I’ve been working with eBooks for a while now, but in the past month I had the pleasure of producing an enhanced eBook of The Mistress of Nothing, using the text, an audio recording commissioned and produced by the CBC, exclusive videos of the author, and a slideshow featuring 1860s Egypt illustrations. The book is now available for sale on the iBookstore, and they featured it on their frontpage during Christmas. What an exciting promotion time frame! I will be interested to see how ‘enhanced’ or multimedia eBooks fare in the marketplace. Currently, many of the dedicated eReaders don’t support the HTML-5 features of the epub that are necessary to render the audio and video.
Will other eReaders catch up? Will reader demand (or lack thereof) speed or slow the process? And will it be non-fiction books that take this trend mainstream? In particular, I’m thinking of cookbooks by famous chefs that would feature embedded ‘how-to’ videos in-line with the recipe text. Many times I’ve googled a recipe, and then also looked up a video on how to perform a certain task. And I’m sure other how-to books, on home improvement, decorating, crafting, etc. can embrace this technology, once readers are ready and able to consume this content.
It’s all speculation from me at this point. I’m just happy to have produced a book with added features that I think book clubs and general readers will love to have!