Despite all the talk about the future of e-books, oddly, there's not much discussion about what seems like an obvious point: e-books are different from print books most significantly because they are made of digital information, not paper, meaning they are not limited to just displaying words. Why not videos, pop-out graphics, audio, Flash animation and just about anything else a computer can do?

That's one of the big ideas behind DNL e-books, designed by Dnaml, a company based in Sydney, Australia. Peter Kent, senior v-p for U.S. operations, compares his company's most interactive books to the magic books in Harry Potter: “When they open a book, it's alive.”

New avenues of distribution are Dnaml's other innovations. The company's founders and partners come from the software industry, where “try-before-you-buy” and packaging software with hardware have long been dominant distribution models. “We think of e-books as pieces of software,” Kent said. This is quite a departure from what remains the predominant thinking about e-books: that they're just like print books, which you select from thousands in a store. Kent imagines, for instance, publishers partnering with computer manufacturers to package computer software guides and other relevant books with the computers themselves; a few chapters would be free, and then the book would ask for a credit card number to unlock the rest.

Adam Schmidt, Dnaml's CEO, sees the software industry's sales and distribution models as ways of opening up whole new markets: “We're bringing a lot of these big heavyweights from the software industry into this business. Software companies have massive databases of registered users. We know how to open up markets.”

One limitation of the DNL e-book is that it's viewable only on a computer—the “moving parts” won't play on portable reading devices like the Sony Reader or Kindle, and an iPhone is too small. Kent, however, does not see this as a real problem: “At the London Book Fair, I did 12 presentations, each for about 70 people. I asked every audience how many owned a Kindle or a Sony Reader. Maybe four or five responded; when I asked how many had a laptop, almost everyone raised their hands.”

The DNL e-book is newly on the market: this year's London Book Fair was its big debut, with a showing in New York shortly before. So far, the company has signed a contract the Hachette US to do its frontlist. Cengage, a publisher of academic books is another large client. Schmidt said other deals are in the works with major publishers, though he is not at liberty to say which.

Free Ideas
The Web has made a critic, columnist, director or author of anyone who wants to be; there's an immeasurable amount of content available, without censorship—but also without quality control. Peter Hopkins, president of Big Think, wants to make sure there's one place you can go on the Web for expert opinions that come from bona-fide experts. Big Think's Web site (www.bigthink.com) offers handsomely produced short videos of all kinds of experts—from Alan Dershowitz on “The Preventative State” to poet and NEA head Dana Gioia on how to reach an audience. The company gives these videos (at least for now) to bloggers and anyone else who wants to use them. “The Web has become deluged with user-generated content, some of which is great, some of which is not so great,” said Hopkins. “What's gotten lost in the mix is the idea that there's value in some degree of vetting. Our goal at the moment is to build an archive of this sort of information, to help create a compendium of expert opinion.”

At present, Big Think pays its bills using a sponsorship model, seeking out sponsors willing to invest in Big Think getting the word out about their interests: “We can give the sponsor bang for their buck, reaching their targeted group,” explained Hopkins. Big Think's main goal, then, is to get its content in front of viewers; the company markets aggressively, sending out targeted e-mail blasts, and contacting bloggers and other sites that might be interested in their videos.

Big Think is another outpost in the free-content frontier, a sign that what it means to be a publisher is changing—territory that seems to make many publishers very nervous. “You're going to have to look at how your authors' capabilities and resources can be monetized far beyond what we're doing now,” said Hopkins, who also said Big Think may charge for some of its content in the future.