With the advent (and growing popularity) of eBooks, I’m seeing more and more articles about how much “better” they can be, because they have the option to be interactive … videos, music, glossaries … all sorts of little extra goodies to help “enhance” your reading experience, rather like listening to the Director’s commentary on a DVD of your favorite movie.
How do you feel about that possibility? Does it excite you in a cutting-edge kind of way? Or does it chill you to the bone because that’s not what reading is ABOUT?
For starters, I don’t think that the ebook with extras are “better”.
I sort of tend to agree with both of these attitudes. It can be exciting to get something extra with an ebook, such as a map or glossary or list of the characters. Or maybe even a short story centering on a secondary character. On the other hand, I think that’s really unfair to start expecting the extras. After all, authors have to already be their own PR person/publicist and copy writers. Are they now expected to be poets, map makers, composers, artists, programmers… When are they going to have the time to write the actual books?
So yeah, on the whole I tend to think that expecting books to be multimedia events is going in the wrong direction. On the other hand, ebooks can allow freedom of expression to those who might have the talent and interest to do all or some of those things.
Mervi's Book reviews 
June 18, 2011 at 4:14 am
I’m really excited about these possibilities, but cautiously so. My excitement is in how much easier it will be to read. The multimedia opportunities are amazing w/ the new tablets and such! Having the ability to cross-promote could be beneficial as well (new music artists having music as a soundtrack for an e-book – the music offering some mood to what’s being read and, of course, can be turned on or off). As a reader of epic fantasy with a load of characters, having a ready hot-link to an image of the character or a short bio for the character as I read would be handy. I HATE reading a book and having to flip back to find out what transpired w/ this character awhile ago – how cool would it be to have all the previous events in the story bulleted up to the point you click the character’s name?
Now, your concern for writer’s not having time to write is founded, but I feel many, most, or all of these jobs would be farmed out to other talents and given e-books low overhead and minimal middle-men, it would keep them comparable to what is market price.
But as w/ anything, I don’t imagine this will be happening anytime soon. It would take a lot of work and continued leaps in tech, but I do believe it will happen with varying degrees of success.