When will books benefit from a further of multimedia magic? Narnia might reason the answer.

HarperCollins has released an enhanced e-book for C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader in allege of a movie adaptation of the same. The book is the perfect exam box for the promises and flaws of a enhanced e-book market.

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader isn’t an app, though the multimedia EPUB book. EPUB is as tighten as you have to a universal e-book customary. This right away makes it multi-platform as well as multi-device — no need for separate iOS or Android code, or store approval. All you need is an application upon those platforms that can read EPUB, as well as the touchscreen. EPUB books can’t be review upon a Kindle, though a Kindle isn’t the multimedia touchscreen device possibly, so that’s no detriment anyways.

The book is accessible for iBooks right away, as well as according to the press recover, “will be available upon the series of handheld multimedia readers as well as touchscreen devices” — read: a stirring Nook Color, as well as possibly alternative Android tablets too. On all available platforms, it will cost $10.

Sometimes, enhancing e-books with multimedia seems similar to the resolution in search of the complaint. Generally, readers aren’t clamoring for extended books. Writers and publishers don’t regularly assimilate them, as well as there isn’t regularly good calm to put in them.

Lewis’s Narnia books are dissimilar. They have the well-established readership as well as have been broadly popular with both adults as well as young kids. They’ve already left transmedia, spinning off games as well as cinema; the writer’s estate is peaceful to develop as well as sanction brand-new media, and companies similar to HarperCollins as well as Disney have the tools as well as incentives to develop them. The serial inlet of a books, in turn, gives the books smoothness and room to develop.

What’s more, the visually abounding and conceptually comprehensive nature of the books equates to which adding maps, illustrations, animations, anxiety guides, and timelines actually turn really utilitarian understanding aids. Add in audio readings and commentaries, vicious essays, and you have something which could become the homogeneous of the fine DVD edition of a beloved book.

Really, the fine DVD editions of The Lord of a Rings were extended e-books without us entirely realizing it — during least those portions devoted to writer JRR Tolkien, a writing of the books as well as the world of Middle Earth. That’s a standard against which you should decider extended e-books.

The Voyage of a Dawn Treader doesn’t utterly get there. I reviewed the iBooks chronicle, that costs $10, $2 more than a $8 “non-enhanced” version. It gets a Pauline Baynes maps and illustrations, animation as well as anxiety thesaurus right. This element alone is worth a extra $2.

But the earnest “read along” feature, regulating audio from Shakespearean actor/audiobook standout Derek Jacobi’s reading of a book, is hopelessly crippled, on condition that just a first couple of paragraphs of any section. If you wish to listen to a total thing, you’ll need to buy a separate audiobook, that costs an additional $17 from iTunes. Putting snippets of audio in the e-book feels similar to the terrible provoke.

Again as well as again, extended e-books bump up opposite rights which have already been sold and reserved. The video calm, together with an animated timeline/summary of a story, is plain, though deliberation a e-book is dictated as a cross-promotion with the film, it’s sad which it doesn’t even include previews from a film.

It’s a inestimable intent for what it is. But it’s ultimately frustrating, since a potential for an integrated intent upon video-capable e-readers similar to a iPad as well as Nook Color is so clear, during slightest to me.

The edition industry, yet, is so knotted — a media streams so legally and functionally fragmented — which the opportunities for the transparent case study, an e.g. which everyone can point to as a customary, get squandered again and again.