Is It A Book, Is It A Movie...No, It's Movie-Book!
Although you'll find a few links to check out iPad's latest contender, the Kindle Fire, what is more intriguing than the latest enhancements for eReaders is the recent announcement of Booktrack's synchronized music integration into The Power of Six by Pittacus Lore, published by Harper Collins Children’s Books.
Many eBook writers shy away from multimedia publishing, preferring instead to stay with straight text, largely because of the limitations of eReaders in handling multimedia...that is, until Kindle Fire and iPad started taking books into the future. An eBook that features multimedia is not an eBook, they say. It's...an app. It's something that works online only, maybe something you subscribe to, but not download to your eReader.
Well, you can definitely download The Power of Six to your iPhone as an app. So much for online only. What IS an eBook with multimedia? Can we continue to call an eBook an eBook knowing that now it may feature multimedia? Maybe an iBook? No, Apple calls it's eBooks, iBooks along with the iBookstore. What about audio books? We thought of audio books as a blend of the written word with actor's narration. In fact, iPad and iPhone versions of A Charlie Brown Christmas includes "Linus and Lucy" as part of the soundtrack and narration by Peter Robbins, the original voice of Charlie Brown.
Old school book lovers have argued eBooks will never sell because you can't hold the book in your hands. Even though some reviews complain Amazon skimped on memory, being able to hold 8GB of memory in your hands means being able to hold...how many books will the Kindle Fire hold?
When an eBook features a soundtrack, animation, links, and especially video, the need for more memory significantly increases. Don't worry. eReaders will feature a terabyte soon enough...and that's a hell of alot of movie-books, or whatever you call them.
Another common complaint, you know, "The movie wasn't as good as the book," is that reading is supposed to be about stimulating the imagination. When we read we see the movie in our minds. I personally like the idea of hearing the sound of a bomb, a kiss, a dog's bark, while I'm reading and I frequently like to listen to music while I read. Given the reported sales threat the Kindle Fire is giving the iPad, how we choose to absorb media--straight text or multimedia--is a matter of preference.
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