HarrisCom Blog

I read with interest Motoko Rich’s September 30 2009 New York Times article on Vooks–a hybrid “literary” form  “mashing together text, Web and  video features. “ 

She describes publisher Simon and Schuster’s  release of fitness and diet and beauty books that include videos on how to perform exercises or make skin lotion. Also,  Anthony Zuicker’s novel “Level 26, Dark Origins, published on paper, as an e-book and in audio, with a Web component that allows readers to watch brief videos adding to the plot.   

The online comments–101  of them–range mainly from skeptical to negative.

 John in New York writes, “Should we still call them books?” 

Val in Baltimore suggests we’ll soon see “A nobel prize…in viterature!” 

Mary the Trainer from Texas writes that the best part of  ”reading a novel is creating the scenes in one’s mind based upon what the author has written.” 

 According to  R Weber   in Park Slope,  ”Publishers –– all corporate hacks these days, with quotas to meet, bearing little resemble to publishers of old who thrived some years, got by in lean years –– have so little imagination & entrepreneurial drive, that idiocies like this are the best they can come up with. The truism proves true once more, “Pay peanuts, get monkeys.”

I scrolled through pages of comments  in hopes of weighing in–but found that the comment box had closed. 

What I would have said is that as an author, former radio and television producer, photographer, and musician,  I’m thrilled and energized by the prospect of being able to merge media in order to give readers/viewers a fuller experience than is available through any single medium on its own.

 In research Ithaca Diaries,  a book (or something) based on journals I kept in college in the late 1960s, I was delighted to be able to check my fading memories using video, photos and news accounts  I  readily found on line.  I’ve been struggling to pull my  journal entries, letters, photographs and drawings into a linear form–but now it will be possible to include video of the Doors from 1969, Bob Dylan’s 1969 concert on the Isle of Wight; old news footage of the Chicago and Democratic News Conventions, maybe even the shootings at Kent State.   Maybe I can even read from the diary entries, aloud–and share tapes of  my old professors and friends.

Now all I need to do is figure out how to do this and  how to find the time, what it will cost–and whether–and how–it will sell.

I’d welcome YOUR comments.

—Anita Harris

HarrisComblog is a publication of the Harris Communications Group of Cambridge, MA. We also publish New Cambridge Observer