Random House has just launched the UK’s first “enhanced” electronic book list. The Book and Beyond project brings together 10 of its authors — with more to come soon — making their new books available, unabridged, for digital download to phones, computers, PDAs and e-book readers. This, in itself, is nothing remarkable. The e-book market has been with us for nearly a decade in one form or another. What is significant is that it is the first download list to feature books embedded with “rich media” content. (Video, pictures, music, games and computer apps to you and me.)

While we’re used to the idea of bonus content as a marketer’s siren call, that content is usually little more than the digital sweepings from the editing process and/or a hastily shot, behind-the-scenes short. With Book and Beyond, this content is designed to become part of the e-book reading experience itself. Download Jacqueline Wilson’s My Sister Jodie and you get a computer game, links to the Wilson community and a no-expense-spared, cinema-style trailer for the book. Irvine Welsh, when his content is added shortly, will offer a gritty video commentary on the characterisation of his book Crime and a taster of his prequel to Trainspotting. Danny Wallace and the mentalist Derren Brown get the enhanced treatment, too, with audio books and text being combined, so you can hear the book as well as reading it. It is Random House’s intention to lead high-profile authors confidently into the e-realm, blurring the margins between the written word and other forms of entertainment as they go. Indeed, just as television, cinema, gaming and radio coexist, the e-book is not intended to replace the traditional book, but to exist alongside it, as a new kind of reading experience.

“I’m not in the business of selling books. I sell writing,” says Welsh. “It doesn’t bother me how they want to read it as long as it’s true to the ideas I had. People criticise e-books for being nothing like the real thing. But they’re not trying to be. E-books are just a different way of getting writing and story­telling. Personally, I like a nice book. I need that private intellectual space that a real book gives me. But I don’t expect everyone to feel the same way.”

Last Christmas was the turning point for e-publishing. More Sony Readers, Kindles, iPods and iPhones were sold than even the optimists anticipated: sales of e-books rocketed on Boxing Day as a result. Up to 1,300 a day in the UK are being sold currently. In America, there were 2.5m such legal downloads last year and more than 500,000 e-book readers sold. And with electronic readers being enthusiastically taken up by Britain’s schools and FE colleges, the e-book experience may, at last, be about to have its moment.

The man who developed Book and Beyond for Random House is a former marketing executive for Sony BMG Records, Jonathan Davis. He wanted to ensure the giant publisher was ready for the digital tsunami. “I lived through it once, and I like to think we’ve learnt from the mistakes made by the record industry. It was freefall. Big mistakes were made early on. The download was demonised, and all they really succeeded in doing was to stifle a new market for a year or two. Publishers need to listen and look at what people are actually doing and respond with the kind of books and reading experience they want for the way they are living.”

Most significant of all for Random House is the launch, today, of its own app. Download it to your iPhone or iPod and any book from the Random House e-book list can be yours. The app allows you to customise the size of the text and the colour of the text, the font, the look, the feel of the electronic page. It’s reading all right, but not as we know it. With 2,500 Random House titles available by the end of the year, many with “rich” content, these steroidal “super-books” are making a serious play for literary attention and our cash.

Publishers are eager to do with books what iTunes has done for music downloads. Hundreds of thousands of titles, all searchable by author, subject or title, are being digitised in an attempt to beat the likes of Google and Yahoo to the online punch. Even big-selling authors are hauling themselves onto the e-bandwagon with their own apps. The Grisham Widget, for example, pops up on your iPhone or laptop, offering thoughtfully selected chunks of the legal thriller writer’s latest book, interviews with the author and the chance to link straight through to Amazon.

Ian Hudson, a former president of the Publishers’ Association, says it isn’t an either/or situation. “The evidence is that e-books are creating a new kind of reader, one who wouldn’t buy or read books in the traditional way at all. They don’t stop to think about how the words get to them, only that they do.” With academic research supporting the thing many of us have known for a long time — that reading off a screen really is a different experience from flat ink — the notion of new kinds of reading is already here.

This change in how people are choosing to read may spawn a new kind of writer, one whose work weaves together not just words and narrative, but a multimedia experience. “I view the e-book as a huge creative opportunity for storytellers and writers,” says Hudson. “The format is saying, ‘You can do anything you want to here’ — graphic novels, soundtracks to books, audio that helps create atmosphere while you read. Instead of adding content at the end, we might be looking at ways to make it part of their vision from the outset.”

The e-elephant in the room is the issue of digital rights. When you can beam books from one mobile phone to another in seconds and sites such as Scribd allow you to download any book on the site for free, writers are understandably jumpy. “Authors are in a tricky position,” says Kate Pool of the Society of Authors. “What we have to remember is that beyond the technology are the moral rights of writers to get paid for what they do. Add online piracy to the equation and the whole issue of e-books, the internet and electronic rights looks like a mess. The worst case, of course, is that we return to writing as a cottage industry for the wealthy and those with patrons, before anyone has worked out a way to pay them.”

Welsh remains typically sanguine. “The technologies will come and go, and nobody knows where we’ll be a decade from now,” he says. “The screen might not even be with us in 20 years’ time — but writing will.”

How an e-book comes alive

The work of a thriller writer such as Lee Child lends itself most obviously to an enhanced, multimedia treatment. His Nothing to Lose contains a trailer for his next tome, a charming number on suicide bombers. Cue a Lara Croft-style animated mini-movie, with the text narrated in a threatening voice. But this is a reassuring extra, compared to other offerings. Derren Brown’s Tricks of the Mind is accompanied by audio of the hypnotist at work, which, at one point, has him dwelling repeatedly on the word “scratch” — so that you do. Joe Stretch’s novel Wildlife provides interviews with the author explaining his work; in one segment, Why Kill Frank?, Stretch tells us why he just had to “kill off” Chelsea FC’s Lampard (for his “very competent haircut”, among other things). In short, these titbits offer a further insight into the mind of the author; but whether these are welcome is another issue, probably dependent on your level of fandom. The more colour these Premium eBooks gain, the more appetising they will be. They are starting out with the more obvious, sensational perks, but it’s early days.

Louis Wise

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