Simon & Schuster is releasing four "vooks", hybrids that intersperse video throughout electronic text that can be viewed on the Web, the iPhone or the iPod Touch. Instead of simply translating the traditional book onto digital form, the vook adds features such as videos demonstrating how to perform an exercise or make homemade skincare potions. You know, high brow stuff. But there are also vook novels (or "digi-novels") in the works that will feature video segments of up to 90 seconds which will advance the plot. There are also plans to "enhance" books by music or even perfume.
"It really makes a story more real if you know what the characters look like", according to Amazon reviewer Fred L. Gronvall. Really? Maybe it's just me but I thought the whole point of a novel was to exercise the reader's (user's?) ima-gi-na-tion.
A less cringe-inducing trend is the participatory novel, in which readers' feedback help construct subplots and new characters for following chapters. "The Amanda Project", a recently released young-adult mystery series invites readers to post their comments on a web site, which then informs what paths the characters will take in subsequent volumes.
How to use new media hybridity, though, to help us understand Lacan, Hegel and Derrida? Or, will the Lacans, Hegels and Derridas of the (near) future formulate their concepts in ways that lend themselves more easily to their hybrid digital presentation and dissemination?
this last question is an interesting one and sounds like a good terrain for an imap project, no?
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