E-books have come a long way since their early days (remember the Gutenberg Project?). While publishers are still working out the kinks--metadata and formatting issues among the most prominent--some are also experimenting with the burgeoning capabilities of e-readers, in particular audio and video. In January, I noted that Vook and McSweeney's both offered good examples of enhanced e-reading. Since then, others have followed suit. In September, Knopf Doubleday released its first enhanced e-book, for Charles Yu's How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe. 
Full disclosure: How to Live Safely is a favorite of mine, and I've been involved in promotion since before its release date (purely out of a place of enthusiasm--no compensation aside from that book-recommendation-glow involved). When I learned that Knopf had created an enhanced e-book, I asked Yu's editor Timothy O'Connell to dish about the reasoning behind the enhancements and the process. My questions and his answers:
Why experiment with this book in particular?
This is a novel about a son searching for his father through quantum space-time. It is full of loops, alternate time lines and set in a universe that is slightly damaged and only 93% complete. Given the nature of that world (open, unfinished), it's almost like the book was asking to be tinkered with, as if it had ports where you can plug in peripheral devices, auxiliary stories. Yu pushes the bounds of fiction in How to Live Safely--we wanted to push the bounds of how a book was published. So I approached Andy Hughes, the head of production for Knopf, and asked what he thought about producing a one-off metal version. (METAL! In an era when everyone says the physical book is dead.) Andy got this grin on his face and said that this book was a perfect candidate to publish both as an enhanced e-book and unique physical one. Knopf, as everyone knows, has a history of making beautiful clothbound books, but this was an opportunity to publish a gorgeous physical book simultaneous with the most advanced digital version possible. Others agreed because sci-fi sells in digital, is inherently futurist and the work itself is essentially a love letter to the genre. This would also be Knopf's first enhanced e-book, which was exciting because it presented us with a significant marketing opportunity.
Charlie, of course, could not have been more enthusiastic from the outset. He made himself completely available, writing scripts for the audio elements, creating ad copy for a job on the Death Star and coming up with a new bonus story, among other things. Not every author would be up for that, and I think it is a testament to him and the trust he placed in us, which is very gratifying.
Please talk about the creation process for the digital versions of How to Live Safely. There are a couple--how do they differ, and why make more than one?
There are two versions of the e-book for How to Live Safely: the regular e-book and the enhanced A/V e-book. Both have photos, illustrations, links and a bonus secret story (like a hidden track on a CD, which is, of course, now no longer a secret), but the enhanced version also has audio and video elements. The essential question when putting them together was how do we make a beautiful e-book, in form and function as well as content, that does not distract from the main matter at hand, which is the text.
Resources are always an issue, so we hired an intern, Josh Raab, for this project. He was basically the guy who made it all happen. Josh and Chris Mitchell in Random House digital came up with the idea of hyperlinking words in the novel to end-notes that were images and illustrations or further links to the web. This way the text was never truly interrupted. The book just links to itself, which is kind of cool given the book's plot line. So all the extra content (aside from the video and audio in the enhanced version) is stored at the end of the book. A reader hits the hyperlink and it takes them to the image or footnote, then they hit a return link and they are right back where they started. We had to try this on every device to make sure it worked. At one point, we had a Kindle, a Sony Reader, a nook, an iPhone and an iPad in constant rotation.
We weren't sure about the A/V version. We had no budget and three weeks to do it. There was no movie from which to pull video, and the idea of adding an interview with or notes from the author seemed, well, boring. We wanted to enhance the book. So Josh began combing YouTube and Vimeo 24/7 and would send Charlie and me links to his ideas. Then the three of us would decide which made sense and where they could go (after clearing the rights). As far as I know, nothing like it had been done. It certainly felt new to us.
All told, we had seven A/V elements, just to give you an idea how selective we were and how much work went into it. Sometimes I wondered if Josh reached the end of the Internet in his quest to find strange videos about time travel and odd geometric shapes.
At the end of the day, we had a blast. Not only were we able to collaborate on a project we all loved, we were able to engineer a very good result, especially when you consider some of the posts on Twitter. Lydia Ondrusek, a writer who goes by littlefluffycat, said "ahmahgah... the special a/v edition of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe is astounding." Another user added "done, and not overdone--a great example of what CAN be done. Awesome." And those are exactly the types of reactions I was hoping for.--Jenn Northington
Up next on the Nitty Gritty: how does the reading experience compare with the enhanced e-reading experience?