enhanced” books and discusses some of their major shortcomings. The problem with these books, she points out, is that the interactive “bells and whistles” can distract from the actual storytelling: I sat down with my iPad to read “The Yellow Submarine” with a friend’s 7-year-old twins, and within 10 minutes, we were embroiled in a conflict that captured the central, nagging problem with the enhanced e-book concept. Desmond liked playing with the interactive features — the digital equivalent of the tabs and flaps...

AppCraver is carrying a press release from app publisher Nosy Crow, announcing that its Cinderella iOS appbook has won Digital Book World’s Publishing Innovation Award for Best Juvenile App: “The Cinderella story isn’t new, but Nosy Crow’s developers use the app platform in new ways to make this an entertaining experience with extremely high play value and a long engagement time,” said the Publishing Innovation Awards judges of the Juvenile App category. “Clever design decisions, excellent navigation, and enhanced content allow young readers to play in a very natural way with the story. Readers can...

Everybody’s getting in on the e-book act these days. On Digital Book World’s website, Jeremy Greenfield reports that NBC News is launching an e-publishing arm, NBC Publishing. NBC took notice of consumers’ increasing comfort level with electronic books, including those that feature video, and has decided to leverage its existing archives of over one million hours of video content to create such e-books (and some traditional print-only ones as well). NBC has hired a number of publishing-industry veterans to staff the new publishing arm, as well as adding a couple of its own television production staff. The company will...

Marketing guru Seth Godin has a piece on PaidContent (reposted from his Domino Project blog) responding to an interview with the head of Ingram Books about the future of books and publishing. In the interview, Ingram CEO David “Skip” Prichard trots out some of the usual predictions about the future of the book—multimedia extras, print-on-demand, physical bookstores finding “niches” to adapt to, and print publishers still being necessary. Godin calls Prichard’s views “economically ridiculous,” basing his argument on Chris Anderson’s “long tail” theory. Godin suggests that the broad consumer choice the long tail makes possible will drive down production...

The Literary Platform has an essay by Richard Beard, Director of the National Academy of Writing, on how writers can help create a new narrative form. The form in question seems to be the appbook—Beard discusses how adding multimedia and clever organization methods for the digital form can turn printed books into something “new” on the tablet. (One example he brings up is myFry, the app edition of Stephen Fry’s latest autobiography (which I covered last year). Beard thinks such apps are a good starting point, though he is careful to differentiate this from run-of-the-mill “enhanced” e-books that...

The New York Observer reports on documentary filmmaker and web developer Steve Rosenbaum, who has decided to make an iPad app memorializing the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. The app will include both pictures and video, and go into detail about the original construction of the towers, the attacks that brought them down, and the construction of the 9/11 memorial and museum. Perhaps controversially, the app will only be available for the iPad. Rosenbaum feels that it’s simply the best platform on which the powerful nature of the photographs and media can be...

Back in June, Apple introduced a new iBook feature it calls Read Aloud, which is similar to Nook's Read to Me feature in that it provides a human voice narration that syncs to the onscreen text. In both commercial cases, the feature is meant primarily for children's books. Now Apple has updated its iBookstore Assets Guide to include instructions on how to add a Read Aloud narration track to your EPUB file. You can't access the latest guide unless you're a registered iTunes Connect member, but eBookNewswer has printed part of the relevant section: "You can create a Read Aloud book...

PaidContent reports on a Harry Potter multimedia e-book app from ScrollMotion, Harry Potter Film Wizardry, that at $12.99 is one of the more expensive book apps in the iPad store. Timed to coincide with the release of the latest movie, it includes behind-the-scenes looks at the filming of the movies, trivia, and other information. Packed with multimedia, it takes up almost 1 gigabyte of device space. Despite the price, it comes in at #3 in the iPad Book Apps store. But as big as the Harry Potter fandom is, this really isn’t a great surprise. Though I haven’t looked...

Picked this up from a tweet by the ever-excellent Peter Meyers.  The article is by Bret Victor and can be found at his website.  Here's the beginning: What does it mean to be an active reader? An active reader asks questions, considers alternatives, questions assumptions, and even questions the trustworthiness of the author. An active reader tries to generalize specific examples, and devise specific examples for generalities. An active reader doesn't passively sponge up information, but uses the author's argument as a springboard for critical thought and deep understanding. Do our reading environments encourage active reading? Or do they utterly oppose it? A...

With the release of the multimedia eBook version of Stephen Smokeís Cathedral of the Senses, the possibility of including a soundtrack inside a novel is now a reality. Book and music publishers can now creatively repurpose existing assets at a fraction of the cost of creating new ones, while providing opportunities for tapping into fresh revenue streams. For years authors and songwriters have dreamed of a day when music could be added as soundtracks for books. That day has now arrived and there are already further applications on the horizon that make use of the concept. Nobody believes that the prolific...

Mike Shatzkin's latest post looks at how designers and developers of illustrated ebooks for adults might want to take a somewhat modest approach to the format, eschewing multimedia bells and whistles for a classic fixed layout that lets the reader zoom in to view details: We have 500 years of experience figuring out what makes an illustrated book that the person holding it will find appealing and useful. Designers learned how to use spreads (placing content across two facing pages), which don’t exist on digital screens (unless they are artificially created there.) They learned how to use sidebars to hive off...