Great news if you enjoy books, but have the puny attention span of a person raised on television and the Interne—oh, look at the kitten!

Publishers have recently released multimedia books that include videos. No, not like the tiny LCD screen embedded in some copies of Entertainment Weekly in September. It’s more akin to a more sophisticated ebook version of embedding a YouTube video in a web page.

The products are being called “vooks,” a word which sounds sounds like it should be some kind of ethnic slur and not a literary product.

Simon & Schuster is also releasing two digital novels combining text with videos a minute or 90 seconds long that supplement – and in some cases advance – the story line.

In “Embassy,” a short thriller about a kidnapping written by Richard Doetsch, a video snippet that resembles a newscast reveals that the victim is the mayor’s daughter, replacing some of Mr. Doetsch’s original text.

While the applications of this idea in the how-to market could be fascinating (crafting books with videos would be particularly nice) are we ready to fundamentally change the act of reading?

Curling Up With Hybrid Books, Videos Included [NYT]

(Photo: nailmaker)

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