Here, my friends, is only a partial list:
- Exclusive audio clips of Kerouac himself reading excerpts from an early draft
- Documentary footage of fellow Beats sharing their impressions of Kerouac
- Pages from the journals Kerouac kept while on the road
- Slideshow of cover art from international editions
- Extensive collection of original reviews
- Side-by-side comparisons of Kerouac’s famous original scroll draft and the published text, highlighting the editorial work that went into his masterpiece as well as the elements removed on the recommendation of Viking’s lawyers, including some of Kerouac’s most explicit treatments of sex, drug use, and other “obscenities”
- Interactive map of the now legendary trips from 1947, 1949, and 1950 taken by Dean and Sal in the book
Holy Crap, I want that app!
Yesterday, before I started this post, I went to the zoo. They were setting up their annual holiday light display, including two 20-foot, red and green poinsettias in lights, a Lite Brite-esque Santa flying off into the sky, and endless fields of red and blue and green lights lining each path. Insane!
In the Gift Shop at the entrance they were selling hologram glasses to “heighten your Holiday Zoo Lights experience” by transforming bits of the light into smiley faces or stars when you wear the glasses. Are the million+ lights alone were not enough? Do we need a gimmick to “heighten” the experience (see: arguments for Just Say No)?
That started me thinking about enhanced eBooks and how they are now “heightening” our reading of a book/eBook. Have we grown that bored of “just text” that we need visual stimulation to carry us through, or is this a new form of art in need, perhaps, of a new name?
“Super enhanced” eBooks – by that I mean eBooks that offer >40% other-than-text, original content – are really a new hybrid of video + writing. These word-focused, super enhanced eBooks could be called Text-Focused Multi-Media (TFMM), the way we call a Digital Video Disc a DVD.
The movie Howl heavily incorporated the spoken poem to support the telling of part of Allen Ginsberg’s life. If, instead, the focus was on the actual written text and there was video produced to support the text it would have been better produced as a book app – a TFMM – than as the biopic it was, in the manner of the very popular app of The Waste Land. (Author Note: Check out Salon.com’s thoughts on The Waste Land’s iBook)
In thinking about it, I see that I have been hesitant to embrace eBooks because I already have books – I don’t need a device that can’t go in the tub with me to do what the paper version can do. What is exciting to me is the new art form of the TFMM (or a different name - please to make suggestions!). Moving on this, it'd be great to see TFMMs divided into their own section so I can find them, oh gods of categorizing commodities!
For now, make comments on these thoughts if you have any...
And submit interesting multi-media bits to Gertrude - I am ridiculously interested...
