Is the e-book edition of Perlstein's Nixonland the future of publishing?
According to Harold Ramis’s nerdy scientist in the movie Ghostbusters, “print is dead.” That rather grim analysis is becoming the case in our increasingly digitized world. The harbinger of the times is that e-books for the Kindle outsold hardcover books for the first time on Amazon in June. Just because the computer screen is supplanting the printed word, however, does not mean that we are facing the end of publishing. Rather, new technology means new opportunities.
Case in point for historians is the new enhanced e-book edition of Richard Perlstein’s bestselling Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, published by Simon & Schuster this July (some publishers refer to the latest generation of e-books as “enriched” or “enriched” e-books; Simon & Schuster uses the term “enhanced”). Nixonland is not a physically light book—the hardcover sported nearly nine hundred pages. The enhanced edition of Nixonland weighs in at over 250 megabytes (approximately eight thousand times larger than this article), and contains 27 videos embedded directly into the text.
Here’s how the e-book works. Readers (or users, if you prefer—e-book jargon is still in the formative stages) can choose to view the text on their iPads in either a scroll-down fashion or through a classic book-spread, turning the pages with a swift stroke of the finger. The videos are actually embedded into the page in a manner similar to HNN’s embedded clips from the OAH and AHA conventions. Unlike HNN videos, which are posted on YouTube and cross-linked in our stories, Nixonland’s video features are part of the package (hence the whopping file size).
Simon & Schuster partnered with CBS News (both are owned by the CBS Corporation) to provide clips from its period news broadcasts, including Walter Cronkite’s infamous 1968 Vietnam editorial. Bob Schieffer, the veteran newsman who was himself an eyewitness to and a participant in many of the events detailed in Nixonland, even interviews the author in an interview exclusive to the enhanced e-book. Partnering with another division of the same corporation helped to simplify permissions issues for the videos, but Adam Rothberg, vice president for corporate communications at Simon & Schuster, predicts that “securing rights and permissions [for] supplemental materials is going to be a major hurdle” in future e-books.
“Nixonland,” according to Rothberg, “made for a good initial foray into enhanced e-books for a number of reasons: it was an acclaimed work of history about a [recent] era…[and] television…is virtually a character in the book.” Rick Perlstein noted that the entire process of creating the “enhanced” edition went “surprisingly fast.” The project began in April and was published by the end of July. “The editor did a fantastic job putting it together,” he said.
Simon & Schuster, for its part, is not putting all of its eggs in one basket. “We are very enthusiastic about enhanced e-books,” said Rothberg, “but it is a format that we will be pursuing selectively….It’s all so new that we don’t yet have a system in place [for production] as we do with standard paper and ink or even plain text e-books.” It was good fortune that the subject matter of Nixonland lent itself so well to the enhanced e-book format, but not every work of history will be about a time period or a subject that has quite the same level of multimedia sources as Nixonland. As such, it remains to be seen how widespread the enhanced e-book format will become with historians and other non-fiction writers. Traditionalists, however, can take heart. Rothberg predicts that “we’ll continue to see print books and plain text e-books for quite some time.”