You say enhanced eBooks to me and I get very excited. The possibilities!!! Rich media. Alternative endings. Interview audios. Videos. Photographs. Interactivity like never before! For the 75th anniversary of The Hobbit, HarperCollins released an e-version with recently discovered Tolkien recordings and his own book illustrations, and Penguin has updated Pride and Prejudice with movie clips and instructions on the dancing.
But before we get lost in all of the hype, it's time to get down to the realism because the main problem with enhanced eBooks is they are not economically viable to the little author like you and me. You also have the concerns that embedded multimedia interrupts the reading experience and these interruptions take away from the reader's ability to imagine the story and characters. Maybe.
The art of merging sound, movies and images with text is constantly evolving and mastering the new technology will take practice. You won't necessarily need coding knowledge as there are apps for non coders to create enhanced eBooks.
Check out these sites:
Trapdoor
For an example of one of their enhanced eBooks created through an app, have a look at this
Storify
Blurb Mobile
Urturn previously Webdoc
This article gives you more information on creating enhanced eBooks
While I will probably dabble in enhanced eBooks more for fun than anything, I do agree with the sentiments of Seth Godin when he says, "Sure, there will be experiments at the cutting edge, but no, they're not going to pay off regularly enough for it to become an industry. The quality is going to remain in the writing and in the bravery of ideas, not in teams of people making expensive digital books."
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