Motoko Rich in the New York Times: In the age of the iPhone, Kindle and YouTube, the notion of the book is becoming increasingly elastic as publishers mash together text, video and Web features in a scramble to keep readers interested in an archaic form of entertainment.
On Thursday, for instance, Simon & Schuster, the publisher of Ernest Hemingway and Stephen King, is working with a multimedia partner to release four “vooks” which intersperse videos throughout electronic text that can be read — and viewed — online or on an iPhone or iPod Touch.
He lost me at archaic
Well, not really. People have been trying multimedia books for years, and sometimes it probably works. (Perfume? May the flying spaghetti monster protect us… and, actually, two companies lost millions betting on various forms of smell-o-vision.)
But there’s a huge difference between trying out new forms of multimedia and saying that print books are archaic. I wonder if Times music writers were ready to write off songs that weren’t music videos a few years back–after all, if you don’t “engage all your senses” how would you pay attention?
vooks??
vooks?? Please! They have to use another name. Instead of video+book, how about book+video.
Bideo.
Used in a sentence:
I am watching and reading this bideo for class tomorrow.