Thursday, April 14, 2011

The Possibilities Are Endless

I watched an interview this morning on Good Morning America with author Jane Green about her new book  A Modern Fairy Tale: William, Kate, and Three Generations of Royal Love.  They're calling it an "enhanced e-book." I hadn't heard this term before and was interested to see what it was all about and I was totally blown away. I guess if I'd thought about it, it would have made sense that this was coming. (Am I the last person to find out about this?)

As an "enhanced" e-book it allows you to expand photos to get a better look at them, bring up videos to watch as well as interviews. For example, you can watch the engagement of interview of Charles and Diana as well as of William and Kate. Videos of William as a baby with his parents, etc. In the interview Green referred to it all as "very Harry Potter-ish." Indeed it is!

While I don't think this will affect novels all that much, can you imagine what it might do for textbooks? And at $6.39 on Amazon, this book is extremely affordable which is something I think college students (and their parents) would surely embrace. Spending fifteen dollars for a textbook rather than $170, and to have these types of enhancements available would be a boon to the educational system. You could see a math problem worked out step by step in a video, watch videos of important historical events, scientific experiments, and the humanities could go wild.

Childrens books too could move to a new level on some books. And with the I-Pads and other such devices I can only imagine all that could happen with these opportunities. Pretty heady stuff.

Yes, the possibilities are endless. It's an exciting time we live in!

No comments:

Post a Comment