Al Gore's newest ebook

After delightful presentations to Off-Campus Writer's Workshop and several area libraries in the past month, I'm delighted to direct your attention to David Pogue's column in the New York Times on Al Gore's gorgeous ebook, "Our Choice."


Here is Pogue's blog post:

Pogue writes:
It’s laid out like a book, with 400 photos, illustrations and charts. It works best on the iPad, of course, but the miniature versions on the iPhone/Touch work surprisingly well, too. In both cases, you can zoom out to see scrolling page miniatures at the bottom of the screen for easy jumping around.

In both apps, the real magic is all the visual elements. You can expand every photo and graphic to fill the whole screen; they look spectacular. At this point, you can interact with them. You can tap the corner of any photo, for example, to see where on the planet it was taken. You can press your finger on a bar of a chart to “explode” it into smaller bars, showing the component data underlying the primary bar. (For example, one bar chart shows the six gases that contribute to the greenhouse effect. Hold your finger on a bar to see it split into smaller bars, showing where those gases come from: transportation, buildings and so on.)

Some of the illustrations become narrated animations. Some turn out to be movies (there’s a total of an hour of video), most narrated by Mr. Gore."

This is likely the future of books!

Helen