Illustrated books or books with videos?
Posted by Peter Blaiwas on Fri, Mar 05, 2010
I am very fortunate to be able to design and produce wonderful illustrated books on painting, sculpture, photography, decorative arts, and architecture for museums as well as university and commercial publishers. I also take great pleasure in perusing a thoughtfully designed book-with-pictures, appreciating the pacing and rhythm of its layout and how text and art refer to and enhance each other.
In my work I strive to provide the viewer with text that is both easy to read and scan for specific information, as well as presenting pictures that one can scan with ease; taking in its surface or boundaries or finding its compositional (or metaphoric) focus.
Of course, all this suggests my preference for holding a book in my hands, scanning spreads from left to right, and turning pages. This experience may be destined for obsolescence, and at Vern Associates we are cautiously adapting our work to accommodate the insistent shift from print-on-paper to digital books.
One seldom visits a site or reads a blog that doesn't supplement its text with video. This is what most people have come to expect from an interactive medium, and video can convey a great deal of information effectively and persuasively. It is a boon for those looking for information on how to do something, because you can watch someone demonstrate the task. I'm more skeptical of sites that combine text with talking heads who instruct, coach, sell, or what have you.
I recently visited two publishing sites that sell hybrid book-and-video titles and found that they to relate to each other in unexpected ways.
Vook is a web-based application that partners with magazine and book publishers to produce highly interactive digital books that you can access on PCs, digital readers, or mobile phones. These vooks include both text and video, along with links to social media sites. Some titles, such as those about cooking and fitness are a good fit for this format. Fiction titles often include dramatized versions of the story, alongside the text. Another discovery was the children's and Y-A author Patrick Carman's Skeleton Creek series (Scholastic). Carman wrote an interesting piece in Publisher's Weekly about his successful series that gets kids really interested in reading.
These stories are presented as text followed by video and so on. This video carrot works really well in making the written word much less of a stick. In the Skeleton Creek books, kids must finish reading before they get to the movie. I don't think that would fly with customers downloading novels from Vook.
The voices in my head
I've never mentioned this to anyone—nor had reason to, until now—but when I read, I "hear" the words in my own voice. My voice is modulated depending on the topic. It is very nondescript when I am calculating figures in a math text, and can get quite dramatic for fiction, a higher pitch for female characters, an appropriate accent for English or French or Bostonian characters. It seems to me that these sounds become an integral part of how I comprehend the written word, make it part of my memory, and classify its value. More important, my internal voice is my first step to visualizing the images and situation being described. I'd like to think that other people share this experience while reading. If not, they must have other means of processing words and internalizing stories. I don't understand how the same degree of comprehension is possible from watching a scripted, filmed, and edited version of that same story, but would love to know if other people share my opinion.