RARE VINTAGE - w an "Easter-Egg" hidden in the code.
An
interactive CD-ROM of the Beatles film "A Hard Day's Night" (1964) in
which you can read the script as the movie plays alongside it. The interface allows you to call up any scene in the film, or any of the songs.
Included is a 160-page essay by rock historian Bruce Elder, extensive
biographies of nearly every cast and crew member, a clip from director Richard
Lester's first film, "It's Trad, Dad (1962)", and all 11 minutes of
his 1960 cult short, "The Running, Jumping and Standing Still Film".
In short, the CD-ROM format offers a wealth of subsidiary information.
JOHN, PAUL, GEORGE and RINGO star in this QuickTime version of A Hard Day's Night. You get the complete and uncut movie, with lots of exciting extras. Meet the Beatles and make you Mac rock and roll.
A HARD DAY'S NIGHT
Released in 1964 a Hard Day's Night captures the Beatles just after their first triumphant tour of American, when "rock and roll" meant racy music and an even racier lifestyle. Now, A Hard Day's Night is completely digitized and ready for playback on your Macintosh computer. This entertaining CD-ROM features:
All 90 minutes of the original movie, complete and uncut.
Great Beatles songs such as "all My Loving," Can't Buy Me Love," "I Should Have Known Better", and the title tune "A Hard Day''s Night".
The original script, complete with scenes that were cut and improvised dialogue.
Essay by critic Bruce Elder on the Beatles, the music and the movie.
The theatrical trailer.
The 1982 movie re-released prologue.
Clips from Richard Lester's early work.
Of course, it's all interactive, so you can jump from one video clip or text passage to another quickly and easily. You can even "dog-ear" pages and find every appearance of a word (or your favorite Beatle)!
ABOUT THE VOYAGER COMPANY
by
And then there were the ebooks produced
by Voyager Company in the early 1990s and distributed on floppy disks (and
later, CDs).
These were early enhanced ebooks called
(appropriately enough) Expanded Books (Wikipedia). A wide variety of titles were
released as Expanded Books, including A
Hard Day’s Night, Shining Flower hukaruhana, and The Tao
of Pooh and The Te of Piglet by Benjamin Hoff
In addition to the text of the book, an Expanded Book also
had audio, animation, links from various parts of the text to supplemental
content. All of this content was bundled with the disk, obviously; this was the
pre-internet era.
Expanded Books was perhaps the very first attempt to
develop enhanced ebooks. The ebooks were built to run in Hypercard and included
such amazing features as embedded audio and images, multiple font sizes,
bookmarks, typed notes, search, and what at the time was considered clever
menu design. Voyager produced around 60 titles as well as a tool kit for
authors and publishers to produce their own ebooks. According to the 1996
edition of The Art of
Electronic Publishing, Voyager sold the ebooks for $20 each, with
some multi-volume sets priced at $25.
This ebook format never amounted to much
because the idea was too new, too expensive, and because it only ran on Macs
(not a common OS back then, or for that matter now). Expanded Books were dependent
on Apple’s proprietary Hypercard programming language (here’s Ars Technica with
more info on Hypercard).
But never mind why Expanded Books failed;
today I wanted to share with you a demo video of one of the titles release.
Here is an annotated and expanded version of Stephen Gould’s On Evolution: his ebook was
released in 1995, so it’s not quite 20 years ago, but I think you get the
point.
The work Voyager was doing 20 years ago
was not a whole lot different from a current ebook app, is it? Sure, the video
is lower resolution and the interface is dated, but the content added to the
original text isn’t terribly different from enhance ebooks today.