Today I'm going to review what I think is a great example of  a next generation eBook, Music: An Appreciation by Roger Kamien. I'll take a look at what this eBook looks like on Inkling, then compare it with a more traditional eBook version on the Kindle.

Musical textbooks are a great example of books that never should have been traditional books; they are calling out for music being embedded into the page rather than being distributed with a set of CDs.

Let's take a quick look at what this eBook looks like on Inkling, complete with interactive listening outlines:

On the Kindle, Music: An Appreciation is basically a PDF file, with the pages exactly the same as the the physical textbook. The Kindle file really is literally a PDF, embedded into a proprietary Amazon format known as AZW4; this is in contrast to Inkling titles, which are in HTML5.

Let's take a look at the Kindle version of this; here I'm paging through some of the pages of this eBook:

Notice how cramped the text is, as the layout was designed for print, rather than for re-flowable digital containers. Notice what happens when you go to landscape mode; since the pages of the eBook are essentially an image, nothing reflows:

In contrast, here is the same Inkling title reflowing as it moves to landscape mode on an iPad, with the ability to zoom into images. In addition, you can see it reflowing on an iPhone correctly:

In addition, the eBook doesn't take any advantage of what the new digital medium enables. For example, readers are referred to physical CDs when learning about the music, while the listening outline literally has time offsets for someone to try to skip about on a CD manually using a CD player:

I don't mean to pick on the Kindle in this blog post; I actually love the Kindle and use it constantly, including using Amazon's Audible.com. What I do want to pick on however is the belief that we can't do better then this; music education texts like this are exactly what next generation eBooks should be all about: beautiful, interactive, built on HTML5, and re-flowable.

BTW, Inkling's version of Music: An Appreciation will also work on the web. Give it a try, for free, including one of the interactive listening outlines.

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Please note that this is my personal blog — the views expressed on these pages are mine alone and not those of my employer.