#view: the future of ebooks?

As reported yesterday over at Gizmodo, this is what selected Penguin digital books will look like on Apple’s new iPad device.

It seems a given now that an author’s efforts at online self-promotion has become part and parcel of selling books. It seems logical then that if ebooks ever do take off, the online presence of an author and their offline work need to get together more often. Certainly this seems to be the thinking over at Penguin (take a look at the Vampire Academy example).

However, the move to interactive books becomes opportunity for some (particularly authors with cross multimedia skills), but one more hurdle for those less technically inclined.

Who funds the development of this kind of interactivity? For publishers taking a risk on a new author, would they willing to shell out an extra 20 grand for the digital bells and whistles?

I know I’ll be sending flowers on a regular basis to all my webby friends from here on…

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What do you think? Is this just something that will appeal to certain genres? Given the number of awful writer website designs already out there, are we just going to see more animated emoticons peppered through digital manuscripts?

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