A Look at a Vook Book

  Jeffrey Deaver and 21 other best-selling thriller authors are collaborating with Vook, a company that has been at the forefront of integrating text and video. The result is Watchlist, a two-part vook series with 34 chapters, each written  by a different author, combined with 26 original videos and a manuscript reading by actor Alfred Molina. There are many experts in the biz who think this is the wave of the future in book publishing, a digital mixed-bag of video, text, images and social media combined into the adult version of a "pop up" book.

Whether the average person takes to this form of information overload in their reading experience remains to be seen; perhaps it will be another generational divide, with those under 40ish appreciating it a bit more than their elders. Or not. Personally, I think this type of multimedia format is ideal for nonfiction works, especially references and textbooks, but since fiction is where I can let my own imagination re-create the world the author has set in motion, I'm not sure the intrusion of someone else's concept will be something I embrace. That's what movie adaptations are for, n'est-ce pas? Fortunately, for us old fogies, there's a print version of the book by Vanguard Press.