New Enhanced eBook/App Venture no comments
Love them or hate them; it looks like enhanced ebooks are here to stay. A new joint venture was announced today between enkHouse, a transmedia production company, and KiwiTech, a leading software developer for movie-tie-in enhanced ebooks.
Together the two companies will focus on creating enhanced ebook tie-ins to films and television programming. This would be reminiscent of the Pillars of the Earth transmedia iPad app that was a tie-in to the Starz miniseries based on the Ken Follet book.
A couple of paragraphs from the press release concerning the principals:
Rakesh Gupta, CEO and Founder of KiwiTech, also founded and led Aptara Corporation, the largest eBook publishing services company in the world. “This alignment gives us tremendous opportunities to enter new markets, especially the film-to-enhanced-eBook market,” says Gupta. “Our companies are a good team, sharing entrepreneurial spirits and decades of innovative work across the media spectrum.”
EnkHouse is led by David Marlett, a film industry consultant, screenwriter and producer, who is himself an author. (His first novel will be published by Brown in the fall.) He comes to enkHouse as Transmedia Producer, a new designation of the Producers Guild of America. “The three keys to a successful enhanced eBook are content, content, content,” says Marlett. Having been represented by William Morris Endeavor, he has over twenty years of experience writing and consulting on screenplays and productions for studios and producers such as DreamWorks, Arnold Kopelson and Michael Ovitz.
Obviously enhanced ebooks and apps must be popular enough to keep inspiring a stream of new releases and high powered partnerships such as this new venture. My own transmedia experiences have been mixed. It definitely can work very well for nonfiction and children’s books, but for adult fiction to be made into a successful enhanced ebook is much more challenging and requires a lot of finesse. I have not had a chance to look at the Pillars of the Earth app yet, but it does look interesting.
