What I’m actually curious about is the “sustainability” of this approach, though – books have the tendency to stick around. Sure there will be reprints, and yes, they might be changed, but the fact of the matter is, the more of these are sold in the original run, the more of these are going to be out there with those codes in them for a very, very long time.

…how long are the servers going to be up?

Or, asked more directly, for how long are the codes going to be worth anything?
If I borrow this novel from a friend in five years, would I still get that content?

And how does that content tie in with the book? The article sort of implies (by explicitly stating it’s not just a novel, but a “digi-novel”) that the additional content is relevant to the story – what if I reach the end of a chapter ten minutes after going on a bus, and won’t have a chance to check the digital content for hours? Would that mean I miss part of the story, and won’t get the next chapter until I went online?

And what about e-book versions of the novel? Would those at least include direct http links to the content? Would they have a different feature set, or come pre-bundled with some of the other stuff?
Would it just be a PDF of the book, ignoring all the additional possibilities?

I’m not criticizing the idea at all (all hail the digital age), I’m just curious about the details of how this will work in practice, given the mismatching limits and reach of books and the web.

MM – Yup, we need to roll out new features on LG15. You’ll first see the features on harpersglobe.com and then we’ll need to do some work on the backend to get the features up on LG15. That may take a little time but we certainly haven’t forgotten about the LG15 community.