Enhanced E-Books

Monday, January 23rd, 2012

Customers haven’t been asking for enhanced e-books, but a few have become break-out hits:

A book about skulls by Simon Winchester features a gallery of more than 300 human and animal skulls that can be rotated 360 degrees, enlarged and viewed in three dimensions with 3-D glasses. “The Elements,” which has interactive images of each element, became a runaway best seller, selling 250,000 copies at $13.99, bringing in more than $2.5 million in revenue. A widely praised app for T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” includes a facsimile of the manuscript with edits by Ezra Pound, readings by Eliot recorded in 1933 and 1947 and a video performance of the poem by actress Fiona Shaw.

The highly produced apps — the digital equivalent of coffee-table books — are expensive to make, but so far they’ve been profitable, says Touch Press’s creative director Theodore Gray. Touch Press spent $120,000 on “The Wasteland” and recovered its investment in 4½ weeks. The app, priced at $13.99, hit No. 1 on Apple’s list of best-selling book apps, prompting hope among publishers that literature can hold its own in the app world.

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