Taking a Vook at Enhanced E-Books

Award-winning author Alina Adams, best known for writing the As the World Turns tie-in novels , Oakdale Confidential and The Man From Oakdale, and collaborating on the Guiding Light novel Jonathan’s Story, with Julia London (The Year of Living Scandalously), talks to us about enhanced e-books.

Look! What’s that over there? It’s a video! It’s a book! It’s a…Vook! Well, technically not, since Vook is a registered trademark, like Kleenex or Xerox, and should not be used in place of a generic product name.  But it sounded better than, “It’s an Enhanced Electronic Book!” Although an Enhanced Electronic Book is precisely what I’m talking about.

Best-selling romance author Jude Deveraux was the first to dip her pen into the brave new world of enhanced e-publishing with her October 2009 novella, Promises. A historical set in 18^th century Virginia, Promises featured the modern-day application of specifically shot video embedded in the electronic text, as part of the story. You can watch Promises’ trailer, here: http://vook.com/promises.html.

Opening with a video right on page one, it depicts a letter being written.  And trees.  Many, many trees.  A Southern manor house.  A shack.  A mysterious woman in white. Running.  A man in uniform.  A man in uniform with a woman in white. More running.  More trees.

After some written exposition, page 4 introduces us to the notion that there is an abandoned school-house on the plantation’s property that “isn’t fit for cohabitation.” A subsequent video shows us the same house in the dark, while a male voice whispers, “We have to hide the body.”  And thunder.  Lots of thunder.

The mystery set up by this :47 second video clip is quite compelling – in a Blair Witch Project sort of way.  As is the mystery set up by the first few pages of the written story. The problem is, they are the same mystery.  That seems redundant somehow.

Searching Amazon.com for “enhanced romance” brings up books by Vintage Romance, including Ethel Dell’s The Keeper of the Door, The Shadow of the East, and Greatheart, along with Edith Hull’s The Sheik.

Regarding the latter, in answer to the question, “What is an Enhanced Book?”, the publisher writes:

 This book includes the following:

– expert formatting for optimal display on your Kindle or Kindle app
– a hyperlinked table of contents
– a bibliography of Edith Hull’s fiction
– a biography of Edith Hull
– a filmography of Edith Hull’s works that were made into movies
– photographs of the The Sheik starring Rudolph Valentino

In other words, this enhanced work of fiction is enhanced with non-fiction extras, rather like those you’d find on a movie’s DVD.

That seems, so far, to be the dominant approach with enhanced e-fiction.  For instance, The Saturday Big Tent Wedding Party by Alexander McCall Smith, promises fifteen videos of the author talking about his series and his love of tea.  The Skull Ring, by Scott Nicholson, boasts the author’s feature film adaptation screenplay and two essays on the creative process. In each case, these are background supplements, not enhancements to the tale, itself.

As someone who is currently in the process of digitizing and enhancing my entire backlist from Avon, Dell, and Berkley, I am constantly struggling — trying to come up with enhancements to my romance and mystery novels that are actual enhancements, rather than informational adjuncts or a visual repetition of something already offered in the text.

Obviously, I am unspeakably excited about the prospect of mixed media narrative.  But – and this is undeniably only my opinion, as every other e-publisher seems to have taken a completely different tack – true innovation will only come when this technology is used to serve the storytelling and not the storyteller.

 

Alina Adams wrote Regency romances for Avon, contemporaries for DELL, soap-opera tie-ins for Pocket, and figure skating mysteries for Berkley Prime Crime. Her first enhanced e-book, Skate Crime: Multimedia retails for $.99 cents in Amazon’s Kindle store.