Book trailers

I rarely watch TV commercials anymore, thanks to my DVR. I find previews more annoying than enticing in a movie theater. My mouse is primed to click CLOSE on online ads the moment they pop up. So you'd think, also given my resistance to vooks and blooks, I'd deride book trailers. But it's not that simple.

Troy Patterson, in a Slate article late last year, discussed several book trailers (like Jonathan Safran Foer's short web video for Eating Animals, below) and contended that "such clips can reveal the hopes and fantasies of readers, writers, and publishers alike".




Patterson criticizes the "Hollywood glamour" in some of these video projects that distracts from the literary merit of a given work, but in general takes a resignedly accepting stance towards the new media. I agree with his evaluation. I view book trailers as adapting to modern publishing, as the print ads of 2010- and whoever took issue with The New Yorker's sidebar promotion of new books, for example? In fact, many of the trailers, rapidly becoming stickier throughout publishing, are artistically sophisticated. One example is Jamieson Fry's piece for T.C. Boyle's The Women:



In a technological climate pushing physical books to the margins- The Millions cited in January that Laredo, Texas, population 250,000, is now literally bookstore-less- any effort to get books into readers' hands is commendable. Granted, book trailers can promote eBooks just as much as bound books, but for readers hesitant to convert to the Kindle just yet these marketing campaigns will fuel a purchase. Like Patterson, I think the trailers can be hokey, contrived, artificial. But so, too, can they be aesthetically pleasing, cinematically impressive, and, most importantly, commercially successful.

A thorn in the flesh?

The extent of my experience with video games: playing Crash Bandicoot and Jeopardy with my sister and friends on our PS2 in high school, plus a game or two of Rock Band at a frat house in college. Add to that many a couch-side observation of frantic, near-foaming male friends' tooth-and-nail battles on the faux-football field or -race car track, and that about does it.

But the recent trend of video game adapatation of literature may force me to acquaint myself more familiarly with the console. This past November, MediaBistro blog GalleyCat cited the B&H Publishing Group's creation of Bible Navigator X, a Bible Reader for Xbox 360. Yes, you read that right. According to Aaron Linne, B&H Publishing Group's executive producer of digital marketing:

"The Xbox isn't just secular entertainment anymore. We can use technology that other people developed to study Scriptures through a new medium. Some people are just more comfortable with a controller in their hands than a book."

The application is available for $5 or 400 Microsoft Points, the currency of the Xbox Live marketplace. Bible Reader users can search, bookmark and adjust settings for big screen readings or customized reading themes.

My initial reaction was skepticism at the sacriligious undertones of manipulating the Bible with technology normally reserved for gory car theft games and virtual wrestling matches. But, really, how different is this venture from the Kindle's digitization of texts, or "cellphone novels" written with and read on mobile phones? (Among best selling novels of the last 3 years, 4 of the top 10 novels in Japan were written with cellphones, like the entire bookcase's contents below.)

The video game lit genre is here to stay: Electronic Arts and Random House recently teamed to release a video game version of Dante's Inferno, in which players can explore the circles of hell interactively in addition to on the page. Much like the vook, these video games meld literary quality and enhanced new media features with the aim of providing a rich, multi-faceted experience of a text. But unlike the vook, games allow readers to physically participate, justifying the hijacking of literature as raw material. Furthermore, the games aren't trying to edge out books from the publishing world, but rather supplement them.

Here's my video game aficionado friend Billy on yet another benefit of video game adapation of books:

"Ask a middle schooler or high-schooler if they remember anything about The Crucible, The Things They Carried, To Kill A Mockingbird, 1984, etc, and they won't be able to recount it with either the vividness or enthusiasm they'll be able to tell the story of Link and the Triforce (Legend of Zelda), the moment Sephiroth killed Aeris in front of Cloud (Final Fantasy 7), minute details about the T-Virus (Resident Evil), etc etc. All of these have intricate plots with the same kind of research, details, development, and copious amounts of dialogue one expects from either a book or movie. But you are far more invested."

Just as with every other new age form of literature I've addressed, these intellectualized video games will never replace tangible paperbacks for me. But I'm willing to cede their beneficially immersive treatment of text. I'll consider them less a thorn in the flesh of the publishing industry, and more an aggravatingly itchy tag in the back of my shirt.

Vook Voodoo

Ever heard of a (shudder) Vook?

It's a video-book hybrid that melds narrative with videos and Web links, to be read online or on a mobile device. Journalist Monica Hesse points to the "bells and whistles" of these multimedia books, from Wikipedia links explaining old-fashioned references to video clips of historians' input, and asks the essential question: "Would these [features] represent the sort of enhanced involvement that book lovers have always dreamed of? Or would they tamper with our imaginations?"

My answer to her first question: no. And her second: of course.

These products are packages, like shrink-wrapped plastic toys. You can't get inside them, although they promise to do just that: lead you deep into the book's world with 3-D glasses, making your experience visual and aural. But such interference destroys the very magic of reading. In a previous post, I wrote about the unique images readers hold for poignant literary moments, like Dantès' escape in The Count of Monte Cristo, and the soldiers' torture of the water buffalo in The Things They Carried. The Vook medium renders each image exactly the same for each reader. How boring.

Hesse apparently agrees:

"The pleasure of reading has always been its uniquely transporting experience: the way a literary world might look completely different to two readers. But when the “true” representation... is immediately provided to the reader, imaginary worlds could be squelched before they can be born."

This kind of reading, aside from fraying the nerve endings responsible for dreaming our way through a story, also makes us lazy. Evan Maloney maligns speed-reading in The Guardian's Books Blog, asserting that skimming "reminds [him] of liposuction: you're putting on intellectual weight without acquiring the mental health benefits". Whether flipping hastily through a great work, or in using a Vook bypassing the contemplative act of real reading, this nonchalance with regard to the narrative text is just empty.

The type of reading required by a Vook also dulls our brains. Reading should be active. Your brain should be working on full speed to navigate its way through unfamiliar territory. In a Christian Science Monitor article on the potential mental hazard of reading eBooks, Tufts child development professor Maryanne Wolf writes, "My concern is that we will develop within the next generation a shorter, less-enriched [brain] circuitry for reading." My point exactly. A Vook force-feeds you. In fact, I would argue that engaging in a Vook is not reading at all.

Now, the catch is that if you treat Vooks not as true books, but as "a new genre that has been dubbed v-books, digi-books, multimedia books and Cydecks," as Hesse writes, I think there can be advantages like attracting book-averse children (or certain filmmakers; Martin Scorsese: "I really enjoy reading the papers, as best as I can, but turning those pages are a problem"), and stitching edification into the thread of a piece of writing. Literature they are not. Books they are not. But inventive products trying to adapt writing to new media? Sure.

Some Vooks aren't masquerading as literature at all, and therefore I think do offer a beneficially multi-layered reading experience. Motoko Rich reviews some for the New York Times:

"In one of the Simon & Schuster vooks, a fitness and diet title, readers can click on videos that show them how to perform the exercises. A beauty book contains videos that demonstrate how to make homemade skin-care potions."

Again, I ask, as I did in that earlier post: Which art form, words or images, is more richly communicative? Is there dilution when we mix the two?

And, again, I answer... there is no answer. But both images and words today, as always, help us to think and connect and create- whatever the form they make take.

Read more:
http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/14/does-the-brain-like-e-books/