Our platform focus continues this fine Sunday with the e-Book Echo, our take on the week in the digital publishing world. A new form of e-book is picking up steam in the digital publishing world, and I for one am not sure about this new style. The vook is a digital book that combines video to weave a story that immerses the “reader”. Vooks are designed to be consumed using one of two methods — through a web browser on any computer and through the iPhone app on a phone.
Early testers of vook “reading” are having mixed reactions; while the combination of the written word with slick videos might be a good way to get information from “how-to” books, the videos create a distraction while applied to literature. I haven’t tried to consume a vook myself, but I know that one of the joys I get from reading e-books is how my imagination builds the characters as I read a good story. By the end of a good story in e-book form I have created the major characters and locations in my mind, and that is one of the biggest joys of reading. That would be spoiled for me if I had someone else’s imagination intrude on reading a good book. This is one of the reasons I’ve never gotten into audiobooks; I prefer imagining how the characters sound. I don’t see a vook in my future.
The New York Times is shouting dire warnings about e-book piracy. They are claiming that as e-books increase in popularity, and everyone admits that is the case, that piracy will become a huge problem for the industry. The author correlates what will happen with e-books to what has occurred in the music industry, and blames piracy for the downfall of that business. I have only one thing to say about this: when e-books are outlawed, only outlaws will have e-books.
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