Enhanced Ebook University

One of the most common questions regarding enhancements for ebooks is whether they actually contribute to the text rather than distract from it. Many have [correctly] noted that these additions may serve only as marketing ploys, a justification to increase the price from the conspicuously low precedents set by publishers (or more accurately, Jeff Bezos). However, there are some enhancements that do undeniably enrich the overall user experience. Inkling, a tech start-up founded by former Apple employee Matt Mac Innis, recently announced some exceptionally contributory enhancements for a burgeoning category of ebooks – etextbooks.

On August 20^th, Inkling released an app that provides college textbooks for the iPad. Although only four titles from McGraw-Hill are currently available, Inkling has also announced “content development partnerships” with Cengage Learning, John Wiley & Sons and Wolters Kluwer. “The partnerships are centered around joint development of interactive content.”

The textbooks feature interactive quizzes, high-resolution images, searchable text, “tapable” key terms linking to an interactive glossary, and a social network through which users can post their notes online and “follow” other students’ and professors’ commentary. Each textbook also boasts individualized elements. For example, the app’s version of the Biology textbook (9^th edition) by Peter Raven, George Johnson, Kenneth Mason & Jonathan B. Losos has interactive 3-D images of molecules similar to the Elements app. Marketing (10^th edition) by Roger A. Kerin, Steven Hartley, and William Rudelius has examples of advertisements, diagrams and photographs in addition to video case studies integrated throughout the text. Also available are Experience Psychology by Laura A. King and The Micro Economy Today (12^th edition) by Bradley R. Schiller.

Particularly worth noting is the unique pricing. Prices start at $69.99 per book, approximately 30% off regular textbook prices. Better yet, Inkling plans to do for textbooks what iTunes did for albums, offering individual chapters for purchase instead of forcing consumers to buy the entire book. Professors who have been limited to a single textbook per subject—or forced to find ways to replicate source materials from numerous tomes—will potentially have the ability to offer their favorite materials digitally on a chapter by chapter basis, with students paying only for what they need at prices starting at $2.99 per chapter.

For more information about Inkling and to download the free app, visit www.inkling.com.

Contributed by Travis Alber, co-founder and president of BookGlutton.

Books are social. It’s rare to meet someone who reads and doesn’t care to tell anyone what he’s read. The phenomenon of social reading, whether it means pushing commentary out to social networks or spinning out conversations alongside the content, will grow significantly in the next five years.

Although there are technical and legal challenges with making books social, it’s a natural progression, and one readers will come to expect. Social reading is tied to this simple idea: people want to share what they’ve read. Technology is the great enabler for this — from Flickr to YouTube, blogs to Facebook, we’ve become a society that values sharing our collected thoughts and observations. After all, Facebook has 500 million members, and half of them update their personal details every day. [...]

Tie-in editions for book-to-movie and television adaptations are far from new. Since books have been adapted for the screen, a new paperback or hardcover edition of the book has been released to coincide with the premier. These editions often feature the stars of the movie on the cover, movie slogans, and impossible-to-miss “NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE” stickers (we’ll set the aesthetics of these cover designs aside). And why not capitalize on the movie marketing to re-invigorate book sales? It’s good business.

Now publishers are looking to cash in on the growing enhanced ebook trend with these tie-ins. Both Penguin and Random House have recently announced enhanced ebooks featuring clips from movie and TV adaptations. [...]

J.C. Hutchins is a successful New Media storytelling pioneer and marketer, perhaps best known for his innovative use of written fiction, podcasting, video and fan-fueled crowdsourcing to create multimedia thriller stories, which he often distributes online.

J.C.’s two novels — 7th Son: Descent and Personal Effects: Dark Art — were published in 2009 by St. Martin’s Press. In addition to writing novels and screenplays, J.C. crafts book- and online-based transmedia narratives. He recently collaborated as Head Writer with creative agency Campfire on an immersive transmedia experience for the Discovery Channel, to promote its program The Colony.

J.C.’s work has been featured by The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR’s Weekend Edition, Fast Company, the BBC, Time.com, Adweek.com, Mashable and BoingBoing.net. Learn more about the author at JCHutchins.net.

Here’s some enhanced e-book wisdom for my author colleagues: It all starts with you.

I’m approaching this from a fiction writer’s perspective, though non-fiction writers can benefit from this advice. Prepare your work’s enhanced ebook experience from the very beginning, as you conceive your book. As you plot and write, always remember that you’re now armed with countless opportunities to push your narrative beyond words. Take advantage of that, and the many emotionally-resonant strengths other media have over text.

Presently, enhanced content is often an afterthought, tacked on at the end of a production process as a blingy differentiator. We are now in an age of storytelling where that model is practically insulting to a reader. These days, there are few good reasons for creators to ignore the potential of integrating resonant multimedia elements into their stories. [...]

The article below was written by Michael Wolf and was originally published on GigaOM Pro. We thank them for allowing us to share it with you here.

The recent news from Amazon that e-book sales are already outpacing sales of regular books shows how fast the world of publishing is going from paper to bits. And while publishers fret about their future in a digital world, forward-thinking authors are embracing new opportunities to not only grab more of the revenue through digital publishing, but to also leverage the new capabilities of digital platforms and express themselves in ways that stretch beyond the printed word.

These newer forms of expression have been labeled “enhanced e-books” by some. The central idea behind the concept is the integration of other media to both enhance as well as even significantly alter the experience for the reader (or, perhaps a better word, media-consumer). So far, the actual number of enhanced e-books has been, surprisingly, few and far between, but this is quickly changing. [...]

Last week, Simon & Schuster released an enhanced ebook edition of Nixonland by Rick Perlstein. The ebook contains 27 historical video clips from CBS News and is available for both iBooks and the Kindle app on the iPhone and iPad.

This is the first enhanced ebook we’ve seen released across platforms, and it seems others are following suit. Titles originally released on one platform or the other are now taking advantage of both the Kindle app and iBooks media capabilities. (The William Styron enhanced ebooks, for example, released for the Kindle app in June are also now available in the iBookstore.)

It’s important to note that though these titles are available across platforms, they are still only available for iOS devices. Apple’s dominance in the enhanced ebook market is formidable to say the least. There is a lot of buzz about new tablets soon to come, but so far there’s no real competition for the iPad. And despite the increase of Android users, new enhanced ebooks are still only available for Apple devices.

In our webinar this Wednesday, Making Sense of Platforms for Enhanced Ebook Delivery, our panelists will discuss these issues and more. We will look at the rapidly changing device market (eInk, smartphones, and multi-purpose tablets), and the complicated relationships among those devices, operating systems, and ereading platforms. We will discuss the strategic decisions publishers must make in the face of these challenges:  How should publishers approach development of enhanced content for these competing platforms? What percentage of development effort might be reused between say, an iPad app and an Android app? Should they also be thinking about RIM and Microsoft?

Pablo Defendini of Open Road Integrated Media, Michel Kripalani of Oceanhouse Media, Inc., and Michael Wolf of GigaOM Pro will join Kirk Biglione at 1pm EDT/10am PDT. Registration is open.

On July 7th, Richard Curtis joined Kirk Biglione, Devereux Chatillon, John Schline, and Mike Shatzkin to discuss the changing rights models for enhanced ebooks. The downloadable archive of the webinar is available now.

In light of the rising tide of enhanced ebooks, the rights to produce these projects and the permissions required to include additional media are becoming increasingly important (and troublesome) for agents, authors and publishers. Last week on his blog, Richard tackled this topic once again.

We are republishing his blog post here in full. The original post and more of Richard’s insights can be found on E-Reads.com.

ONE-WORD EXPLANATION OF WHY ENHANCED E-BOOKS WON’T WORK

The word is “Greed”, says author Tony Woodlief in the Wall Street Journal.

Is that the right word? We can agree on it as a working hypothesis, but in truth the issues are far too complicated for such oversimplification, and unfortunately they’re about to become even more complicated. Fiendishly, maybe even insolubly, complicated.

[...]

Apple has just released the new iBooks version 1.1.1. Along with updates to the dictionary, PDF-viewing, and image options, the new version will now let readers “experience books that include audio and video.” This comes after Amazon’s June announcement of enhanced Kindle editions for the iPhone and iPad.

Previously, if an author or publisher wanted to include media in an iBook, they had to link to that content on the web. The special edition of David Baldacci’s Deliver Us from Evil , for example, included “links to a special web page” with video and audio rather than having that content embedded in the iBook itself. As with the Kindle announcement there was no corresponding information on how to actually embed media.

We have not yet found a sample of an enhanced iBook. Please let us know if you discover one, and share your thoughts here.

This week, Google announced the App Inventor for Android, a “visual programming language” that will let the uninitiated, Java-illiterate public create their very own Android apps. Skepticism and enthusiasm abound in near equal measure, but from where I sit, the potential implications for the app market and for book apps in particular are tremendous.

Though the actual program is not yet publicly available, anyone interested can request an invitation. In the same way that word processing software brought desktop publishing to the masses and visual html editors enabled anyone to create a webpage, the App Inventor promises to level the app playing field:  “To use App Inventor, you do not need to be a developer. App Inventor requires NO programming knowledge.” More experience, knowledge, and know-how will naturally mean the experts create more sophisticated apps, but easy access and low barriers to entry can drive a great deal of creativity and bring new people (and their talents and energy) to the market who would have otherwise thought app development too difficult.

[...]

The Bookseller reported today that Nick Cave’s novel The Death of Bunny Munro will be adapted into a television miniseries. A movie deal is also reportedly in the works.

Published by Canongate in 2009, Bunny Munro was developed into an enhanced ebook app through a partnership with Enhanced Editions. The app, available for the iPhone and iPod Touch, includes the full text of the book, an original soundtrack, the audiobook synchronized with the text, and videos of Cave reading excerpts.

In our E2BU webinar this week, “Changing Rights Models for Enhanced Ebooks”, we discussed the possibility that an enhanced ebook could prevent  future television and movie adaptation deals. Videos may interfere with dramatization rights, and interactive game elements could jeopardize later video game tie-ins.

It seems from today’s news that an enhanced ebook could have helped to promulgate a television deal. It certainly doesn’t seem to have hindered it. Nick Cave’s reading of the book, while dramatic, was not a dramatization. Where is the line and how clear are the contract terms? Vook produces dramatizations for some of their novels; these, though, are generally brief and do not portray the entire story. Do these excerpts negate future movie rights? Or, could it be that enhanced ebooks might help movie-makers see the cinematic potential in a story more clearly?