The first Vooks (combination text and video) were published yesterday by Simon & Schuster imprint, Atria. I bought the iPhone app version of Jude Deveraux’s Promises. Basically it’s an ordinary romance novel with video clips interspersed in the pages. In terms of form the result is ho-hum in the extreme, particularly as there doesn’t seem to be much attempt to integrate the text and the banal video, which seems to exist simply to pretty-up the pages. (Note: two of the other Vooks, released yesterday are self-help titles, 90 Second Fitness Solution and Return to Beauty: Old World Recipes For Great Radiant Skin, which probably make a much better case for integrating video into the page.)
If you want to see something innovative however, check out HBO’s Cube experiment which breaks the film into more than 35 scenes each presented from four angles. As the viewer, you choose how you move through the time and space of the movie. Putting it all together is not unlike solving a jigsaw puzzle with a narrative.