Enhanced e-books are thought to be the next major threshold in the digital book universe,” wrote PublicAffairs founder and editor-at-large Peter Osnos in the most recent issue of the Atlantic. Osnos was inspired to address what the near future could bring by Hyperion’s enhancement of Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy, which contained 22 minutes of video and the entire audio recording of Jacqueline’s interviews with Arthur Schlesinger. Always the savvy publisher, Osnos noted the inherent problems. Admitting, “We are still in the very early stages of the development and availability of these books,” Osnos pointed to the elephant in the room: securing rights to archival material to support an enhancement. Sports books, books about cinema, and cookbooks cry out for video enhancement—and the day may come when rights to multimedia enhancements are more available. Just imagine if Knopf, which is about to release an e-book of Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, could add a dash of video enhancement with those PBS shows. But that day is not quite here.

For the moment, however, text and photography, gliding smoothly with their practiced grace, are going strong in the illustrated book category. And several of the more high-end art book publishers are keenly aware that production values and the right subject can make for success.

To wit: in May, the Metropolitan Museum of Art published Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty, on the occasion of the Met’s blockbuster show of the late fashion designer’s work. Reports publisher and editor-in-chief Mark Polizzotti, “After only five months, the book is in its sixth printing, and now has 200,000 copies in print—and is still going strong more than a month after the show closed.” The lushly illustrated book retails for $45.

Abrams and Rizzoli, neither slaves to fashion nor new to the topic, are weighing in with books about clothes and designers and the legendary taste-making publications that have attended the fashion industry for decades.

The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier—the French haute couture designer who brought you Madonna in a cone bra among countless other wild flourishes, weighs in at 424 pages and carries a list price of $125 (Abrams). It accompanies a show of Gaultier’s work, which originated at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, is now at the Dallas Museum through February, after which it moves to the de Young Museum in San Francisco.

Abrams honors the two great fashion mags with separate books: Harper’s Bazaar: Greatest Hits, by the magazine’s current editor-in-chief, Glenda Bailey, who has been at her post for a decade. The book of photo shoots, spreads, and cover reproductions covers Bailey’s tenure, and are meant to show how she has helped make “pop culture fashionable.” It retails for $65.

Then comes Vogue: The Covers ($50), which contains 120 years of the magazine’s covers, from gals in bloomers to Gwyneth Paltrow, evincing a different and more classic sense of style than Harper’s—something for everyone.

Rizzoli is right there in the fashion battle, with three titles forthcoming. In one, an unusual pairing of big names in the business—Louis Vuitton/Marc Jacobs—turns into a handsome history of an empire. Louis Vuitton started his trade in luggage and packing, a guild profession known as emballeur (packer), in 1854, and transformed the business into the high-end brand we know today—a brand for which designer Jacobs has served as creative director for the past 15 years. With 300 color illustrations and a text by fashion and textile curator Pamela Golbin, the book retails for $80, but does not publish till spring. Then there is Jimmy Choo: Icons, with text by the Jimmy Choo Ltd. co-founder (and British Vogue accessories editor) Tamara Mellon. Rizzoli publishes just after Christmas, at $75. And the fashion-conscious former editor-in-chief of Interview magazine, Ingrid Sischy, appends an essay to Dior Couture, a photographic collection of the iconic Dior gowns. Photos are by well-known fashion photographer Patrick Demarchelier, and the book is priced at $150. Perhaps Carrie Bradshaw will read a book.

Cue the Music

There are maisons de haute couture and then there’s rock ’n’ roll, where concert getups worn on stage or pictured on album covers, combined with a musical style and attitude, influence millions. Fashion with licks and lyrics, if you will. Packaged into books, this amalgam can sell and sell, as it did this year, which saw the bandanna-ed Keith Richards, the über-louche, and Steven Tyler, the über hard-ass androgyne, pen life stories that a certain generation couldn’t get enough of. (Life spent 22 weeks on the PW hardcover bestsellers list, 12 on the trade paper list; Tyler’s: 14 on hardcover, with the paperback due in January.)

At the center of it all this fall is George Harrison, the so-called quiet Beatle whose mysteriousness and reserve have made him all the more interesting. Martin Scorsese’s two-part HBO documentary on Harrison has met with terrific reviews—for the filmmaker and the soulful guitar player. Abrams is there with George Harrison: Living in the Material World, with text by his widow, Olivia Harrison. The 400-page book is filled with reproductions of notes, letters, scribbled lyrics, and some never-before-seen photographs. How many Beatles fans are out there? And how many “liked George”? Quite a few, it may turn out: the book debuts at #24 on our extended nonfiction bestseller list this week, in its first week on sale (Abrams, 400 pages, $40). An enhanced e-book with concert footage, song tracks, and those inimitable Beatles interviews? At this point (to quote another Beatle): Imagine.

Abrams also weighs in with a gigantic compendium of rock photos by Bob Gruen in Rock Seen, nearly 300 solid pages of photos and captions, picturing a lot of bare chests, eye liner, glitter, and wasted food. A style, if you will, that Gruen has focused on for the last 35 years, since he got his first gig photographing Tommy James and the Shondells. Debbie Harry pens a brief intro, and Gruen provides a revealing preface about the grind of being a documentarian of anarchy. List price: $45.

Sterling has what it calls “the definitive history” in Fleetwood Mac. Talk about style. We can leave it at Stevie Nicks, but the boys and girls in this band—which morphed from authentic blues to AM rock and back, traced an evolution in how rock looked and sounded. Mike Evans, who wrote Woodstock: Three Days That Shook the World, has written a comprehensive history of the band—with its ups and downs, personnel changes, internal dramas, and soaring success. Readers of a certain age will be reminded of some forgettable wardrobe choices—and whom to blame or credit. But for Mac fans, Evans’s fine recounting of each album will be, well, a landslide of memories. List price: $29.95.

Critical to all the above-mentioned music books is a plucked string instrument played with fingers or a pick. The guitar has swung on the hip of many a rock icon and is perhaps the most fetishized of musical instruments. Lucille, anyone? Five full-color posters are bound into Billboard’s Guitars Illustrated, a visual catalogue of 250 guitar models, researched and written by Terry Burrows. The five posters are particularly fascinating: each covers a different “family tree” of an important line of guitar—Fender, Gibson, Martin, Gretsch, and Rickenbacker. If you want to see a full page each on the Stratocaster models used by George Harrison, Jeff Beck, Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Ray Vaughan, this is for you. List: $40.

For hardcore—and practicing—guitar enthusiasts, Sterling has another luthier title: Electrified: The Art of the Electric Guitar, written by Robert Shaw, a curator of American folk arts and crafts. Shaw gives a historical blow-by-blow of how new designs by new craftsmen altered the landscape of electric guitar playing. Along the way, 125 guitar makers are discussed, with more than 20 individuals given extensive treatment. The merits of such things as Fender vs. Gibson are intriguingly debated. List price: $35.

Theater and TV

And then there is art, writ large, which has taken place at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, in various forms, for 15 decades. Marking the venerable but still cutting-edge institution’s 150th anniversary is BAM: The Complete Works, from Quantuck Lane Press. With essays by Phillip Lopate, Robert Wilson, John Rockwell, Peter Brook, Meredith Monk, and Joan Acocella—among many others—BAM’s run from its time as an opera house during the Civil War right up to its current season is lovingly detailed. For anyone who has had a moving experience at the Academy—or who is interested in the history of Brooklyn—this volume will have strong appeal. Priced at $95.

And finally, a diva of style, substance, entertainment, reading, and public emotional catharsis—Oprah—now that she has given up her popular and influential daytime show, she gets her due in yet another Abrams title. The Oprah Winfrey Show will likely be catnip to the millions of Oprah fans who await her return to their lives. This is a book with a $50 price tag and an announced 500,000 printing. In it, the history of her shows—and her role in American culture—is detailed by Deborah Davis, with contributions from Angelou, Bono, Steinem, Mandela, Travolta, and many more. One would think there’d be a bookseller in there. After all, the book business was mightily brightened by Oprah’s enthusiasm for good books. Perhaps, with this book, the boon will continue.

High in New York

It begins with a quote from Sartre—“New York reveals itself only at a certain height, a certain distance, a certain speed”—and the aerial photographs by Yann Arthus-Bertrand, a Frenchman who specializes in aerial work, shows just what height, distance, and speed does reveal. In a sense, New York from the Air: A Story of Architecture (Abrams, $60), is quintessentially both French and American, something not lost on the book’s designer, who selected a shot of Wall Street with Lady Liberty’s torch (of course, a gift from France) in the foreground for the cover. The New York revealed is not the gritty or romantic one found in other photo-essays on Gotham, but a cooler, more abstract consideration of the designs of the city, from playgrounds to skyscrapers, from public parks to renovated piers and crosswalks and helipads. There are no interiors here, only an endless play of surfaces, lines, and volumes, accented by sunlight. The text is by John Tauranac, who served as the design chief of the 1979 New York City subway map, and his work is matter-of-fact, filled with fascinating detail.