View From the Publishing Trenches

I keep hearing people touting the wonderful possibilities inherent in e-books. Things like links to other content (embedded or online somplace). Video. Audio. Even game-like interaction.

But I really have to wonder how many people truly want that kind of thing in their e-books.

I don’t know about you, but if I want to read a book…well, I want to read a book. Not watch a movie. Or listen to audio. Or jump around to other documents, books, or websites.

If I want to read something that has other options associated with it — links to audio, video, games, etc. — I’d rather do it online.

I can’t help but think that the people making all the noise about multimedia content are the techno-geeks, not the typical book reader.

The biggest advantages to e-books are immediate order fulfillment and portability. The more bells and whistles you stuff into the “book” the less immediate and portable it becomes.

I generally find most educational and informative videos to be primarily consumers of my time. I can read the material faster, skimming over stuff I already know or don’t care about, and retain it longer.

Also, consider that people are resisting most (although certainly not all) high-priced e-books. I can’t prove it with statistics, but it seems that price resistance is increasing. If you invest more time and money in production costs for spiffy, multimedia e-books, you’re going to have to charge more for them to achieve a reasonable ROI.

Will the additional (multimedia) content convince people that the book is, therefore, more valuable?

Or will this just be another flash-in-the-pan fad that takes off and then fades away?