TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

PalmAddict: Wrong on interactive e-books but helpful on other topics

By David Rothman

Remember the Kurt Vonnegut story where you must wear a mask if you’re beautiful and carry around lead weights if you’re trim?

I’ve used Harrison Bergeron before to warn against Draconian DRM. And now I’ll summon up the parallel again in reply to attacks by Palm Addict’s Peter Wolchak and Jennifer Chappell against interactivty.

No, we shouldn’t do interactivity for its own sake, but we also shouldn’t try to resist e-book standards that facilitate its spread. So, Peter and Jennifer, whether or not you’ve heard of OpenReader, here are some examples of useful interactivity:

• Literary classics. Enjoy the book the old-fashioned way, then switch on the links and enjoy forums and blogs embedded in the work–and viewable online as well as off. Reach your own conclusions, then discuss the writing with others. Become a better writer by reading their own takes on character, plot, description, dialogue and the rest.
• Romance novels. Share fantasies with other readers.
• Novels with reader-voted endings and other games-like features. Let the market decide that. Meanwhile, if you’re going to merge fiction and games, do it right.
• Political book clubs. Join an annotation group and dissect not just the books of friends but also those of foes. Al Franken and Rush Limbaugh types can annotate each other in depth rather than just shouting insults over talk radio.
• How-to books, including the computer variety. I’ve perped my share, and I can’t imagine how much more valauble they’d have been if my readers could have used them to share tips directly with each other. Same concept could apply to manuals that came with equipment–not just computers but washing machines or railroad engines.
• Medical books. If you’re a doctor, imagine the opportunity to enhance and even correct the information there–perhaps even saving lives.

But how could you see all this action happening on your little handheld screen? Well, one way to accomplish this would be through pop-up windows, clearly separate from the main text. And if you didn’t want to use a virtual keyboard or a tiny physical KB to make entires, you could use your desktop instead. Or maybe in some cases you would offer audio annotations.

Hey, Addicts, have I made my case for interactivity of various kinds? You really should reconsider. Meanwhile, via MobileRead, here are some PA links I enjoyed:

• E-book sales growing, but price is still sucking the life out of the market.
• UMASS Nursing Students Gain Confidence, Experience with Skyscape Medical References for PDAs.
• E-Books are going to be more and more popular as time goes by.
• Aquapac Phone Case for the Treo.
• Is Palm missing the multimedia boat?

“Come on palm, time to get the finger out before the multimedia device waves you a cheery goodbye!” says the latter post. Same observation might be made about Palm and interactivity. We’ll welcome Palm’s participation in the OpenReader Consortium where we look ahead to the future potential of e-books rather than wishing for a Bergeron-style scenario.

First-hand, I’ve seen the benefits of interactivity. Readership of the TeleBlog multiplied after I added comments from readers, and the numbers increased still more when I put excerpts from the comments on the home page. I can see the same happening to books. If we want e-books to be more than a toy-sized industry, they should be more dynamic–more Weblike. Interactivty is key.

Detail: As noted, PalmAddict did not mention OpenReader. But as one of the ringleaders, I hope that it will–in a positive way. Our work will be simpler if people can grasp the potential of sophisticated OpenReader implementations compared to the proprietary programs of today.