Why would you want video and animation in a book?

Ever since Apple's iPad was introduced last month everyone has started writing about how magazines and books should now have embedded videos and animations.  The more I've given thought to that I keep getting to the same question: Why?

While I can understand the desire to have user controlled animation in the advertising of a car, so that the user can swivel it around and see what it looks like from all sides, I could not see why I would want anything of the sort in a book.  In non-fiction titles you could add interactive charts, which could prove to be interesting and even animations for the explanations of something like physics.

Read more »

Gibraltar series: Three good science fiction books

After eleven years I've finally completed the Gibraltar series by Michael McCollum. I enjoyed all three books and actually read them quickly.  Eleven years was just the interval between the first and last book of the series were published.

Now that you don't have to wait as long to read the last book, I highly recommend this series.  The first book, called Gibraltar Earth tells of humanity's first encounter with an extraterrestrial intelligence and of the chilling revelation that one species dominates all others in hundreds of thousands of worlds. Those who won't submit are summarily destroyed.

In Gibraltar Earth the humanity takes its first steps in confirming the information that the have been given is in fact true.  While in the following two books the story plays out in ways which are not totally unexpected and that can sometimes be quite predictable, the reading is light and generally entertaining. 

Gibraltar Earth was one of the very first ebooks I purchased, back in 1999.  I read that first novel in paper form, after printing it out on an HP Laser printer.  Gibraltar Sun, the second book in the series was read on my notebook's screen while the last title, Gibraltar Stars, was read on my iPod.  I guess this progression shows just how far ebooks have come in these eleven years.

Publishers shouldn’t bury their heads in the sand…

I found an  interesting article on how Magazines and Newspapers are responding to the iPad and Apple’s revenue sharing model on Ars Technica. Reading this article got me reconsider how I view what their position on the impact of the iPad should be.

To me it always seemed obvious that publishers of magazines and newspapers should welcome and embrace a device which might help regain relevance to their properties, but it seems that they don’t agree.

Read more on iPad Watcher...