Big-name investors back Booktrack
Kiwi e-book technology launches in New York.
Thursday, August 25 2011 || News || BY Maria Slade, Businessday.co.nz
Booktrack is the brainchild of brothers Mark and Paul Cameron, and is backed by such big-name technology investors as PayPal founder Peter Thiel, The Hyperfactory's Derek Handley, and Facebook's director of global creative solutions Mark D'Arcy.
Booktrack has been three years in the development. Its first commercially available title is James Frey's The Power of Six.
Co-founder Paul Cameron said around the world people read while listening to music that was disconnected or at odds with the book they were reading on their mobile devices.
''Until today, technology that can synchronise sound and music within an e-book did not exist - something almost as hard to imagine as a movie with no soundtrack.''
Booktrack would provide them with a complete movie-like sound experience, he said.
Booktrack chairman Derek Handley said it was a new genre of entertainment.
''Ten or twenty years from now it will be absurd to think of creating a book without a Booktrack.''
Booktrack editions can be downloaded from the Apple app store, with access for Android users available later this year.
The company has collaborated with HarperCollins, SonyATV, the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, composers, and Wellington film facility Park Road Post Production to produce the soundtracks.
The venture received financial support from the Ministry of Science and Innovation and New Zealand Trade and Enterprise.
Classics such as the Sherlock Holmes stories, Pride and Prejudice and Romeo and Juliet would be among its library, Booktrack said.
'Ten or twenty years from now it will be absurd to think of creating a book without a Booktrack.''
Not at all sure about that. Though the technology, and the potential is huge, there are questions to be asked about this intervention into the intimate space between author and reader, surely? See "Printing error or sound addition":http://wp.me/pF9OB-R0
Posted by Richard Littledale at 17:48 on August 25, 2011
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