Curling up with hybrid books, videos included

But in the age of the iPhone, Kindle and YouTube (and declining traditional publishing revenues), the notion of the book is becoming increasingly elastic as publishers mash together text, video and web features in a scramble to keep readers interested in an archaic form of entertainment. Simon & Schuster, the publisher of Ernest Hemingway and Stephen King, is working with a multimedia partner to release four "vooks," which intersperse videos throughout electronic text that can be read - and viewed - online or on an iPhone or iPod Touch. "There is no question that these new media are going to be superb at engaging and interesting the reader," said Maryanne Wolf, a professor of child development at Tufts University and author of "Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain." But, she added, "Can you any longer read Henry James or George Eliot? Do you have the patience?"

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/01/books/01book.html

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For more than 500 years the book has been a remarkably stable entity: a coherent string of connected words, printed on paper and bound between covers.

 
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