BTT for 6/16/11

Interactivity!

With the advent (and growing popularity) of eBooks, I’m seeing more and more articles about how much “better” they can be, because they have the option to be interactive … videos, music, glossaries … all sorts of little extra goodies to help “enhance” your reading experience, rather like listening to the Director’s commentary on a DVD of your favorite movie.

How do you feel about that possibility? Does it excite you in a cutting-edge kind of way? Or does it chill you to the bone because that’s not what reading is ABOUT?


Honestly, it seems a bit gimmicky to me. The only "extras" i ever want in books are maps and genealogies in big epic books like the Song of Ice and Fire series or the Night's Dawn trilogy by Peter F. Hamilton. I'm honestly a bit perturbed by the dictionary feature in ereaders. Hate to sound old-fogeyish, but when i was a kid i always just puzzled out words from context rather than stop, go get the dictionary (we had a great big hardback one) and look up the word i didn't know. Even now, when it's just a matter of finding my cell phone and using the web, i rarely look up words. I'm not saying that people should have to memorize words and meanings by rote but using your reasoning to figure things out must be good for your cognitive abilities in general.

But back to the question, no, i don't want to see book trailers for "other books you might enjoy", there are few authors i want to see interviews of (Gaiman and King come to mind as ones i would watch), i don't want to watch some manufactured pop star do her take on the music of Westeros. Seems like catering to the ADD culture, not readers.

Comments

  1. Hi Melanie. I found you at TuesBookTalk and am stopping in to say Hi. I like your rating system. I may adapt a part if I may.. I'll be sure to give you credit!
    Is BTT a meme title?
    I like trailers. I don't mind the extras...sometimes I'll look at sometimes not, just like on DVDs. I guess some people really like the option.
    Happy reading to you. :-)

    ReplyDelete
  2. BTT stands (for me) for Booking Through Thursday, a weekly meme where they ask a bookish question; gobs of people answer. Feel free to use the ratings!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Yet Another Best of the Year Post

Fahrenheit 451

Henry IV Part 1
http://www.cynicaloptimism.net/2011/06/btt-for-61611.html
www.cynicaloptimism.net
crawl=CC-MAIN-2018-17
132637
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:UD5MQSY44ZYHEWB4SHGR2CO7CWHTQ4TC
<urn:uuid:a7144fb6-124b-47b9-944e-c8725e71da85>
2018-04-25T18:12:45Z
216.239.34.21
text/html
sha1:6DJHUQYZO3XYJN2I2S575PTZ6Q55FHGQ
<urn:uuid:5321466f-c3db-4ffc-9715-fdcedd5ba4c2>
http://www.cynicaloptimism.net/2011/06/btt-for-61611.html
response
<urn:uuid:838bda2a-fa2c-44c4-8ea5-81fb165cdf5c>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-35-148-49.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2018-17
operator: Common Crawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for April 2018
publisher: Common Crawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf