“i” on Digital Publishing: The Shakesperience (enhanced iBook)

• Blog
• Oct 5, 2012
• 0 Comments

New from Sourcebooks are a series of enhanced iBooks dedicated to making Shakespeare a modern and immersive tablet experience. The Shakesperience iBooks: Othello, Hamlet, and Romeo & Juliet (currently available in Apple’s iBookstore/each starting at an introductory price of $5.99) show true merit as they have taken advantage and have harnessed “the most current and dynamic features of the innovative authoring tool, iBooks Author.”

Each “Shakesperience” features a “touchable interface with remarkable audio, video, photos, and illustrations to create an interactive, hands-on Shakespeare experience unlike any you’ve ever seen before.”

From our perspective, this is a welcome sign to see publishers embrace the iBook platform. As opposed to two years ago when the closest thing possible to creating “The Shakesperience” was to create a stand-alone-app, not so dissimilar to the immersive and original T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land app or Kerouac’s On the Road app, which were of the first to offer such a controlled and expansive tablet experience—going far beyond the capacities of the original text. I would imagine as well that publishing with the free to use iBooks Author software is a far more sustainable model, especially for independent publishers, to get such an interactive teaching tool as “The Shakesperience” into the hands of students and fans alike.

[link: iTunes]