Can We Add Even More Value To E-Books?

I was sitting in the doctor’s office waiting. Inactivity alarms me. If I’m not doing something, I know I’m wasting my time, and the feeling increases proportional to the importance of the event before which I am attempting to kill said time.

To get my mind off the irritation of being made to wait patiently in order to obtain the reward of doing something faintly unpleasant, I slid my phone out and pulled up my Kindle app. I’ve been practicing the glorious skill of reading since age 3, so dropping into a different space and time is effortless and immediate, and feels like it has always been.

In the middle of the reverie, I got that nagging feeling that I had lost track of time, been gone too long….that feeling is almost always wrong, and it was wrong again. I looked up at the clock and noted with disappointment that what had felt like an hour in my immersive universe had consumed an entire 5 minutes of objectively measurable reality. Sigh.

I love to read things. Anything that has words. Books of any genre. Newspapers. Essays. Road signs. (Cereal boxes. I read a lot of cereal boxes as a child.) Electronic books have given me effortless access to my drug of choice at any time, in any place. I don’t believe that they have or will any time soon supplant physical books entirely, but I do use them as a supplement.

They’re great for research. I can pull one up on my computer while I’m writing and then search and annotate passages for later reference. And some people probably enjoy searching and annotating pleasure reads too, but not me, and I think I’m more typical. I don’t buy e-books very often because the value of a portable electronic text, for me, isn’t equal to the value of a physical book, especially when they typically cost nearly as much.

When I buy a physical book, I’m buying the paper and the ink and the artwork on the cover along with the words inside. I’m buying a physical, tangible experience. When I buy an e-book, I’m just getting the words, and the more extreme portability. To get me to prefer an e-book, you the publisher must add more value. I may be greedy for wanting more, but I’m sure I’m not the only one.

The challenge is that when it comes to the pleasure reading experience itself, I don’t really want stuff getting in the way of my reading experience. Multimedia is just a distraction. For a child, perhaps, it has value, but not so much for me. I don’t even like when books do that thing where they put several pages of pictures in the middle of the book. Suddenly the words stop, even in the middle of a sentence, and I’m jolted out of my experience by the necessity of either absorbing a bunch of images that are now somewhat out of context, or flipping past them to get back to the words, leaving behind a vague intention to return and look at the pictures later, an intention rarely fulfilled.

I’m a passionate consumer of physical books, but I’m not a Kindle device owner, nor am I a knowledgeable consumer of e-books. I admit to having done no particular research on the topic I’m discussing, but for now I’ll claim this as a casual conversation, motivated by curiosity. I’d like the designers of an e-book to find a way to incorporate relevant, in-context “extras” without pulling me from my experience in the process, and here are some things that occurred to me, unprompted by any sort of actual knowledge of what might have been done already in these areas.

Color and Font Options

I think if I were reading the right kind of book, I’d enjoy the atmosphere provided by a font or a page background specific to the text, as long as it was still very readable. If I came to a part that was a handwritten letter, it could have a handwriting-inspired font, for example, and a parchment-colored or textured background.

Maps

For the epic fantasy or the historical novel particularly, or any novel that takes place in a lot of different locations whose positions on a map are relevant, I’d enjoy having a easily-referenced map follow me through the story. For example, I know that personally I got very disoriented all the time while reading The Lord of the Rings. There’s a map at the front, but in order to flip back and study it I would have had to severely interrupt my reading experience, and it wasn’t worth it. For the e-book, I’m picturing a thumbnail at the beginning of each chapter or section that begins in a new location that, if clicked, loads a broader map that puts the location of the action into perspective. If someone made a e-book of The Lord of the Rings that did that, I would absolutely spend my money on it.

Images/Video

As noted above, I’m not entirely convinced that images and video add enough value to a text to make them worth the trouble, especially for a pleasure read. But I might be more willing to give them a chance if they were properly in context and fit into the flow of my reading. Have an interview with the author or a video introduction that you want me to watch? That might be cool, but be sure to do it at the beginning, or the end, when I’m already out of the story. Have some supplementary images of some kind? You can put them on the pages as illustrations I suppose, but don’t make them rude: Don’t make them take up the whole page, and ideally don’t even make me have to look too hard at them. If I do have to look hard at them, put them in a place where I’m already out of flow, like the beginning of a chapter or the end of a section.

There is nothing worse to me than reading happily along and encountering an image off to the side in the middle of a chapter. What do I do with this? Sometimes I get so distracted I end up pulling myself away mid-sentence to take it in, but even if I wait until the end of the paragraph I have a feeling of severe disorientation. This is advice I’d like to apply even to physical books: Don’t interrupt me while I’m reading.

“Choose Your Own Adventure” Books

This doesn’t actually appeal to me personally, but e-books would be a perfect medium for chose-your-ending style books. It looks like this has already been done (example: http://www.cyoa.com/pages/ebooks) and I’d be curious as to how well they are implemented, and how popular and well liked they are. I read a few books of that type when I was a child and they didn’t quite work for me, but I think one of the biggest problems was that having to flip around back and forth in the pages of the physical book was too disruptive.

So Can It Be Done?

I have so much affection for literature that I feel that if we must inevitably leave printed books behind, we shouldn’t do it without preserving the immersive reading experience. Utilizing the new possibilities that come with digital media, while still letting me simply get lost in a good book…it’s a challenge that fascinates me. Can it be done? I’ll be wildly interested to find out.