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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...

Gizmodo reports that Ubimark has published a special edition of Around the World in 80 Days that includes QR codes that work with a free iPhone app to serve as links to a website for on-line footnotes and discussion. Just point the iPhone at the code, and the link opens on your phone. Print books with e-footnotes is an interesting idea with a lot of potential. We all know that printed books aren’t going away—but something like this could serve to provide them with the easy-linking advantage of e-books. Of course, it’s a little funny that the...