Embedded video to liven up HarperCollins e-book original
Lady Amelia’s Secret Lover, an e-book original from the Avon imprint at HarperCollins, will feature pop-up videos of author Victoria Alexander discussing plot and characters in different parts of the story. Fittingly, she’s a former award-winning TV news reporter.
Avon will release the $3.99 e-book on September 4 in Microsoft Reader format.
Romance readers are among the most tech-smart customers, says Theresa Horner, director of e-book operations at HarperCollins.
Sci-fi and self-help next
Other genres in line for the video experiments at HarperCollins, reports Publishers Weekly, are sci-fi and self help.
Such genres, especially the how-to variety, will be great use of video. My big concern would be this. When is a book a book, and when is it just a skeleton holding video clips together? The HarperCollin video books will clearly be books if the videos are just pop-ups. But will the future be different?
Performing vs. writing
Another issue is, Will it matter when performing ability counts as much as writing ability, or maybe even more someday? Will ugly but gifted writers, at least of romances, especially if they have rotten voices, be doomed to failure?
How would Jane Austin (not a looker, even if the covers of recent reprints spiffed her up a bit) have fared? Will professional actors someday play authors?
As a matter of fact, I believe that’s actually happened in the past in the romance world. Anyone remember when?
The cost and “big vs. small” issues for publishers
The more books rely on video—both in number and in the amount of video used per book—the higher will be the costs for small publishers. Good production values for video are more expensive to achieve than writing.
Still another concern would be: Will video in books mean less money or more money for writers? Will we see fewer books from publishers because of the extra costs—but more money for the writers creating them? Will acting talent be reward as much as writing talent?
Plot of Victoria Alexander’s vidbook: “Lady Amelia Hathaway thought she had the perfect husband, perfect marriage, perfect life. Until one day she discovered happily ever after wasn’t quite what it was cracked up to be. But she was not about to give up perfect without a fight!”
The technical considerations: I wonder how well the books with pop-up video will work on underpowered cellphones and PDAs. Perhaps HarperCollins is going with the Microsoft Reader format because even the portable version of Windows requires a certain amount of power and includes a video player.
The domain-spec angle: Someone has already registered vidbook.com.
Related: DearAuthor item on the Avon vidbook. Like DA’s Jane, I think vido is cool, but experimentation with an audio or podcast without DRM would be still cooler. No DRM of the text, or just social DRM, would also be a noble experiment.
August 23rd, 2007 at 5:12 pm
David, you raise a good point about videos in e-books.
It is important to make sure the author’s message is not diluted and that the reading experience is not sublimated by video. With Victoria Alexander’s Lady Amelia’s Secret Lover we kept the videos short and believe we have maintained the flow of the reading experience.
Of course not every book and/or author is designed for this type of video treatment or even for this type of product. In this particular instance the author was looking to have some fun with her readers and with the content. We felt this was a fun way to bring the author closer to her readers and I think we succeeded.
In future projects we will experiment with the placement, length and structure of the videos to keep the text dominant.
As for the technology, we did not use the Microsoft Reader. We used the DNL Reader created by DNAML. It allowed us to easily embed video content and to create a viral distribution model which doesn’t rely on a storefront to purchase the content. The “buy†experience is contained within the book. We didn’t really intend for this product to be readable on all manner of portable devices but ideally we will move in that direction.
Walk before you run…
August 23rd, 2007 at 6:34 pm
Theresa re vidbook: Big thanks for the informative and thoughtful answer. The HarperCollins site says: “Available E-Book Formats: Microsoft Reader.” So it’s interesting to learn that DNAML’s format will be used to allow viewing of the videos with the text. Yes, that’s an ingenious viral distribution model for the format. Thanks for the info. In this case I can understand the use of the special format. Best of luck with the experiment. For people who want to know more about DNAML-related things, go here. Reader is downloadable here. David