Ever the Twain shall cross – Monday equals another free short story from Harper Perennial at their Fifty-Two Stories website, and this week we’re getting spoiled again with another unpublished classic, this offering being a Mark Twain short called Telegraph Dog. Wow! That’s two unpublished classics in a row (last week we had Thorton Wilder’s A House in the Country if you remember. I read it a couple of days ago and enjoyed it)! Is Harper spoiling us? I should say so.
Teri Tynes does Melville House bookstore – Remember I evangelised Melville House Publishing and a series of their novellas in a ‘Cover Love’ post not long ago? Well following that post good online friend and former Reader of the Week Teri Tynes, famed for her outstanding Walking Off the Big Apple website, resolved to take one of her legendary walking tours over to the Brooklyn bookstore of Melville House. She did that last week and has put up a delicious post (quite literally) about her adventures. Not only was the bookstore everything Teri expected it to be (and more), but she also managed to visit a couple of other first-class bookstores en route, together with treating herself to a couple of culinary delights. *Sigh* I’m not jealous! No really I’m not! 
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Random House launch ‘enhanced’ ebooks – I’ll ignore the fact that the launch date for Dan Brown’s latest novel The Last Symbol was announced by Random House today (sorry I should be keeping an air of impartiality – the release date is 15th September), and tell you the news from the same publisher that intrigues me the most (because I’m a qualified multimedia developer don’t ya know?). It’s the news that Random House are introducing enhanced ebooks to the UK, and in the principle of it I couldn’t be more excited. Designed to be used on a computer, as opposed to a dedicated reader which doesn’t have the necessary playback capabilities (yet), enhanced ebooks contain extras such as audio and video shorts, author interviews, games etc. Branded under the title of ‘Book and Beyond’ all the info on these premium ebooks, including available titles, can be found on Random House’s dedicated Book and Beyond website.
Emmm…… Even though the initial choice is dreadful (and they’re even threatening to release an enhanced Katie Price later in the year )), I love the multimedia direction that this publisher is taking with its ebooks (being qualified in this area I would do), but I’m not sure, in the short-term at least, if this is really going to catch on. Ebooks are certainly gaining in popularity, but this popularity goes hand-in-hand with portable readers, and because the extras on these enhanced ebooks are no good with portable readers, their practical use is somewhat limited. It’ll be a different story when portable readers can accommodate these multimedia elements, but that raises another issue – do people really want that much functionality in a simple reader? I don’t know! My head hurts! We’ll leave it there for now! )
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