From page to screen: the rise of the video book trailer

Their quality varies wildly, but video trailers for books are proliferating. Do they work? And what are the implications of the technology for the books themselves?

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The video trailer above is pitching John Lanchester's novel-of-the-moment, Capital. In under a minute, the animation spins off from Tom Berry's cover illustrations to suggest both the parallel social universes inhabited by Lanchester's characters on a single London street just ahead of the 2008 crash, and the way in which, as the author puts it, properties had become "like people, and rich people at that, imperious, with needs that they were not shy about having serviced".

Born only a few years ago on YouTube, video trailers are becoming more or less de rigueur for any book's marketing campaign (if it has one; a relatively rare honour, of course). Most of the time they are a little on the perfunctory side: Camcorder pointed at author, author fielding questions or (oh, the visual riches) looking down and reading from the book they're promoting.

Some, like The Night Circus, aren't really much more than mobile billboards. A step up are Gary Shteyngart's sendup of himself for Super Sad True Love Story, and even Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter by Seth Grahame-Smith, which are very good fun if not strikingly ambitious.

But others, like Capital, begin to look like artworks in themselves.
The promo for Aleksandar Hemon's Love and Obstacles, for instance, takes a short reading from one of the stories and uses animated collage to suggest the febrile mix of real first impressions of Kinshasha and fevered imaginings. Or the very impressive sequence of videos made for Douglas Coupland's The Gum Thief (it's worth watching them all).

These are terrific diversions, but their status next to the book is a little ambiguous. Isn't using animation to advertise a book a little like using sculpture to promote poetry? Most still use the authors' words, but are they using the film and animation to suggest the rest of the advertised text – or somehow enhancing what's there in the book?

One of the sweetest examples, for children, is also one of the oddest. A neat little hymn to the joys of traditional reading – in contrast to the whizzbang excitements of multimedia – it has the punchline, and the title, "It's a Book". Because of course, like the pipe in the Magritte painting, it's really not.

It does, however, make clear sense. More and more people are doing their reading on web-enabled devices. As you finish one ebook, you don't have to put it down before clicking around to watch some trailers for your next one.

Which leaves you wondering about where the technology is pointing. Why aren't there any novels that work video into the body of the text? (I can't help feeling that probably there are, I just haven't read them yet: please do set me right in the comments.)

It's a truism that the ebook is taking over, but I'm not sure we've really begun to absorb how radically it's going to alter the book itself. The potential of technology, historically, has always determined the form that art takes: from the pigments and optical devices that have shaped painting, to the building materials that have decisively inflected architecture. Likewise, it's impossible to imagine the modern novel without the printing press. It feels inevitable, therefore, that video and other multimedia are going to find their way in to the text; in fact, it would be bizarre if they didn't. But the implications for the artform, and even authorship itself, are giddying. Won't a decent, multiply-mediated read need more than one artist to work on it? Where will that leave the idea of authorship? Who will have the money to produce them?

Perhaps I'm getting a little ahead of myself. But if the medium of reading is changing, it seems to follow that its content is also going to look – and sound – very different before too long.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/feb/29/video-book-trailers
www.theguardian.com
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