Are you ready for multimedia ebooks?
[Note to readers: this is my second post on the ebook revolution. In the first, I spoke to the advantages of ebooks over pbooks, but I didn’t mention the one potential advantage considered here. Enjoy!]
I’ve been an avid reader all my life, but I sense that there are fewer of us with each passing decade. That’s a unisex statement. When most people are just struggling to make ends meet, sometimes with more than one job, raise their children, and stay healthy, time for any entertainment can become scarce. But gender differences also influence the statistics. Women readers outnumber men, a positive development if you assume that this means that (1) men are sharing more in household duties, and/or (2) all the modern gizmos we have free up more leisure time for women, and/or (3) women are now socially and economically independent enough to enjoy quiet moments reading. It’s a negative development if it means that men are so addicted to computer games, streaming video, porn, or sports that sitting down to read a book is the last thing they’ll do. The idea that reading is something you had to do in school can make for a quick exit from a rewarding reader’s life almost as fast as math as well, for both men and women.
Let me posit that the ebook has the potential to change some of the negatives non-readers feel toward reading. While I’ll not be quick to experiment (I’m a traditional reader and writer), I know this potential exists. Even established writers like Deaver are experimenting. I’m not applauding his writing a novel in reverse (that’s just a strange and ungainly way of presenting the written word, of course), but his release of an audio-only book is interesting. It doesn’t go far enough, though. An ebook gives an author many opportunities for exploring multimedia. In particular, sight, sound, touch, smell, and the written word can be blended together in a single story. Who knows? Maybe we can add an odor app or a touch app to ereaders and tablet computers. I don’t know how many times I’ve written a gunfight scene. Even if the gun has a silencer, the sound is a better description than simply writing pfft! The odor of gunsmoke could be added too. In my new Mary Jo Melendez novel, there’ll be a fire scene. Heating up your ereader or tablet, adding the crackle of flames, and including the odor of a burning room could make that scene come alive.
Of course, similar additions could be made with video. Why even keep the written word? That’s a critical question. Hollywood’s great actors are ones who can raise an eyebrow, roll their eyes, or use other body language to let the movie-goer know what they’re thinking, but Hollywood generally falls on its face expressing the internal thoughts of film characters because movies are limited to sight and sound. Shakespeare often did it with soliloquys—that’s gone out of style on the silver screen, probably because Jack and Jill Q. Public hate Shakespeare. From readers, you’ll often hear, “The movie version wasn’t as good as the book.” The reason usually is that the movie doesn’t contain the written word. (Take the ending of American Sniper as a recent example. The few words at the end about how Chris Kyle died emphasized the irony of that death far better than visuals could.) Ebooks still have that advantage. The reader can know what a character is thinking—his point-of-view, in technical parlance—while other characters do not.
While I can imagine video being used in an ebook story, its use has another problem: visual media is too passive. If the reader is presented a clip of character X buying a gun, that visual record of X writes over your mind’s-eye view of character X. If you have developed your own image from the hints given by the author’s descriptive narrative, that overwrite could be a nasty shock. If not, your image of that character will be determined by that video clip for the rest of the book. In other words, the reader’s participation in the creative process could be so minimized that he or she simply becomes a passive observer.
That last negative would particularly affect authors like me, those whom I call minimalist writers. I’m a champion of the Goldilocks Principle—a writer should provide a guide to readers about what a character looks like but not so much that he blocks their ability to create their own personal image. I suppose the same could be said about a character’s voice, smoothness or roughness of hands, or body odors, from perfumes and colognes to cleanliness. I guess I’d watch out for those sound, odor, and touch apps too, not just the visual, in other words. Of course, there’s no reason the Goldilocks Principle can’t apply there as well. The odor app might feature a vixen’s perfume but not give away the brand, unless the author is selling product placements in his novel.
The opportunities for multimedia ebooks are boundless. I predict there will be a lot of experimentation. I can imagine my general reaction, though—I’ll probably turn the apps off. I’d still just want to sit down and quietly read an entertaining or educational book (those two characteristics aren’t exclusive), so the writer damn well should still be a master of the written word. But you might want to leave the apps on. Or, be selective about which ones you leave on. That kind of freedom in writing boggles my mind. Deaver, take notice!
In elibris libertas….
