Via my good friend Jeff Stanger at the Center for Digital Information, **Al Gore** has a new book coming out, in the form of a super-jazzy iPad app, full of not just text but audio, video, and interactive graphics. Here's the trailer:
Al Gore's Our Choice from Push Pop Press on Vimeo.
Is this the future of books? Well, not exactly. Here's the thing about books: most of them are put together by one person who doesn't happen to be a celebrity or a former vice president, typing in front of his or her computer for a year or two. Then the book is sold to a publisher for an extremely modest advance, then edited and printed, whereupon the publisher may decide that they aren't going to put any marketing effort behind it, and it sells a few thousand copies and fades from memory. According to Wikipedia, there were 275,000 books published in the U.S. in 2008 alone. Which isn't to say this isn't a terrific use of advanced technology to tell a story. But if I had to guess at how much "Our Choice" cost to put together, I'd throw a dart and say half a million dollars. I could be way off in either direction, but you're talking about the involvement of research assistants, graphic artists, data design specialists, filmmakers, programmers -- a lot of people and a lot of resources. Obviously, only a tiny fraction of the books that get written every year will be seen to justify this kind of up-front investment. One place it can and should be used (and will) is in textbooks, where it makes much more sense to have every student have a tablet in his/her backback with interactive, up-to-date content, instead of a heavy stack of textbooks that are years out of date.
