Al Gore Invents a Showpiece E-Book: Al Gore's book "our Choice" has been converted into an e-book app that is a showpiece for the new world of touch-screen gadgets.
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.
The interactivity, the zooming into graphic elements and the videos aren’t a gimmick. They actually add up to a different experience. The book feels more Web-like; at your leisure, you can jump from the main river of text into one of these deeper dives. Yet there’s no fear of falling off the primary train of thought.
Thanks to all of the smoothly integrated multimedia, the book engages more parts of your brain than just the one that reads prose. As a result, Mr. Gore goes much farther in his mission — persuasion — than he could on the printed page alone.
Best of all, the small company that created the app (called PushPop Press) says that over the last 18 months, it didn’t create just “Our Choice.” It simultaneously created a platform, a technology, that will permit them and others to publish subsequent immersive book-apps much faster and more easily.
But over all, this is one of the most elegant, fluid, immersive apps you’ve ever seen. It’s a showpiece for the new world of touch-screen gadgets.