Arguing about the iPad versus the Kindle isn’t just for the tech press anymore. Now the debate has even made it to the New York Review of Books, with an article by Sue Halpern, ‘The iPad Revolution.’
One of the things I keep hearing about is enhancing e-books with multimedia. I admit a bias: That word sends me looking for a link to somewhere else. ‘Multimedia’ evokes every website that wastes my time and slows Firefox to a crawl with bad Flash animation. It has a whiff of marketers who want to make everything more like TV, the better to sell me stuff.
People who read for pleasure generally want to ‘get lost in the pages,’ as Halpern puts it. The last thing we want is distractions that pull us out of the story, fiction or nonfiction. Certainly I would not pay more to get an e-book larded up with video clips of the author typing away, or whatever. And good multimedia costs money to produce.
Of course there are exceptions. Graphic novels obviously depend as much on the images as the words, perhaps more. The same for some kinds of nonfiction pleasure reading, say books about art.
And I can think of a few other possibilities. A hundred years ago even adult fiction often had a few illustrations, beautifully done sketches. If e-book economics allows a return of that charming custom, not many readers will complain.
As always, content is king. And content isn’t just information, it is information we actually want, such as words to get lost in, with perhaps an graceful sketch now and then. But don’t expect us to pay for needless clutter.