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Books with Sound

If a system can, will it? I suppose that sooner or later that answer will be yes. I'm sure that some will gnash teeth or rend clothes because some ebooks are coming with sound effects, but again this isn't really new. A book company is releasing classic books and adding music and sound effects to add to the background as the reader reads. Is this new, not really, after all if you ever look in the children's books section and find those books with the sound strip down the side (usually pretty icon buttons on top), then when a child reads that book and they see the icon they press the button and hear the sound effects. I once repurosed one of those side sound bars from a Robin Hood story and created a book for someone who had just had heart surgery (they work great with adults who have just been under anesthesia). As for the sound tracks, including it with the book is new, but otherwise many of us have been soundtracking books for a long time. When I was young I picked Chopin (Moog with Strings Attached) to use as the soundtrack for Journey to the Center of the Earth, and still today when I hear that music the book comes back to me. Then too there are the authors who give you ideas to listen to as you read. Jennifer Cruise often makes specific references within her books (Dusty Springfield keeps showing up), but she now also has created book soundtracks - music that she played while she wrote the stories and now lists soundtracks on her website (http://www.jennycrusie.com/more-stuff/soundtracks/).  Since ebooks have the capacity to display text and images, along with the ability to play sounds - then we should expect that they will, perhaps not for every book or everyone, but someone will love them just that way.


Soundtracked ebooks launch in UK  Telegraph.co.uk
By James Hall, Consumer Affairs Editor Publishers are capitalising on the popularity of electronic books, or ebooks, by releasing versions of literally classics with orchestral scores and sound effects such as crunching gravel added in.


That's the end of a quiet read: Now the ebook comes with added sound effects ...  Daily Mail
By Louise Boyle The success of the e-book is to be expanded on this week when publishers add music and sound effects to novels. One of the first multimedia books, to be released on Friday in the UK, will be a Sherlock Holmes tale with the accompanying sound.
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