Fear the vook?

Coming to this a little late, I know.  A vook is text plus video, merged into an iPhone app — the latest incarnation of our long-promised  “multimedia book.”

So, the death of literacy?  (Again?)  Actually, I can’t get too worked up, this time.  A ‘vook’ is just a hyped-up comic book, really, and even graphic novels never managed to kill the real kind.

To me the larger problem is that words-on-paper is, in itself, perfected.  The reading experience is never going to be better than that, because it can’t be.  So any bells and whistles added on only degrade the experience, however slightly.  And that, in the end, pushes people AWAY from books, it doesn’t draw them in.

Or rather, more hopefully, it pushes people away from vooks, and back to real reading.

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