“There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.”
I came across this fantastic quote from Charles Dickens last night while watching an interview on BBC2’s Newsnight with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who was talking about the impact that wireless reading device’s such as Amazon’s Kindle might have on what constitutes a book in the future. You only have to look at the humble newspaper to see what impact the internet has had, allowing them to add audio and video, while users can also interact and contribute in a way that would have been impossible twenty years ago. So what opportunities does this open up with the advent of the Wi-Fied digital book?
Certainly adding a musical soundtrack to the latest best-seller could be an interesting way to attract younger readers to books (if like me you have two teenage boys, you’ll know how hard it is to get them to sit down and read). However the ’soundtracks’ appeal could be a lot broader. A recent online survey done by beststuff.com, showed that almost 89% of the people surveyed liked to listened to music while reading, while only 1.3% preferred silence. That seems like an interesting opportunity to me. And with authors such as Jonathan Coe, Alan Rankin and Nick Hornby regularly referencing music in their books, as well as using music as part of the creative process, maybe the book soundtrack could add something totally new to the reading expereince?
