Enchanced Books on the Ipad

You watch this video of Alice in Wonderland digitally enhanced for the ipad and you are not only left drooling for one of these devices but also wondering just how much the technology is indeed going to change the face of books as we know them. At least I am.

We have been in negotiations with our publisher of Lick Your Plate! Celebrity Chefs Cook for their Dogs and Yours about electronic rights and what we learned may surprise you. Yes, we garnered a substantial portion of any proceeds from the sale of a digital version of our book but we also discovered that the sale is not going to take place that quickly. Put simply, publishers are very slow in jumping on the electronic bandwagon--much slower than authors.

For one, each book that is available on the ipad is a separate application. That is you buy the Alice in Wonderland digital version from the App store just like you buy an application for your phone. That's right. One app for each book. And in the beginning, which is now, there are not too many apps.

They are expensive to produce and until the dust settles and publishers determine whether or not they are profitable, the only ones that are going to exist are those that lend themselves naturally to the medium. Which would probably mean picture books with lots of action, a la Alice in Wonderland.

Not that they aren't the wave of the future--they truly are, much more so than the black and white Kindle versions of straight copy--but that they aren't for every book. Books that are mostly words are just as good on a Kindle or a Nook as they are on the ipad--they are basically PDF versions of copy. But books that move, talk, connect to larger things and inspire interactivity on the part of the reader--well those are still in development.

All of which is to say I still am going to get the G3 version of the ipad when it comes out but that I don't think I will be buying many books on it--at least not novels. I will probably use it more as a lap top than an enhanced phone but all of this remains to be seen.

What it does mean, however, is that cool versions of enhanced books are not going to be that plentiful--at least not yet.