Here's one more reason to buy an iPad instead of an Amazon Kindle: multimedia. Amazon is introducing books that include embedded audio and video content.
But they won't play on the company's own Kindle reader, which is sadly still restricted to displaying pages of dark-grey on light-grey text. Instead, the new multimedia-enabled books will only be fully experienced on the iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch.
Dorothy Nicholls, the director of Amazon's Kindle business, said that a number of books are available as of June 28 with embedded video and audio, "from Rose's Heavenly Cakes with video tips on preparing the perfect cake to Bird Songs with audio clips that relate the songs and calls to the birds' appearances. This is just the beginning—we look forward to seeing what authors and publishers create for Kindle customers using the new functionality of the Kindle apps."
As Harry McCracken reports on Technlolgizer, these multimedia books are a bit bigger than the usual Kindle books.
The books I bought with audio took a few minutes apiece; one with video took around fifteen minutes. Oh, and you can only downloaded AV books over Wi-Fi, not a 3G connection. Unlike with its Kindle e-readers, downloads to Apple devices aren't on Amazon's nickel, so it's protecting AT&T from an onslaught of Kindle app users clogging the 3G network with massive files.
There's a lot of potential for multimedia in e-books, as the folks at Sideways demonstrated for me at BookExpo America in June. That's especially true for instructional, how-to and travel content, the sort of materials that Sideways is already working with publishers on as "apps" to be sold through the iTunes Apps Store.