In 1987 a prerecorded video tape cost in the region of £70 and in those days £70 was worth a lot more than it is today. Also studios like Disney were reluctant to release their films onto VCR, around eight years after the VCR arrived in the UK.

These VHS tapes had a film on them and that was about it - if you were lucky you would also get some trailers for upcoming releases.

Obviously the price started to drop, soon the tapes were much cheaper and every film studio saw that they could make a lot of money by putting their old back catalogue onto VHS.

Everyone was happy (with the exception of the now familiar cry that ‘piracy’ was destroying the industry).

][][][][

Then came the DVD - a much better format for many reasons. If has random access and a player fault wouldn’t destroy the disc unlike the familiar ‘chewed up’ VHS tape.

However, by now most people owned a large library of video tapes, either bought in the shops or taped off the TV and kept forever. What would make them want to start re-buying their library again?

Soon the DVD creators realised that ‘extra features’ would be one of the motivations for upgrading your entertainment library. Why buy a cheaper VHS tape when you could buy the more expensive DVD, but the DVD would have commentaries, deleted scenes, mini-features and so on and so forth.

Perhaps one reason why Bluray hasn’t taken off like DVDs did is because the extra features on a Bluray disc are much the same as on a DVD.

][][][][

What has this little history got to do with ebooks I hear you say.

Well, like DVD replacing VHS, a lot of people are interested in ‘upgrading’ their library. The obvious benefits are there to be seen - instant gratification when you buy from an online store and they take up a lot less room.

Unfortunately there are disadvantages in the format, that you can’t resell or lend them (and please don’t talk about the often mentioned Nook, the lending on that is so crippled as to be next to worthless) and some people just prefer books.

The cost is also an issue - why are many online stores charging hardcover prices for 100Kb of data? Who wants to pay that for books that you can lend or resell.

][][][][

One solution comes with portable colour screen readers, and by taking a leaf out of the book of those early DVD innovators.

‘Ebook extras’.

So, you can buy the physical book and read the text.

Or, you can buy the ebook and read the text, see an interview with the author, hear the audiobook, read the reviews and critiques, and read some samples of the author’s other works. Maybe even select a section of text and hear the author’s ‘commentary’ for that section of the book.

With a reader connected to the internet you could join the author’s fan club, discuss the book on dedicated forums, have online author ‘events’, update your Facebook site, write your own reviews, earn credit for money off vouchers for other books, become part of the copyediting for a future edition and have those edition updates pushed direct to your device.

Don’t those ‘extras’ mean that you’d be happier paying the current (too high) price for an ebook?

iTunes has started down this road with the iTunes ‘LP’ and some of the films that Apple sells have the DVD extras included (although for some reason, not the director/cast commentaries). The extras make us want to buy these items rather than just download the music or video from some dodgy torrent site.

][][][][

‘But’, I hear you say, ‘wouldn’t all this extra production cost money?’

It would - although with the falling price of technology the cost would mostly be paying the wages of the people to create the content. Once the ‘book’ has been created the cost per unit is pretty much nil. It essen