Penguin has some interesting plans for the iPad.
They’re eschewing the .epub format in favour of applications. Each book will become an individual app, to include appropriate non-text-based content like videos, games, audio and whatever else fits. This is less about books per se as it is the intersection between books and toys, calendars, maps, IM, productivity apps, etc.
I’m halfway through (ok, a quarter of the way through) David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest at the moment, and I can see that this new medium - and that’s what it is, a new medium - is perfect for his particular style of footnotes, endnotes, clauses, sub-clauses and asides. Consider this brief excerpt from this brilliant article on designing and typesetting a dfw book:
Wallace’s idea was to have leaders and labels, like a diagram. He wanted something that looked like hypertext rollovers that were immediate and at hand. I thought this whole thing might be a bit much for me to design. It seemed like it might be a full-time job. I sent it off to one of my favorite designers, who shot me an email back saying something along the lines of “There is not enough money in the world to make me do this.”
I’m completely convinced that Wallace would have been all over this this new medium.
There will clearly be a cost involved - this isn’t a value-add. But I’d happily pay more for novels featuring video introductions by the author and integrated reading groups, and non-fiction featuring extra commentary and context. The more senses involved, the richer the experience and the understanding. When I have children, I want them to read all those Dorling-Kindersley books and have the concepts come to life in front of their eyes.
And how much fun will it be? I mean, really: take a look at that Spot book and tell me you don’t want to be a child again.
As an aside, there will be a generation that grows up with the iPad (and iPod/iPhone, and other app-led devices) as their definition of what a computer is. And when they have to use our PCs and Macs they’ll wonder what all these goddamn files are for and why we cared about Flash and windows (with both upper- and lower-case w) and taskbars and start menus and all that stuff that gets in the way of connecting our brains with our computers. Because that’s ultimately where we want to be.
