"One company has created its own category that supports this goal — Booktrack." more -->
New Zealand Entrepreneurs At Booktrack: 'Books Aren't Just For Reading'
The following guest post is by Andrew Ferrier, who has held director and executive positions for large multinationals, working in Canada, the United States, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and Mexico. He is currently the Chair of New Zealand Trade and Enterprise, New Zealand’s international business development agency, and runs his own investment company.
At last year’s Frankfurt Book Fair, the opportunity (and threat) offered by e-books was a hot topic. As publishers face increased competition from entertainment categories such as movies, games and TV, they are constantly looking for ways to generate revenue through e-books, and to enrich the experience.
One company has created its own category that supports this goal — Booktrack. This two-year-old, New Zealand-based company has redefined reading in its traditional sense by synchronizing sound to reading in much the same way that movies synchronize sound to images. For example, if you are reading the Booktrack version of Romeo and Juliet and Juliet has just met her end in the Capulet tomb, you hear the fatal blow and then the orchestra starts at exactly the right moment to convey the tragedy of the scene and complement the text.
As you can imagine, there is a fine line between immersive and distracting when adding a sensory experience into the reading mix. Co-founder and CEO Paul Cameron’s largest operational challenge to-date has been to figure out how to offer customers a personalized reading experience when everybody reads at a different speed – there is nothing more distracting than hearing waves crashing when you are reading that the protagonist is back on dry land. Cameron notes that he and his co-founder, his brother Mark, had to shelve their idea for a few years while the technology caught up.
The introduction of the iPad and its advanced technology made their vision a reality. Paul also attributes the close-knit technology and creative sector in New Zealand to its success: Booktrack’s sound producers are from Park Road Post Productions, who were on the award-winning audio team for the Lord of the Rings film trilogy. As they faced skepticism that the technology would work, Paul credits the Kiwi attitude of anything is possible, which draws on the country’s tendency toward both optimism and problem-solving—as keeping the development team on target.
With investments to the tune of $4 million from Facebook’s director of global creative solutions, Mark D’Arcy, among others, Booktrack has been busy growing its B2C and B2B customer bases. Currently, Booktrack has featured as one of the top three ranked apps in the Book category on the Apple App Store and has been a top 10 book app in 20 countries. On the B2B side, Booktrack has been helping e-book retailers and publishers reinvigorate backlist sales and monetize royalty free sales.
Booktrack’s publishing partners include Sony/ATV Music Publishing, Random House, HarperCollins and Thomas Nelson. The next endeavor is to look for new ways to scale the business, a necessary process for all entrepreneurs. To that end, Paul’s plan for growth is to build a community of content developers where anyone can leverage Booktrack’s software and audio library to create a soundtrack to their own proprietary work, including white papers, blogs, best sellers, you name it. Booktrack’s foray into this new direction was developing the first crowd-sourced eBook soundtrack with Indaba Music.
With the National Endowment for the Arts reporting 33% of high school – and 42% of college-students – never read a book after graduation, it is critical that publishers look to enhanced reading experiences to compete in our multimedia world (see Paul’s TEDx talk). Who knows, maybe all future content will be accompanied by a soundtrack in a similar way that all content now is available to be shared via social media? Cue the Star Wars Theme Music …
URL: http://www.forbes.com/sites/groupthink/2013/04/01/new-zealand-entrepreneurs-at-booktrack-books-arent-just-for-reading/ 
"Booktrack CEO Paul Cameron on setting up shop in San Francisco and New York" more -->
ComputerWorld: 21st March 2013
Making tracks into the US Market
Doing business in the US is massively different compared to New Zealand, according to Booktrack CEO Paul Cameron
“Things happen really fast, and it’s very dynamic. You’ve got to be really hungry. There will be 20 guys behind you looking to make a deal,” he says.
Paul Cameron spoke to Computerworld from San Francisco, where he is busy setting up the company’s second US office, in addition to its office in New York. Booktrack creates synchronised soundtracks for e-books. The software automatically matches music and sound effects to where the reader is on the page.
But while it may be competitive, Cameron says it's also a supportive environment.
“Especially in San Francisco, everyone is out to help each other, and it’s so refreshing.”
There are thousands and thousands of startups in the US and they all “sound and look American”.
“When New Zealand startups come [to the US] they sound and look different and their view of the world is quite different – but that is also a big opportunity,” he says.
“I think it’s much harder for New Zealand startups here but only as hard as their attitude. If they come with the right attitude they have as much opportunity as any American startup. But you have to be prepared to perhaps operate a bit differently, not hang on to the way things are done at home, and work a bit harder.”
Cameron started Booktrack in Auckland in 2010 together with his brother, Mark. It was Mark Cameron that came up with the idea for the technology. He was commuting to work on a ferry and would usually read and listen to music during the trip. He noticed that quite a few of his fellow commuters also read books and had earbuds in as well. From time to time, a happy song would come on just as he was reading a happy part of the book and that made him think about having a soundtrack to match the story. He got his brother onboard. Paul Cameron was running a technology company at the time – developing military electronics software.
This was pre-Kindle times, so it was early days, Paul Cameron says, but when the iPad came along, they knew the right time for their idea had come.
Booktrack now employs twelve staff.
The software calculates the reader’s reading pace by indexing when the page is turned. It also uses other indicators, such as double-tapping of words.
“We use those cues to continually estimate what words you are reading. Every time you interact with [the app] we update it.”
A number of algorithms determine how the soundtrack should be delivered – if you are speeding up or slowing down the app will adjust, he says.
Last year, the company secured around $2 million in funding, with investors including Stephen Tindall; Peter Thiel; Derek Handley; angel investors Sparkbox; and Park Road Post Productions – the Wellington sound studio behind films such as Lord of the Rings.
In addition to the cash, there is huge value in the investors’ connections and their ability to help the business, Cameron says. If you are looking to raise funding for your startup, his advice is to start small – use your local networks and go to friends and family. Once you have got that support behind you, you can work your way up the tiers.
“It’s difficult to jump straight to a venture fund,” he says. “If you are not prepared to ask your friends and family to back your business there is no point going anywhere else.”
Cameron’s top tip for budding entrepreneurs is to get your product to market as quickly as possible. “Don’t wait for the perfect moment. The longer you wait the more money it’s going to cost you.”
“Give it a go – but be prepared to work hard,” he says.
Getting the idea is the easy part. Actually making it happen is harder.
“But that is also the most exciting part. You get to drive your own destiny – both your business and personal goals.”
The company is now building tools to allow third parties to create their own soundtracks to books, whether they are publishers, music fans or school children. They will be able to share or sell their soundtracks among their friends, he says.
URL: http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/news/making-tracks-into-the-us-market 
"Booktrack is bringing Christians closer to stories told in The Bible with the release of its Booktrack edition of The Gospels." more -->
idealog: 19 December 2012
Booktrack brings the Bible to life
The Kiwi startup, launched in 2011 by brothers Mark and Paul Cameron, adds background music and ambient noises to books, accompanying passages of prose with complimentary sound.
Booktrack bounced back from initial criticism of its product, recently closing a $2 million funding round led by existing investor Peter Thiel, and new investors including Sir Stephen Tindall’s K1W1 angel investment fund.
The latest version of the ebook app for iPad, which launched at the beginning of this week, includes an audio-added version of The Gospels, telling the story of Jesus’ life. A demo version is available for free, with the full version costing US$20.
Booktrack CEO Paul Cameron says the company worked with Park Road Post Production in Miramar to create over 100 unique musical compositions, 200 sound effects, and 100 ambient noises. Altogether, three composers and six audio engineers worked for six months to develop the product.
Although Christianity has a global following, The Gospels ebook is aimed primarily at the US market, particularly in the southern states in the Bible Belt.
“Right now a lot of the marketing is focused on segments of the US where there is a real passion for Christianity,” says Cameron.
There was no consultation with senior members of any church organisations during the book's production, but Cameron says the team included very religious people. Booktrack partnered with Bible publishing company Thomas Nelson, which Cameron says made sure the background sounds were tasteful.
Cameron says an audio accompanied version of the New Testament is almost complete, and due to launch in January 2013.
The focus for the 12-strong Booktrack team now is to build tools for third parties to produce their own audio-accompanied ebooks, using Booktrack as a platform for sale and promotion. Development for this is already underway, and Cameron says the platform will go live in early 2013.
URL: http://www.idealog.co.nz/blog/2012/12/booktrack-brings-the-bible-to-life 
"The Kiwi firm whose technology creates synchronised soundtracks for e-books has added a "rich, movie-like soundtrack" to The Gospels." more -->
Stuff.co.nz: 21st December 2012
The word and the sound
The Kiwi firm whose technology creates synchronised soundtracks for e-books has added a "rich, movie-like soundtrack" to The Gospels. It was created in association with audio studio Park Road Post and the 12-month project involved composers, musicians, musical historians and sound engineers.
Booktrack CEO and co-founder Paul Cameron says the popularity of The Bible, and the strong part music plays in Christianity, made the project a natural fit for the company.
“Right from very early days of working on Booktrack we were looking for titles with big fan bases. Your first instinct is to go to the very big authors but very quickly you realise that a book like The Bible has a very passionate fan base,” says Cameron.
Cameron says Booktrack’s version of The Gospels, being sold via the Booktrack app in Apple’s App Store, has already been sold around the world. The company’s next Bible release will be the remaining 24 books of the New Testament.
“It has been a long and involved project but it is a big book at the end of the day,” he says. “Unlike a bestselling novel it’s something that will endure for a long time and it can reach many different age groups and demographics."
URL: http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/unlimited/8104238/The-word-and-the-sound 
"is the Age-old Practice of flicking through A book in silence becoming defunct? sounds dramatic, but the evolution" more -->
APRAP: May 2012
Reading the Booktrack
Booktrack is a Kiwi-led innovation that allows eBook users to read and listen to music simultaneously. What is unique in this idea is the ability to synchronise music and sound effects to the story, whilst keeping the audio at the speed in which you a reading. Having trouble fully imagining that “whistling wind” you are reading about? Cue the sound of whistling.
Val Hunting, VP Audio & Operations of Booktrack, helps describe the technology used. “Years of research and development have enabled us to develop a combination of methods to ensure that the soundtrack (which consists of hundreds of individual sound files) will synchronise with the reading speed of the user. The unique challenge is that each reader not only reads at a different speed, but also changes their reading speed as they read and they may change the font and layout of their eReaders. We have complex algorithms that constantly monitor the speed of the reader and cue each audio file accordingly.”
Behind the company is an impressive line-up of entrepreneurial names. Kiwi cofounders Paul and Mark Cameron lead the pack, with Derek Handley – CEO of media company The Hyperfactory – sitting as Chairman. The NZ names don’t just feature on the business side of things either. APRA Ambassador John Psathas and APRA Professional Development Award 2011-winner Stephen Gallagher are composing contributors, working with the NZ Symphony Orchestra and Wellington’s Park Road Post to bring the causative projects to life.
Having only launched in August 2011 the software is still in its inception, yet already has some strong literary names (Booker Prize winner Salman Rushdie has just released a story) and downloading numbers (over 100,000 downloads for one title) behind it. But one of the most exciting elements of this venture is the prospective possibilities for composers.
APRAP talked with John Psathas and Stephen Gallagher on their different approaches to adapting words to music and the future of ‘book composing’, all within the realm of an evolving technology. What is the process you go through when writing a score for an eBook?
JP: I read the short story (Salman Rushdie’s In The South) about 50 times and got to know it inside out. I developed a concept for the score, which grew out of specific Indian ragas that matched things in the story like the time of day of the scene, or an attribute of an Indian God. I ran this by Salman and he agreed it was a good way to proceed. I then created music scores that combined tablas, sitars and a full symphony orchestra, along with a few synth textures. We recorded all of this, edited and mixed it, then gave it to Salman to approve, which he did. From then on it was a process of embedding the music into the Booktrack software and combining it with the sound design and atmospheres being created at Park Road Post.
SG: The Story Director plays a vital role in this process. The composer cannot always read through the book to get an overview so the way the Story Director describes the book is crucial to how the pieces come out. They go through and read the book, breaking it down into descriptions on the changing of scenes and what the music needs to sound like at each cue. How do you find the process of composing a soundtrack for a book to composing for film?
JP: The book score is very different from the film score. In a film the music is often revealing hidden information, for example what characters are really feeling. In a book all of this is unnecessary as it is described by the writer. So the music is there to enhance the overall feeling that a passage is evoking and that is everything combined – all of the characters, the setting, the plot, the historical era. In a book score it is not the aim to exactly match (in timing) a sequence of events – although this is often possible – but more to deepen the overall experience of the moment the reader is in, and the immediate past and future of the story.
SG: It’s a challenge. The first and most obvious difference is that there is no visual reference at all. Every medium that I have worked in with dramatic score prior to Booktrack is based on a fixed visual reference of some kind. Or, at least, a fixed linear timeframe in which action or dialogue takes place. To suddenly not have these absolutes is daunting. It is also a nice challenge. How long are the compositions?
SG: For a long book the total music time can run for hours, though this consists of cues being reused and looped throughout the book. The composer is given the brief based on an average reading time of 130 words per minute. The compositions need to fit with this speed but also fit for faster readers. Do you see this as an area that could open up more work for musicians and composers?
JP: It has huge potential. This is the biggest opportunity for composers since the emergence of film scores. A lot of Booktrack scores can be made without live musicians, which means they can be created with computers. This opens up the career to anyone with a good computer, the right software and good quality sounds. It’s also a very new concept – composers haven’t really been able to engage with authors in this way before. I’m looking forward to the next step. In which authors and composers create new hybrid works; making the book and the music together in collaboration, and feeding off each other’s creativity. That’ll be something extraordinary.
URL (Page 14): http://www.apra-amcos.co.nz/music-creators/aprap-magazine.aspx 
"Booktrack melds together the two things that spark me up like a fire cracker: words and music." more -->
TEDx Auckland: 2nd October 2012
Booktrack Sound Engineers Publishing
Booktrack melds together the two things that spark me up like a fire cracker: words and music. And at the beginning of this year when I heard that the prolific composer John Psathas had scored the music for Salmon Rushdie’s short story In the South, in that moment I knew the people behind Booktrack had teamed up two giants on the creative stomping ground. I snatched up the iPad, hit download, and became completely immersed.
In the South is set in India, and having never travelled to India, the music created a deeper ethnic connection to the backdrop of the story, transforming the book into a more communicative art form. There is this part in the book where Salmon writes,
“…to notice the moment when the thing happened that must happen to us all in the end, when the last little puff of vapor pops out of our mouths and dissolves into fetid air.”
And the music feels naked and haunting, and transfixed, like a scene out of a movie. But a few pages further in there is an earthquake, and just as the first giant wave hits, the drum roll proceeds and the music becomes dark and physical.
Paul Cameron, CEO of Booktrack and TEDxAuckland 2012 speaker, lined up an opportunity for me to meet John Psathas in Wellington.
Says John, with a strike of passion that is contagious, “Creating music for In the South was about evoking the world that the story was placed in. I must have read it fifty times! I read the book so many times the whole thing was inside me before I started writing music.”
John scored the short story over a two month period and then sixty six performers from the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra (NZSO) recorded the music in one day. And the post production was handled by none other than Park Road Post, (The Hobbit, Lord of the Rings and King Kong).
But the exciting part really is that Booktrack is still in its infancy. Paul Cameron is a determined man. He went out there and secured funding from some of the most exceptional investors in the world, and now the Booktrack library is starting to expand, the technology is being developed and improved all the time, and essentially we’re dealing with disruptive technology – an innovation that helps create a new market and eventually goes on to disrupt an existing market. The bar has not yet been set.
No one really knows how we will be consuming ebooks five years from now.
For the first time since the printing press came into being, the world of reading is changing dramatically. Especially for the younger generations who have been raised with digital TV and music on the move, sound has become a natural enrichment of their habitat.
And I don’t know exactly what Paul has planned for his TEDx Talk on Saturday 6 October, but one thing is certain; to trigger the pursuit of knowledge and creativity is to enter a realm of limitless possibilities.
.
URL: http://www.tedxauckland.com/booktrack-sound-engineers-publishing/ 
"Key phrase: Paul Cameron on his biggest "aha" moment when building Booktrack. Our initial reading speed algorithm implementation to match sound to text to the user’s reading speed, and the NYU research that proved an increase in comprehension and retention when reading with a Booktrack soundtrack." more -->
Microsoft BizSpark Featured Startups: 2 August, 2012
Featured Startup on Azure - Booktrack
It turns out that if you track a person's reading speed, and then match that speed with a song played at a pace with the reading, a person will comprehend more and retain more. This is what Paul Cameron, CEO of Booktrack, discovered with research from NYU while he was building the company. Booktrack is a company based in New Zealand. You can find them on Twitter @Booktrk .
It's a fact that should make a whole bunch of teachers and students happy. And we're happy to say that BookTrack is a featured Azure startup in BizSpark. BizSpark is a program that offers free software and free Azure hosting to startups building for the cloud. You can sign up your own startup for this three year program here, if you are less than three years old and making less then $1 million in revenue each year.
Key phrase: Paul Cameron on his biggest "aha" moment when building Booktrack. Our initial reading speed algorithm implementation to match sound to text to the user’s reading speed, and the NYU research that proved an increase in comprehension and retention when reading with a Booktrack soundtrack.
Interview
BizSpark: Tell us who you are and your role in the company.
Paul Cameron: CEO
BizSpark: What is your company’s mission?
Paul Cameron: To create the platform for a new genre of entertainment content – soundtracks for books.
BizSpark: In 140 characters or less, tell us what your company does.
Paul Cameron: Booktrack is creating the standard and platform for a new genre of entertainment content that provides synchronized movie-style soundtracks to eBooks.
BizSpark: Tell us about your Azure-based solution.
Paul Cameron: We use Azure for the following services: 1. Content Delivery Network for our client application (running on Windows, Mac, iOS & Android) to deliver Book and soundtrack content. 2. Registration Database so we can interact with our user base.
BizSpark: How is Azure implemented in your solution?
Paul Cameron: Currently the main purpose of using Azure is providing a Content Delivery Network for our client application delivering eBook and soundtrack content to our applications.
BizSpark: How did you get excited about Azure?
Paul Cameron: Scale, simplicity and cost to provide a cloud based system to our users
BizSpark: What were the Azure features that prompted you to decide to build on Azure?
Paul Cameron: The potential to scale was the main benefit. Although currently our main purpose in using Azure is to provide a CDN, our future roadmap includes using Azure as a platform to provide services such as a content store, account system and user portal.
BizSpark: What specific value are you getting from BizSpark beyond the technology?
Paul Cameron: The main benefits are the easy access to the latest Microsoft software, resources, and advice.
BizSpark: What has been your biggest “aha” moment since founding your company?
Paul Cameron: Our initial reading speed algorithm implementation to match sound to text to the user’s reading speed, and the NYU research that proved an increase in comprehension and retention when reading with a Booktrack soundtrack.
BizSpark: What advice do you have for companies that are thinking about building in the cloud?
Paul Cameron: Highly recommended. The flexibility, ease of integration & reduced cost made it a simple choice for Booktrack.
BizSpark: What is the one thing that you would like readers to take away about your Azure app?
Paul Cameron: Using Azure is a cost-effective way to access scalable, near limitless content distribution and processing power.
URL: http://blogs.technet.com/b/bizspark_featured_startups/archive/2012/08/02/featured-startup-on-azure-booktrack.aspx 
"So, what would the perfect music be for reading whatever you’re reading? Booktrack thinks it has cracked this particular code by composing music that specifically goes with particular books, from scratch. It alters the music as you read, so that the resulting soundtrack matches not only the book in general, but the particular words you are reading." more -->
evolver.fm: September 24, 2012
Interview: How Booktrack Puts Music Alongside Writing
I cannot write while I am listening to rap music. It overloads the word part of my brain, and my own words freeze up. When that happens, I queue up Boards of Canada or something like it, which has no words at all, and my words flow once again.
The same is true for reading with music. We can read at the same time that we listen, obviously, because these activities utilize different senses. However, some music goes with some words better than others. It wouldn’t make much thematic sense to read avant-garde, futuristic sci-fi while listening to traditional, formulaic German beer drinking music — and besides some kinds of music are simply too intrusive (usually intentionally) to permit the reading anything except, maybe, 140-characters or less.
So, what would the perfect music be for reading whatever you’re reading? Booktrack thinks it has cracked this particular code by composing music that specifically goes with particular books, from scratch. It alters the music as you read, so that the resulting soundtrack matches not only the book in general, but the particular words you are reading.
We had to know more about how this idea, which has received investment from PayPal zillionaire Peter Thiel, worked — even though it didn’t come out today, and some people think it’s silly. Granted, following an animated arrow is not how I want to read. But I would like some appropriate music to go with whatever I’m reading. We wondered, how does Booktrack make that happen? So we asked (edited for length and clarity).
Eliot Van Buskirk, Evolver.fm: How does Booktrack create its music? How many composers are there, how do they do it, how does it expand or contract based on the reader’s speed, and so on?
Paul Cameron, co-founder and CEO, Booktrack: Each Booktrack project is treated uniquely, and depending on the budget unique composition or music libraries are used to create the music and ambiance sounds that make up the soundtrack. Normally, the Academy Award-winning sound Studio Park Road Post Productions (Lord of the Rings, King Kong) completes all of Booktrack’s audio, and a single composer is used for each Book title. But for the [H.G. Wells] Time Machine release, the Indaba Music community submitted over 600 audio tracks from which the winning audio files were selected and combined to form the Booktrack soundtrack. The result was amazing and showed a great appetite from musicians to participate in Booktrack projects.
Booktrack and Indaba music make a great combination as both companies are innovating uniquely around music and audio. It has been a pleasure to work with Indaba and we look forward to many more competitions in the future.
Booktrack is creating a new type of digital entertainment content with its technology that combines ambiance audio and music into a soundtrack that automatically synchronized to the individual’s reading speed and to the story line. (Note: This is not an Audiobook. Booktrack consist of a cinematic soundtrack played while users read to themselves.) Each audio file is cued uniquely to match the readers reading speed and the reader can at anytime update where the reading by double tapping on any word and the soundtrack will synchronize back to the text. By altering when audio files start, stop and loop based on the users reading speed the reader is completely immersed in the author’s world
Evolver.fm: Where did the idea to do this come from. Was there a “Eureka” moment, or how did it otherwise happen?
Cameron: The idea arose from my brother, Mark, who was commuting to Hong Kong by ferry every day. During the trip, Mark would read books and articles while listening to music on his iPod. On occasion, there would be serendipitous moments where the music and the text would align tonally and thematically, enhancing the experience of both. He called me up to explore how we might be able to make this happen on a regular basis for all readers. I was running a team of developers at the time, so we started prototyping and developing, and from that, Booktrack was born.
Evolver.fm: Users of the Indaba collaborative recording service recently banded together to make a BookTrack for H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, which is available as an in-app purchase within the BookTrack app. What has the response been to Time Machine so far, and has it been different to the other titles?
Cameron: The response to the Time Machine Booktrack edition has been great. The idea of crowdsourcing a Booktrack from the Indaba Music community has definitely attracted a lot of people to Booktrack to try The Time Machine for themselves, and the reaction has been very positive with one reader claiming “Very enjoyable. Adds a delightful new dimension to reading.” The most downloaded Booktrack title was “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: The Adventure of the Speckled Band,” which was downloaded more than 100,000 times from the Apple iTunes App Store in 105 countries, making it one of the most globally downloaded eBooks of 2011.
All current enhanced e-books take you away from the reading experience by adding videos or games. Booktrack is the only “lean back and just read,” passive-participation model within the sector focused entirely on enhancing the age-old practice of reading words while you read. Proof of Booktrack’s effectiveness is research conducted by Professor of Communications Liel Leibovitz at New York University, who concluded that Booktrack’s innovative technology provides “a significant benefit in terms of increased, clarity, focus and retention of information over traditional e-reading.”
We believe that our solution — which relies on patented algorithms and other technology that we have developed in-house — is the cleanest, purest, and most sophisticated solution of a problem that artists have been facing since the creation of opera more than 400 years ago: How do we merge sound with text to create an immersive multimedia experience. The Indaba Music community have proven what is possible with Booktrack and future possibilities are endless.
URL: http://evolver.fm/2012/09/24/interview-how-booktrack-puts-music-alongside-writing/ 
"In the film versions of 'Pride and Prejudice' the music jumps and swells at all the right moments, heightening the tension and romance of that classic Jane Austen novel." more -->
The New York Times: August 23, 2011
Bells and Whistles for Some EBooks
In the film versions of "Pride and Prejudice" the music jumps and swells at all the right moments, heightening the tension and romance of that classic Jane Austen novel.
Will it do the same in the e-book edition?
Booktrack, a start-up in New York, is planning to release e-books with soundtracks that play throughout the books, an experimental technology that its founders hope will change the way many novels are read.
Its first book featuring a soundtrack is "The Power of Six," a young-adult novel published by HarperCollins, soon to be followed by "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," "Jane Eyre," "Romeo and Juliet" and "The Three Musketeers."
"It makes a new and engaging way to read and really enhances the experience and enhances your imagination and keeps you in the story longer," Paul Cameron, Booktrack's 35-year-old co-founder and chief executive, said in an interview. "And it makes it fun to read again. If you're not reading all the time, it might help you rediscover reading."
As e-book sales have skyrocketed in the past several years, publishers have searched for ways to improve on the digital editions of their books. In 2010 enhanced e-books with video and audio were all the rage - Simon & Schuster, for instance, found some success with an edition of its best seller "Nixonland," with 27 videos scattered throughout the text - but sales for many enhanced e-books were dismal, and the books were often expensive to produce.
Tara Weikum, an editorial director for HarperCollins Children's Books, said she believed "The Power of Six" could work with a soundtrack because the book is "cinematic in scope."
"We're learning that everything is up for grabs in terms of what people are going to respond to or be interested in, and the digital space is ever changing," she said. "If a reader falls in love with the book, they want more of it. And if we can give it to them in something like an e-book or the Booktrack edition, then it's pre-emptively anticipating what readers might be looking for."
Booktrack's founders say that their product is an improvement on the old book soundtracks, partly because it plays at the pace of the individual reader and can be paused or adjusted with a touch of the screen.
Reading the Booktrack edition of "The Power of Six" on an iPad is much like reading the standard e-book edition, with the addition of a small indicator scrolling down the page, line by line.
Much of the music - about nine hours' worth for the typical novel - is instrumental or ambient noise. But during livelier passages, a reader may hear the patter of footsteps, a booming gong, a crackling fire or the tick of a grandfather clock.
URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/24/books/booktrack-introduces-e-books-with-soundtracks.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all 
"The Future of Reading? ... A thrilling prospect" more -->
The Atlantic: August, 2011
Books With Soundtracks: The Future of Reading?
There is a long-held belief about cinema: "There never was a silent film." From the early days, when moving images fascinated viewers in their mute spectacle, musical accompaniment drowned out the incessant whirring of the projector machine. Sound brought cinema's haunting figures into being, amplifying their moods and heightening the intensity of the action.
Reading, however, is silent by design. Unless readers add their own accompaniment. On any given public transit commute, one might find an audience of readers trying to do just that, headphones in, books open, providing soundtracks to literature. Mark Cameron noticed this on his daily ferry rides, and as he selected his own music-reading pairings, found himself choosing songs that emotionally corresponded to the words on the page. When he told his brother, the two started cooking up an idea for "a more cinematic-type experience" for reading, says Paul Cameron, who is now the CEO of the company they co-founded, Booktrack.
Over the course of about three years, the Cameron brothers set up a service to provide movie-like soundtracks for digital books, five of which are available now for download onto an iPhone or iPad. More titles will appear on Booktrack's virtual shelves in the coming weeks and months, and will eventually be accessible for Android, computers, and other e-reading devices. They'll be offering selected titles for free, but most will cost between $1 and $4.
Hundreds of files, each tagged with different categories of sound, are combined into a mix that accompanies books and short stories. The first full novel they released, The Power of Six, comes with over 70 original scores, ambient noise, and sound effects.
It takes about six weeks to produce the nine hour-long track for a typical book. Booktrack has a small in-house team, but the bulk of the labor is done at outside production companies like Park Road Post, which has won Academy Awards for sound mixing. Creative designers read each book and determine what music and sounds should be used, and where. It all comes together with a composer, an audio technician, and sometimes, a sound producer. Cameron said it was only natural to seek out sound experts from the film industry, and they try to work with writers when they can. The company is also preparing to publish Salman Rusdie's short story, "In the South," with a soundtrack developed out of conversations between the author and the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra.
Booktrack hopes to create soundtracks for biographies, history books, textbooks-"Sort of the gamut," says Booktrack's VP of Publishing, Brooke Geahan. "We see the opportunity being limitless." She and Cameron pointed to a study they commissioned from Liel Leibovitz, a visiting assistant professor of communications at NYU, who found "significant cognitive advantages to sound-enhanced reading," compared with standard e-reading.
"It's almost like having your own personal conductor directing you as you're reading," Cameron explained.
This is both a thrilling prospect and a frustrating one. The sound is linked to the line of text for which it was composed, and as I begin reading a Sherlock Holmes mystery on my iPhone, an arrow in the right-hand margin slides down before my eyes can follow. I tap on the arrow, which is supposed to adjust the music to my reading pace, but from time to time it skips and the sound switches suddenly from a synth to a doorbell. If I turn back a page, it's like rewinding to an earlier spot on a record track.
After a bit of getting used to, the track flows relatively seamlessly. More than anything, it reminds me of a video game soundtrack. Violins play simple melodies on a repeated loop, interrupted at intervals by the atmospheric sounds of my location in the story-a fireplace, a clock.
"I honestly think Arthur Conan Doyle would have loved this," says Geahan.
The Power of Six has an eerier soundtrack, which suits this young adult sci-fi novel. As I read on, I begin to find myself immersed in the action as it's played out in the music, the hum of rain, and footsteps. If I read ahead of the track, I pause and listen. I wonder what might have played through my head had I read in silence.
URL: http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/print/ 2011/08/books-with-soundtracks-the-future-of-reading/244344/ 
"Could transform your reading experience forever." more -->
BusinessInsider: August 24, 2011
An Awesome Startup Launched Today That Could Change How You Read Books Forever
Earlier this summer, we attended a party for a stealth startup that Peter Thiel backed.
Today, we can finally announce what the startup is, and why we're bullish on it.
Booktracks is a startup that could transform your reading experience forever. Like movies have soundtracks, now books can have soundtracks.
"It's difficult to imagine a movie with no soundtrack. Yet, until today, the technology did not exist to synchronize music and sound within an e-book," Paul Cameron, Booktrack's co-founder and CEO says.
"Tens of millions of commuters around the world listen to a playlist that's disconnected from what they're reading-perhaps a sad song with an upbeat story. Now they can replicate a movie-like sound experience and fundamentally transform their reading experience."
When we first heard the idea, we were skeptical. Many people find listening to music distracting when reading. And everyone reads at different speeds, so it's impossible for one track to cater to everyone.
Not so, we were told. You have to try it to believe it.
So we went off in a corner of the party, put on some headphones, and read the first few pages of Da Vinci Code. Immediately, music started to play appropriately with the words. Right as we read a line about a door slamming shut, we heard the exact same sound.
We tried reading at different speeds to trick the book soundtrack. It didn't work. It seemed to hover within a few seconds of the lines we were reading, and the track followed us with every page turn.
Some Booktracks are already available in the App Store. In the coming weeks and months, Booktrack will also create editions of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Tale of Peter Rabbit, Peter Pan, The Three Musketeers, Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, Romeo and Juliet and more.
Booktracks has a number of strategic partners behind it already, including major music company Sony/ATV, which will be making tracks for books and selling them much like iTunes would sell a song in the bookstore. It also has HarperCollins on board.
The founder of Booktracks is a Kiwi, Paul Cameron. Derek Handley, an entrepreneur who sold his company to Meredith Corporation, is the Chairman. Peter Thiel's right hand man, Andrew McCormack, led the startup's investment.
The startup is hosting a launch party tonight with celebrities like Georgina Chapman, James Frey, Courtney Love, Paul Haggis, Salman Rushdie, and Harvey Weinstein.
URL: http://www.businessinsider.com/booktracks-2011-8 
"Curl up with your iPad and start reading Gone with the Wind-go with me on this for a minute-and as you visualize Scarlett O' Hara gliding across the room, you actually can hear the swish of her petticoats." more -->
Smithsonian: August 31, 2011
E-Books Get a Soundtrack
Curl up with your iPad and start reading Gone with the Wind-go with me on this for a minute-and as you visualize Scarlett O' Hara gliding across the room, you actually can hear the swish of her petticoats.
Or you're plowing through The Da Vinci Code and suddenly you're jolted by the two-note whine of Paris police sirens.
As disorienting as it may seem, the experience of reading to a soundtrack took a big leap forward last week with the launch of a new software application called Booktrack. The company, with a U.S. office in New York City, is about to start rolling out versions of e-books that come not only with music but also sound effects synched to the story line-a ticking clock here, a gunshot there and just like that, you're multi-sensing. Booktrack files currently work on Apple devices and should be available on Android devices soon.
"The big buzz around e-books are devices, like Amazon's upcoming tablet, and apps such as Booktrack that take interacting with stories to a new level." more -->
Los Angeles Times: August 25, 2011
Booktrack: A soundtrack for books
What brings Salman Rushdie, screenwriter Paul Haggis and James Frey together? Booktrack, the soundtrack for books. Or rather, the party for Booktrack, which happened in New York on Wednesday night.
As the video above demonstrates, Booktrack provides a soundtrack for ebooks that includes ambient music and sound effects, and that plays according to the pace at which you're reading.
It comes from a shiny start-up that has lots of friends (see also Rushdie, Haggis and Frey). Booktrack partners include Sony/ATV (for music) and HarperCollins (for books). Currently Booktrack-enhanced ebooks are available as apps in the Apple store, and the company says that an Android version is coming soon.
Booktracks cost just a bit more than non-enhanced ebooks -- $12.99 versus $9.99, for example, for its first booktracked novel, "The Power of Six" by Pittacus Lore, which comes from Frey's company Full Fathom Five. Upcoming Booktracks include short stories by Rushdie and Jay McInerney.
The company also has plans to Booktrack several classics: "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" (river sounds?), "Romeo and Juliet" (weeping?), "Peter Pan" (flying?), "Pride and Prejudice " (minuets?), and "Jane Eyre" (cold winds blow across the moors?).
URL: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy /2011/08/boktrak.html 
"New Zealand Company, BOOKTRACK Continues its Momentum with Award Wins, Prestigious New York Launch, and Local Fundraising Drive" more -->
Scoop: 14 May 2012
New Zealand Company, BOOKTRACK Continues its Momentum
Auckland, NZ – May 14th – Fresh off the high of their double win at the New Zealand High Tech Awards on Friday, BooktrackTM co-founder and CEO Paul Cameron is now in New York to launch the first Booktrack short story from renowned US author Jay McInerney, before returning to New Zealand for an investor fundraising drive to enhance the company’s next phase of activity.
At the NZ High Tech Awards 2012, Booktrack was awarded the prestigious and hotly contested Duncan Cotterill Innovative Hi-Tech Software Product Award, and the Vodafone Most Innovative Mobile Technology Award.
“It is an honor for Booktrack to receive this prestigious double accolade and to have this unique technology acknowledged by our peers in the industry. The awards are recognition of our great team and the timing is impeccable as we begin a fundraising drive open to all New Zealand investors to fuel our next phase of business growth in the global eReading marketplace,” said Cameron.
“Booktrack’s success is reflecting the belief of our initial investors and consumers, that this is a paradigm shift that genuinely enhances the engagement people have with reading. We’re seeing a whole new generation of readers come on board through Booktrack, and the continual interest we’re receiving from high profile authors further validates that.”
Paul Cameron is in New York with his team for an exclusive Booktrack event to premiere Solace, the first short story using Booktrack technology from beloved author and essayist Jay McInerney (Bright Lights, Big City and The Juice).
The event will be attended by literary luminaries such as Candace Bushnell (Sex in the City author), host, André Balazs, celebrities such as Courteney Love, and features artist Will Cotton, and the author himself, Jay McInerney.
“It is really exciting to write a story knowing that there will be this immersive element alongside my work created by Booktrack”, said Jay McInerney.
“Booktrack came to me with an idea of bringing in the musician Marc Scibilia to create the score and trailer for this story and it’s pretty amazing.”
The release of the Booktrack edition of Solace marks the first release of a title only available on the Booktrack platform by a highly acclaimed author. It is also the first time a musician has created a musical “trailer” for an eBook featuring SONY/ATV’s Marc Scibilia, a Nashville-based up-and-coming singer/songwriter.
Wellington’s Park Road Post Productions continues to stamp its authority with the mixing and sound design for Solace.
In February, a Booktrack edition of Salman Rushdie’s story In the South was released, and more recently Sir Andrew Motion, the Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom, had his sequel to Treasure Island, Silver, released by Booktrack.
URL: http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/BU1205/S00458/new-zealand-company-booktrack-continues-its-momentum.htm 
"A new startup called Booktrack...is an effort to create a whole new genre of e-books. Booktrack creates synchronized soundtracks for e-books that aim to 'dramatically boost the reader's imagination and engagement'. The startup's technology pairs music scores and sound effects with text, automatically paced to one's reading speed. " more -->
TechCrunch: August 24, 2011
Fad Or Future? Booktrack Adds Music, Sound Effects To E-Books; Peter Thiel Invests
A new startup called Booktrack launched this morning (actually, the NYT launched it yesterday), in an effort to create a whole new genre of e-books.
Booktrack creates synchronized soundtracks for e-books that aim to "dramatically boost the reader's imagination and engagement".
The startup's technology pairs music scores and sound effects with text, automatically paced to one's reading speed. Booktracks can be downloaded for iPad, iPhone and iPod touch, and Android apps are on the way. Check out the Booktrack Bookshelf for available titles.
"It's an interesting idea, and I'd quite like to try it out." more -->
The Guardian: September 1, 2011
Words And Music: Should Books Have Soundtracks?
The company was founded by brothers Mark and Paul Cameron, after Mark realised that "as he selected his own music-reading pairings" he was "choosing songs that emotionally corresponded to the words on the page". Inspired, the pair set about devising "movie-like soundtracks for digital books" (it only works for digital books, as the soundtrack needs to be linked to the page you're reading), combining sound effects and original music. They only have tracks for a handful of books so far, but if you click on the copy of Sherlock Holmes on the top shelf on this page, and watch the trailer, you get a sense of where they're going with it.
"Booktrack—with its elevator pitch of "soundtrack for e-books"—has managed to capture the attention of other Jobs-level Silicon Valley movers and shakers. Peter Thiel, who founded PayPal before selling it to eBay for $1.5bn in 2002, is the lead investor, while Facebook director for global creative solutions Mark D'Arcy is a board member and investor." more -->
The Bookseller: September 21, 2011
Digital focus: sounds or silence?
Paul Cameron admits that the official launch of Booktrack—a company that is for the moment heavily linked to the Apple ecosystem—might have benefited from a bit better timing. "We launched about 12 hours before Steve Jobs resigned," he says with a laugh. "We were lucky; we did get a lot of press. But had it been 24 hours later I think we might not have gotten any attention."
Cameron cannot be faulted for being overshadowed by Jobs' surprise resignation, which caught most of the tech world flat-footed. Yet Booktrack—with its elevator pitch of "soundtrack for e-books"—has managed to capture the attention of other Jobs-level Silicon Valley movers and shakers. Peter Thiel, who founded PayPal before selling it to eBay for $1.5bn in 2002, is the lead investor, while Facebook director for global creative solutions Mark D'Arcy is a board member and investor.
Booktrack currently has six apps on the Apple Store, five free classic titles including a Sherlock Holmes collection and Hansel and Gretel, plus one paid-for app, Pittacus Lore's The Power of Six (Michael Joseph).
The idea is simply that the apps provide, like a film, background ambient sounds, sound effects and music as you go through the narrative, with the bespoke software that synchs the sound to the user's reading speed. In the opening of The Power of Six, for example, which takes place on a beach, there is the sound of the sea, the wind whistling and moody music.
URL: http://www.thebookseller.com/feature/digital-focus-sounds-or-silence.html 
"A soundtrack to digital texts claims to 'enhance the e-reading experience', but how will my latest novel, Silver, fare with sound effects?" more -->
TheGuardian: 16th April 2012
Can Booktrack make ebooks sensuous?
We sometimes forget it, but reading a book in the old-fashioned way (holding an object made of different thicknesses of paper, most of which are covered in words) is a peculiar kind of composite experience. Never mind what happens in our heads and hearts and senses and nerves. The thing itself speaks. Pages rustle. They smell – sometimes delicious, sometimes of disconcertingly previous owners. Spines creak. And so on. Compared to such an immersion in small sensory events, the digitally downloaded text can seem antiseptic, even emasculated. Convenient it may be; sensuous it ain't.
Not until now, anyway. In America last year, a group of investors that included Peter Thiel, co-founder and former CEO of PayPal, launched Booktrack, which describes itself as a "revolutionary new technology [that] dramatically enhances e-reading experience". How? By creating a synchronised soundtrack for ebooks that automatically matches a pre-recorded stream of music, sound effects, and other kinds of ambient noise to the reader's consumption of words. A character knocks on the door: bang-bang-bang. Another puts a slice of bacon in the frying pan: sssssss. Someone kisses someone: well, no, perhaps not. And in between all these bursts of activity: sympathetic music, or weather-noises, or (if it's a scene outdoors) a bird singing at the end of the garden.
The American launch was centred on Sherlock Holmes: The Adventures of the Speckled Band. Predictably enough, it had some vocal critics – people who felt distracted, interrupted, closed down by the literal manifestation of things they would rather be left to imagine. But it had a lot of fans too. In its first 10 weeks on sale, The Speckled Band was downloaded more than 100,000 times through the Apple iTunes app store. It has since been downloaded in 99 different countries, reached the top 10 iPhone books apps in 20 of them, and become a top 100 book app in 11. "Bells and Whistles for ebooks," said the New York Times. "Phenomenal," said the Week. "Revolutionary," said the Huffington Post; "books without soundtracks could some day seem as quaint as silent movies".
But what will the UK say? It's easy to imagine some old-style sniffing about American vulgarity, or obviousness, or unintended comic value – and the Booktrack people had better steel themselves for a bit of that. But they have powerful counter-arguments, as I've been able to see because they've chosen my recently published novel Silver: Return to Treasure Island as their UK launch title. For one thing the technology is just very entertaining (how on earth does the page know where your eyes have got to, and therefore when to do the knocking on the door etc). For another, it really does create an "immersive world". I wrote the book, so I might well say that mightn't I. But still. It seems to me likely that for every reader who feels their own powers of imagination have been curtailed or pre-empted, there will be another who is grateful for some encouragement and extra fun – in much the same way that we are grateful for these things when listening to a radio play.
Which is the ace in Booktrack's hand. They commissioned Liel Leibovitz, a professor of communications at New York University, to investigate "the cognitive advantages, if any, to reading accompanied by audio elements", and the prof came up with some pretty interesting results. In particular, the research suggested that when readers tackled books with a soundtrack, they not only found them easier to follow than "silent" books, but also found them easier to remember.
The summary of this research provided by Booktrack tells us that the subjects tested in the study all resided in the New York metropolitan area, and represented varied levels of income and education – which doesn't say about their backgrounds, ages, reading experience etc. But it seems reasonable to assume they were people who don't spend every day of their lives chained to the library desk. Which might in turn mean that the greatest benefit of the new technology will be to help improve literacy rates – and probably help schoolchildren reading for assessment, as well. If it does, all power to it.
At the same time, the success of Booktrack so far also says something interesting about the appetites of people for whom reading is not "an issue", still less a problem. For while we think of ourselves as an increasingly visualised culture (on phones, in games, on video) we might also reflect on our hunger to live in the acoustic world. The audience figures for the Poetry Archive (250,000-odd unique visitors every month) prove what a good friend new technologies have been to poetry. Maybe Booktrack will riff on a similar theme. Amid all the complaints that computers cut us off from reality, there is room to argue that in many surprising ways they are reminding us how much we rely on our senses.
URL: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/apr/16/booktrack-ebooks-sensuous-andrew-motion 
"Booktrack is the newest way to enjoy your favorite novels and short stories on mobile devices including iPad, iPhone, PC and Mac and Android Tablets. eBooks published by Booktrack include a customized, hand-created, movie-style soundtrack that matches the action in the text." more -->
Indablog: August 27, 2012
Booktrack – “The Time Machine” Released
Booktrack is releasing the book “The Time Machine” today. The Booktrack Contest has been one of the most unique ones Indaba Music has ever run. It lead to 13 members who helped Booktrack score audio for the classic story, “The Time Machine”. The entire book is comprised of 1 or more of the submissions from those 13 winners.
Booktrack is the newest way to enjoy your favorite novels and short stories on mobile devices including iPad, iPhone, PC and Mac and Android Tablets. eBooks published by Booktrack include a customized, hand-created, movie-style soundtrack that matches the action in the text.
As users read the text, the music, sound effects, and ambient audio change to reflect what’s happening in the plot and are automatically paced to each individual’s reading speed to match the action of the story as they read. The result is a wholly immersive experience that pulls readers into the world of the book. In order to read “The Time Machine”, you would have to download the app.
We’re excited that 13 of our members were chosen to contribute their creative outlet to such an innovative project.
URL: http://blog.indabamusic.com/2012/08/booktrack-the-time-machine-released/ 
"This week, Booktrack released a digital version of [Salman] Rushdie’s short story “In the South.” ... Mr. Rushdie said he was impressed with the orchestra’s work. He was particularly pleased when his 14-year-old son pronounced it 'super cool,' he said." more -->
"What sets Booktrack apart is the precise alignment of the text and score. To keep things synced, Booktrack's technology uses the rate of page turns to gauge a reader's speed and adjusts the pace of the score accordingly." more -->
Fast Company: February 13, 2012
How Booktrack Creates Custom Soundtracks For E-Books
When the addition of sound turned movies into talkies, late-1920s audiences were so astounded and confused that many people walked out of theaters. (Things worked out fine for the film industry.) More than 85 years later, Booktrack, a company founded in New Zealand that adds custom soundtracks to e-books, is confident readers won't respond in similar fashion.
"Music brings emotion to a story," says cofounder Paul Cameron. "We've created an experience in which text and music are synchronized through a whole book." At the heart of the process is an ear for intricate sound design that rivals Hollywoodian efforts. In the Salman Rushdie short story, "In the South," readers hear ambient street noise--food sellers, cars, and distant music--that corresponds to the environment of the protagonists. The cues then fade as the story unfolds and a bed of traditional Indian music begins. There are no words, just melody, with individual sound effects that are pegged to specific actions.
Booktrack isn't the first outfit to give reading a multimedia flavor: "Enhanced" e-books have been around since 2008, offering a multimedia reading experience with links, video, and suggested playlists. What sets Booktrack apart is the precise alignment of the text and score. To keep things synced, Booktrack's technology uses the rate of page turns to gauge a reader's speed and adjusts the pace of the score accordingly. And, should the sound elements become more grating than great, they can be silenced. Admits Cameron: "For people who aren't used to reading with sound, it can take getting used to."
That's what people said about e-book reading itself earlier this decade. The concern is gone. According to the Association of American Publishers, e-book revenue grew 620% between 2008 and 2010. Net revenue for e-books in 2010 was $441.3 million. Booktrack--which prices short stories at $0.99 and novels at $2 to $4 above the standard e-book sticker--is angling to get a seat on that comet, with A-list writers like Jay McInerney and Sam Lipsyte expressing interest in joining the ride. Though Cameron tapped the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra and Park Road Post Production (sound designers for Peter Jackson's films) for Rushdie's story, he hopes Booktrack will become a platform for up-and-coming sound designers. To that end, the company will be releasing its creator software for free so independent sound designers and authors can collaborate, with Booktrack selling the final product for a cut. Hard to imagine anyone not liking the sound of that.
URL: http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/163/booktrack-ebooks 
"An advance in electronic publishing could make the book you are reading seem as dated as a silent film. Publishers hope to exploit the growing success of ebooks by releaseing versions with added soundtracks and accompaniments." more -->
The Sunday Times: August 29, 2011
Can you turn that book down, please?
An advance in electronic publishing could make the book you are reading seem as dated as a silent film. Publishers hope to exploit the growing success of ebooks by releaseing versions with added soundtracks and accompaniments.
When the plot of a book reaches a climax, background scores will create tension.
In America, works by Shakespear and Jane Austen have already been embellished with music and background noise so that, for example, readers can hear china cups clinking in Mr. Darcy's garden as they read Pride and Prejudice.
"The swing to digital reading could establish a lucrative software industry on the North Shore." more -->
The Aucklander: 30 March, 2012
Booktrack deepens the plot
The swing to digital reading could establish a lucrative software industry on the North Shore.
That's the hope of the founders of Booktrack, brothers Mark and Paul Cameron, who have devised a much talked about application to complement the experience of reading a digital book.
Booktrack plays a cinematic soundtrack while you read your digital story - synchronising music, ambient noises and sound effects to match the storyline, and your reading speed. Tests show Booktrack improves the comprehension of what is read, meaning there could be educational benefits as well.
Milford resident Paul Cameron hopes the development of Booktrack will be done on the North Shore.
"But much work remains to make this a reality, not least the challenge of sourcing additional development capital," he admits, pointing out that he's already doing a lot of travelling to promote the software to overseas investors.
With around $3 billion in ebook sales annually, there's plenty of potential to add Booktrack soundtracks to more books. E-reader applications are hot, and Booktrack has attracted big publicity. There have been articles in the New York Times, The Guardian, The Los Angeles Times and the Times of London. The Huffington Post called it "revolutionary".
Investors include Facebook director Mark D'Arcy, also a Kiwi, who believes Booktrack is the future of reading. He says Booktrack enhances the imagination by improving a person's ability to visualise the story described in the text.
"Booktrack gets you there quicker and keeps you there longer. It brings another immersive element to the experience - it doesn't detract from it."
Critics say it invades the sacred silence of the reading experience. But Paul points out: "When the 'talkies' were just getting started, theatre orchestras protested because they said they'd be put out of work and one of the Warner brothers said, 'Why the hell do we want actors to talk?'."
Paul, 35, came to the project already used to the challenges of marketing high-tech electronics; he'd been director of a successful North Shore-based defence company. The former RNZAF navigator and father of two, says business was booming when he astonished his partners by pulling out a few years ago.That decision was sparked by the 2010 release of Apple's iPad - something Paul and Mark had been waiting for.
"All of a sudden we had a platform which was going to be adopted on a large scale and it had about 1000 times the processing power we needed."
Mark, 39, who lives in Hong Kong, had the "Eureka moment" while reading a book on the ferry, back in 2008. As he read, a song regularly came up on his music player that seemed to complement the passage he was reading. Mark looked up and saw almost everyone on the ferry was reading while they listened to music and realised the potential for an app that could meld music with text to provide a deeper way for readers to experience their books.
Soon the brothers were working on the challenge in their spare time. So far, there are limited Booktrack books - another reason development capital is sought - but they include popular titles and classics out of copyright. There's an edition of Sherlock Holmes which has been downloaded through iTunes more than 100,000 times, and children's books like The Selfish Giant. Kiwi composer John Psathas has scored a Salman Rushdie book, recorded by the NZ Symphony Orchestra. You pay for the titles, but can try them free first and the app is free.
Paul says Booktrack creates opportunities for authors to write for a new group of readers, and for musicians to score republished books.
"Booktrack is so effective in education; it really helps to get young people reading," he says. "We're getting positive feedback from many parts of the world, and that's what my brother and I love to hear."
URL: http://www.theaucklander.co.nz/news/booktrack-software-adds-sound-ebooks/1323347/ 
"A kiwi innovation is showcasing a new revolution in reading, with an app that has co-ordinated musical soundtracks into e-books. While still in its infancy, the ground-breaking technology ... looks set to change the way we read forever." more -->
NZ3 News: February 19, 2012
Kiwi Company Creates Soundtracks for EBooks
A kiwi innovation is showcasing a new revolution in reading, with an app that has co-ordinated musical soundtracks into e-books.
While still in its infancy, the ground-breaking technology, designed by Kiwi brothers Paul and Mark Cameron, looks set to change the way we read forever as it provides e-books with their own soundtrack.
“People were putting CDs and playlists in the back of books, but no-one had really taken the next leap which was ‘hey it could be a really cinematic experience where you brought in not just music but ambience and effects’ – if you’re reading about walking along the beach you should hear the waves crashing,” says Booktrack CEO Paul Cameron.
Music, ambient audio and sound effects are carefully synchronised to match the text, immersing the reader into the world of the book.
State-of-the-art software created on Auckland's North Shore measures and automatically adjusts pacing of the audio with your reading speed.
For renowned New Zealand composer, John Psathas- who created the score for Salman Rushdie's e-book In The South- it is a ground-breaking way of writing music
“The key thing that drew me to it was the newness of the experience – there’s nothing that’s been around for composers like this ever before,” says Mr Psathas, who composes music for the soundtracks.
Booktrack has produced 11 e-books so far, from Peter Pan to the Power of Six and Mr Cameron hopes to build a concentrated online bookshelf, with 500 booktracks planned in the next 12 months.
With the e-book market estimated to be worth $20 billion in the next three to five years, Booktrack's popularity is quickly gaining momentum
“We’ve got 500 authors who have emailed us and said, ‘I want you to booktrack my book’. We’ve had 500 audio people saying, ‘I can make a booktrack for a book’,” says Mr Cameron.
Readers, though, worry that a soundtrack might be distracting while you're trying to read.
“When I initially heard about it, I thought I need complete silence when I’m reading, but if it’s done right, it has this phenomenal potential to turn reading into something we’ve never experienced before,” says John Psathas.
And for those of us who live with readers, it will be that much harder to get their attention.
URL: http://www.3news.co.nz/Kiwi-company-creates-soundtracks-for-e-books/tabid/1607/articleID/243387/Default.aspx 
"A soundtrack to digital texts claims to 'enhance the e-reading experience', but how will my latest novel, Silver, fare with sound effects?" more -->
guardian.co.uk: 16 April, 2012
Can Booktrack make ebooks sensuous?
We sometimes forget it, but reading a book in the old-fashioned way (holding an object made of different thicknesses of paper, most of which are covered in words) is a peculiar kind of composite experience. Never mind what happens in our heads and hearts and senses and nerves. The thing itself speaks. Pages rustle. They smell – sometimes delicious, sometimes of disconcertingly previous owners. Spines creak. And so on. Compared to such an immersion in small sensory events, the digitally downloaded text can seem antiseptic, even emasculated. Convenient it may be; sensuous it ain't.
Not until now, anyway. In America last year, a group of investors that included Peter Thiel, co-founder and former CEO of PayPal, launched Booktrack, which describes itself as a "revolutionary new technology [that] dramatically enhances e-reading experience". How? By creating a synchronised soundtrack for ebooks that automatically matches a pre-recorded stream of music, sound effects, and other kinds of ambient noise to the reader's consumption of words. A character knocks on the door: bang-bang-bang. Another puts a slice of bacon in the frying pan: sssssss. Someone kisses someone: well, no, perhaps not. And in between all these bursts of activity: sympathetic music, or weather-noises, or (if it's a scene outdoors) a bird singing at the end of the garden.
The American launch was centred on Sherlock Holmes: The Adventures of the Speckled Band. Predictably enough, it had some vocal critics – people who felt distracted, interrupted, closed down by the literal manifestation of things they would rather be left to imagine. But it had a lot of fans too. In its first 10 weeks on sale, The Speckled Band was downloaded more than 100,000 times through the Apple iTunes app store. It has since been downloaded in 99 different countries, reached the top 10 iPhone books apps in 20 of them, and become a top 100 book app in 11. "Bells and Whistles for ebooks," said the New York Times. "Phenomenal," said the Week. "Revolutionary," said the Huffington Post; "books without soundtracks could some day seem as quaint as silent movies".
But what will the UK say? It's easy to imagine some old-style sniffing about American vulgarity, or obviousness, or unintended comic value – and the Booktrack people had better steel themselves for a bit of that. But they have powerful counter-arguments, as I've been able to see because they've chosen my recently published novel Silver: Return to Treasure Island as their UK launch title. For one thing the technology is just very entertaining (how on earth does the page know where your eyes have got to, and therefore when to do the knocking on the door etc). For another, it really does create an "immersive world". I wrote the book, so I might well say that mightn't I. But still. It seems to me likely that for every reader who feels their own powers of imagination have been curtailed or pre-empted, there will be another who is grateful for some encouragement and extra fun – in much the same way that we are grateful for these things when listening to a radio play.
Which is the ace in Booktrack's hand. They commissioned Liel Leibovitz, a professor of communications at New York University, to investigate "the cognitive advantages, if any, to reading accompanied by audio elements", and the prof came up with some pretty interesting results. In particular, the research suggested that when readers tackled books with a soundtrack, they not only found them easier to follow than "silent" books, but also found them easier to remember.
The summary of this research provided by Booktrack tells us that the subjects tested in the study all resided in the New York metropolitan area, and represented varied levels of income and education – which doesn't say about their backgrounds, ages, reading experience etc. But it seems reasonable to assume they were people who don't spend every day of their lives chained to the library desk. Which might in turn mean that the greatest benefit of the new technology will be to help improve literacy rates – and probably help schoolchildren reading for assessment, as well. If it does, all power to it.
At the same time, the success of Booktrack so far also says something interesting about the appetites of people for whom reading is not "an issue", still less a problem. For while we think of ourselves as an increasingly visualised culture (on phones, in games, on video) we might also reflect on our hunger to live in the acoustic world. The audience figures for the Poetry Archive (250,000-odd unique visitors every month) prove what a good friend new technologies have been to poetry. Maybe Booktrack will riff on a similar theme. Amid all the complaints that computers cut us off from reality, there is room to argue that in many surprising ways they are reminding us how much we rely on our senses.
URL: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/apr/16/booktrack-ebooks-sensuous-andrew-motion?newsfeed=true 
"As Salman Rushdie intones his own elegant prose in a rich, musical British accent, a soundtrack plays softly but distinctly in the background. If the music seems particularly well-selected — if its rhythms subtly match the story’s turning points — that’s because it was commissioned expressly for the purpose. more -->
Salon.com: February, 2012
Salman Rushdie Fears Nothing
Plates and glasses are cleared away, and a hush descends on the packed private dining room of a fancy Manhattan Indian restaurant; a distinguished writer — the star of the evening’s event — is about to give a reading. The iPad in his hands bathes his familiar features in a soft, electric glow that complements the muted lights and blinking candles spaced around the room.
As Salman Rushdie intones his own elegant prose in a rich, musical British accent, a soundtrack plays softly but distinctly in the background. If the music seems particularly well-selected — if its rhythms subtly match the story’s turning points — that’s because it was commissioned expressly for the purpose.
Though the story is short, Rushdie stops several times to ask the audience if he should continue. At each juncture, rapt listeners beg him to go on. After the performance is over, guests murmur words like “mesmerizing” and “transporting” as they turn back to their tablemates — and I’m one of them.
The event is a glitzy dinner organized by Booktrack, a company that publishes e-books with “synchronized soundtracks”; the occasion is the launch of the e-publisher’s first short story — Rushdie’s “In the South” — with accompanying music composed by John Psathas. (“In the South” is available for download now from Booktrack’s website.) ...
What does Rushdie — who has embraced social media wholeheartedly over the past several months — think of the Booktrack project?
“I had to be convinced that this was a good thing,” he says. “But actually, when I heard the music, I thought it really went very well.” Although Rushdie’s own instinct is to read without music, Booktrack’s presentation of his story eventually “won [him] over.”
“I always yield to [my younger son] in these decisions,” he notes graciously. “He said, ‘It’s super cool, dad.’ If he thinks it’s super cool, he’s right. What do I know?”
URL: http://www.salon.com/2012/02/10/salman_rushdie_fears_nothing/singleton/ 
"The book, that venerable handmaiden of Western thought, has had a lot of work done these past few years, and the latest technology startup trying its hand at giving her an extreme makeover is Booktrack. Launched Aug 25, Booktrack creates soundtracks for e-books, using exclusive technology that detects individual reading speeds and synchronizes sound to text, line by line." more -->
The Huffington Post: August, 2011
Booktrack Adds A Soundtrack To The Books You Read
The book, that venerable handmaiden of Western thought, has had a lot of work done these past few years, and the latest technology startup trying its hand at giving her an extreme makeover is Booktrack. Launched Aug 25, Booktrack creates soundtracks for e-books, using exclusive technology that detects individual reading speeds and synchronizes sound to text, line by line. The technology is currently available for e-books on iPhones and iPads.
To get a sense of what Booktrack does, imagine if the ashram scenes of "Eat Pray Love" were accompanied by yogic chanting, or if you could hear the wet percussion of harpoons piercing whale flesh as you read "Moby Dick".
"I was pleasantly surprised with the app itself on a test drive in my morning commute. First off, the software is intuitive; after about three pages or so, it judges your reading speed and matches the music and sound effects to where you are in the text." more -->
FutureBook: September 20, 2011
Sounds or Silence
Paul Cameron admits that the official launch of Booktrack—a company that is for the moment heavily linked to the Apple ecosystem—might have benefited from a bit better timing. "We launched about 12 hours before Steve Jobs resigned," he says with a laugh. "We were lucky; we did get a lot of press. But had it been 24 hours later I think we might not have gotten any attention."
Cameron cannot be faulted for being overshadowed by Jobs’ surprise resignation, which caught most of the tech world flat-footed. Yet Booktrack—with its elevator pitch of "soundtrack for e-books"—has managed to capture the attention of other Jobs-level Silicon Valley movers and shakers. Peter Thiel, who founded PayPal before selling it to eBay for $1.5bn in 2002, is the lead investor, while Facebook director for global creative solutions Mark D’Arcy is a board member and investor.
Booktrack currently has six apps on the Apple Store, five free classic titles including a Sherlock Holmes collection and Hansel and Gretel, plus one paid-for app, Pittacus Lore’s The Power of Six (Michael Joseph).
The idea is simply that the apps provide, like a film, background ambient sounds, sound effects and music as you go through the narrative, with the bespoke software that synchs the sound to the user’s reading speed. In the opening of The Power of Six, for example, which takes place on a beach, there is the sound of the sea, the wind whistling and moody music.
Some of that attention that Booktrack is getting is not entirely positive, some even downright hostile, the notion of having possibly distracting background noise in a reading app seeming to have incensed many. Reviewing the app in Wired Charlie Sorrel called the experience "incredibly jarring". Paul Carr on Techcrunch.com writes that Booktrack is "just a horrible idea. Really horrible" (though perhaps having Carr, who by his own admission, has failed as a dot.com entrepreneur railing against your idea might be a good thing).
Cameron is unfazed. "On the surface it might seem like a daft idea," he concedes. D’Arcy was one refusnik, with Cameron chasing him around for a year for a meeting. "I finally met him for lunch and he said: ‘Yeah, that books with sounds thing, I’m not really interested.’ I told him to try it, he put the headphones on, and after five minutes he wanted in."
He argues that people do often have their own soundtrack to books already. "We are in a multi-media hungry environment. When you go on the Tube, and I see this in New York where I’m mostly based now, about every third or fourth person who is reading will be doing so with headphones on, listening to music. It’s just not synchronised."
He continues: "The whole idea is a read first, listen second activity. If you make the sound effects too loud and right in the forefront, it’s too distracting. What we have is something that blends in. A lot of products in the enhanced e-book market take you away from reading—games, video, etc. We think we’ve created something that is about complementing an author’s work, not taking away from it."
Cameron, a New Zealand native with a background in IT companies, founded Booktrack with his entrepreneur brother Mark three years ago as the iPad was entering production. The company’s two offices are in New York and Auckland—the sound production is largely done by Park Road Post Production, the Wellington-based studio that did the sound on the "Lord of the Rings" films—and Cameron is aiming to open a London office soon. Booktrack soundtracks currently stay away from lyrical music in order not to detract from the text. Yet negotiations are under way with another partner, Sony ATV Music—the music publisher for Bob Dylan, The Beatles and Hank Williams among many others—and publishers about incorporating the technology into music biographies.
By the end of this year, Booktrack will have 20 titles on the App Store, by the end of 2012 between 200–300. It is developing the technology for other devices and platforms, including Android. Currently the company’s apps are branded under the Booktrack name, yet the long-term aim for Cameron is to become a standard background technology for publishers, a sort of PowerPoint for books with soundtracks.
He says Booktrack is in talks with Amazon and other major e-tailers. "What they like about it is its ability to upsell—which you can’t really do with books at the moment. Other products you can—when Amazon sells shoes they can ask: ‘Would you like polish with that?’ But if you’re on Amazon.com and buy a Kindle book for $9.99, there is the possibility to have a button that says: ‘Why not try the soundtrack for $1.99 more?’"
Booktrack has been focusing mostly on the Anglophone market but is looking to expand to other languages. For next year’s Frankfurt Book Fair, for which New Zealand is the Guest of Honour, it will produce a bespoke German language book available at the New Zealand pavilion. Cameron is pleased with the take-up so far, with the Sherlock Holmes app hitting number four in the US App Store book charts when it was launched. "We’re hovering around the top 50 in App Stores around the world. We were number one in Bahrain, for some reason. Which I think goes to show how people are interested in reading and trying something new."
How it works:
Dubious. That was my attitude before I tried Booktrack. I like to read my books in silence, and I think my imagination is sufficient to conjure up atmosphere from the text alone. My doubts were not allayed by a promotional video on the Booktrack website which shows Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City which is accompanied by rubbish disco music and a cacophony of voices in a loud party scene. Yet I was pleasantly surprised with the app itself on a test drive in my morning commute. First off, the software is intuitive; after about three pages or so, it judges your reading speed and matches the music and sound effects to where you are in the text. Jump ahead a few pages and it recalibrates the speed. The soundtrack itself is at first hearing obtrusive, but after a few pages becomes an immersive experience not detracting from the text. In one of the Sherlock Holmes’ stories, "The Adventure of the Speckled Band", there is moody, ominous music, crackling fires, a woman screaming in the distance . . . all well-judged and perfectly timed. I do not think I would choose to use Booktrack in a quiet room. But in an environment where my attention was competing with the hubbub of my fellow commuters and bus announcements, it helped close the rest of the world out. Booktrack may not be the next evolution of the book, but it is an extremely useful and clever enhanced add-on to an e-book.
URL: http://www.futurebook.net/content/sounds-or-silence 
"Booktrack is targeting the senses in order to put you in a little sound bubble -that immerses you in the world of your book." more -->
CultureWav.es: January 20, 2011
Sountracks For Your eBooks
Here’s an idea that might interest all you avid eBook readers. How would you like a soundtrack to play while you read your latest novel? Booktracks has a proprietary technology that combines music, sound effects and ambient sound that is automatically paced to an individual’s reading speed.
They have a way of tracking your reading speed. Whaaa? Yes, check out the video here.
“Booktrack represents a new chapter in the evolution of storytelling, and an industry “first” in publishing, by creating synchronized soundtracks for e-books that dramatically boost the reader’s imagination and engagement.”
Just like I find it hard to write while there is a lot of noise around me, I enjoy reading in a quiet environment. However, one can’t always make that happen – especially on public transport, for example. Booktracks is targeting the senses in order to put you in a little sound bubble -that immerses you in the world of your book. Sensory Appeal™ is all about taking aim the senses. This wave has ideas that involve textures, colors, tastes and sounds. The Human Truth™ is: “I want a new sensation.”™ Booktracks and their “Hi Def immersive experience” is a great example of this… one I’d love to try.
URL: http://blog.culturewav.es/2012/01/soundtracks-for-your-ebooks/ 
"At moments that match the text, there might be sounds of footsteps, an explosion or suspenseful music. A scrolling arrow keeps track of the reading speed at which the app is matching sounds to text and can be easily sped up or slowed down." more -->
Mashable: September 11, 2011
Spark of Genius--Booktrack: A Soundtrack for Books
Quick Pitch: Synchronized ambient sound effects for books.
Genius Idea: Technology that recognizes an individual’s reading speed and paces the soundtrack with corresponding text.
Mashable’s Take: Booktrack’s sound effects for iPad and iPhone books are designed to create a background soundscape that matches the text. Sherlock Holmes, for instance, opens with the sound of a heavy rain. At moments that match the text, there might be sounds of footsteps, an explosion or suspenseful music. A scrolling arrow keeps track of the reading speed at which the app is matching sounds to text and can be easily sped up or slowed down.
Says Booktrack founder Paul Cameron, “It makes a new and engaging way to read and really enhances the experience and enhances your imagination and keeps you in the story longer,” he recently told The New York Times.
PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, the company’s lead investor, evidently agrees. HarperCollins, Penguin Books, Sony/ATV Publishing, and others have agreed to at least try the format.
Crazier concepts have succeeded, and other book platforms are experimenting with adding social networks and videos to texts — both of which are arguably even more distracting than sound.
But one thing I like about books is that they’re not movies. There’s an inherent silence on the written page that is part of the experience of reading and a pleasant departure from the constant pinging of screens.
It’s not hard to imagine that concentration on one medium at a time will become outdated. But for me, the written word is still perfectly adequate on its own.
URL: http://mashable.com/2011/09/11/3-new-takes-digital-staples/ 
"While Booktrack may scratch an itch you never knew you had, some believe the introduction of multimedia to the book-reading experience may actually portend a larger cultural shift. more -->
The Daily: September 5, 2011
Sound affects
Not long into Pittacus Lore’s “The Power of Six,” the protagonist, Marina, comes upon two young girls hogging her hotel’s only computers. It’s terribly annoying — “I’m shaking with anger,” she says — but the moment allows for the establishment of a new interactive feature that’s caused a fair bit of controversy in the publishing world of late: music and sound effects that accompany the text.
As the girls fiddle about on the computers, the reader becomes a listener, with the familiar clickety-clack of a keyboard trickling out of the iPad’s speakers.
This is Booktrack, the company that wants to make reading a more immersive experience — for those so inclined.
“Once I tried it, I threw my iPad down and said, ‘Eureka!’ ” Brooke Geahan, Booktrack’s vice president of publishing, told The Daily. “We’re trying to give consumers a different experience, a different choice when it comes to reading.”
You’d never have pegged Geahan as a cheerleader for the current electronic book revolution. She used to run a library — some might say shrine — dedicated to the preservation of old, paper books. That she became a Booktrack convert, and vice president of publishing no less, should go some way in detailing just how prominent the company could become.
Booktrack, which got its start three years ago with the help of PayPal co-founder and Facebook board member Peter Thiel, aims to create “synchronized soundtracks for e-books that dramatically boost the reader’s imagination and engagement,” according to the company’s website.
Available as a free iPad and iPhone app, readers can buy and download any of several books, including “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes,” “Rikki Tikki-Tavi,” and “The Power of Six,” a science fiction novel released last week whose Booktrack soundtrack was produced by Peter Jackson’s Park Road Post production studios. A downloadable Salman Rushdie short story is due this fall.
The app “learns” your reading speed so that the music and sound effects — original compositions funded by Booktrack — stay in sync with reading progress. Users can customize the experience: ambient noise, sound effects, and music can all be turned on or off or have their volume adjusted.
“We’re bringing sound to text across all genres,” said Geahan. “We’re looking for books that would appeal to people who are already used to reading e-books, or reading on tablets.”
But while Booktrack may scratch an itch you never knew you had, some believe the introduction of multimedia to the book-reading experience may actually portend a larger cultural shift.
We could be looking at the “emergence of a whole new art form,” Tom Zoellner, author of “The Heartless Stone and Uranium” and a professor of English at Chapman University in Orange, Calif., told The Daily. Just as opera was the marriage of music and story, Zoellner reasoned, Booktrack could be seen as the marriage of literature and music, something that was first attempted with Samuel Barber’s 1948 “Knoxville: Summer of 1915” voice and orchestra work.
Additionally, the introduction of music to literature, said Zoellner, could force publishers to confront something they may not have even considered: how it affects the ethics of the author-reader relationship.
“Music is a mood-setter,” said Zoellner. “It’s fairy dust.” Is it ethical to include music and sound effects in nonfiction? If so, should publishers have to explain the origin of all this fairy dust? Should a history of World War II’s Battle of the Bulge include machine-gun sounds produced in a studio thousands of miles from the Ardennes?
Still, raising legitimate questions doesn’t mean Zoellner isn’t receptive to the idea itself.
“We never turn off our other senses when we read,” he said. “There’s always the scent of your coffee. It’s an exciting development because many writers listen to music as they write.”
What would perhaps be even more interesting, said Zoellner, would be to ask authors, “What was on your iPod when you were writing this?”
Lev Grossman, whose latest novel, “The Magician King,” the sequel to 2009’s New York Times bestselling novel “The Magicians,” was published last month, remains skeptical.
“One of the reasons why I love books is they help me concentrate,” he said. “Books are a machine for focusing my mind.” The introduction of music and sound effects,” said Grossman, “could prove to be a distraction.”
“Books actually give you very little data to work with,” he added. “They ask you to fill in a lot.” By supplying a ready-made, carbon-copy experience, something may be lost in the process, he argued.
Grossman said that, if approached by Booktrack or any similar service, he’d “probably opt out.”
“It all sounds a bit weird and a bit gimmicky” he said. Mixing music and reading may appeal to some people, he argued, but that doesn’t it makes sense. “It’s not a wine pairing.”
URL: http://www.thedaily.com/page/2011/09/05/090511-tech-appnews-booktrack-1-2/ 
"Listen up, e-book readers, because you’re going to love the sound of this new startup." more -->
Portfolio.com: August 24, 2011
Music to Readers' Ears
Listen up, e-book readers, because you’re going to love the sound of this new startup.
New York-based Booktrack, which creates synchronized soundtracks that accompany electronic books, launched today and plans to change the way we experience literature. The startup combines tailored music and sound effects with words on the page, all automatically paced to users’ individual reading speeds.
CEO and cofounder Paul Cameron, a New Zealander, likens the technology to movie soundtracks in the way they add another level of audience engagement.
“Tens of millions of commuters around the world listen to a playlist that’s disconnected from what they’re reading, perhaps a sad song with an upbeat story,” he said. “Now they can replicate a movie-like sound experience and fundamentally transform their reading experience.
The technology has already been integrated into its first novel—The Power of Six, by Pittacus Lore—and is currently available for the iPhone and iPad, with Android apps coming soon. The company has teamed up with Sony/ATV Music Publishing and Park Road Post Production to develop the soundtracks and plans to publish additional tracks for classics like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Pride and Prejudice, and Romeo and Julietin the coming months.
The company’s business model will entail splitting profits from the book soundtracks with participating publishers, authors, composers, and musicians.
Booktrack is backed by Peter Thiel, former PayPal CEO and Facebook investor, Mark D’Arcy, Facebook’s director of global creative solutions, and Derek Handley, CEO and cofounder of The Hyperfactory, a mobile business management firm. The company has also received financial support from several government agencies in New Zealand.
“It’s always exciting to witness the creation of a new form of media,” Thiel said. “Booktrack’s technology promises to captivate readers in a way that will seem intuitive in hindsight and compelling even after.”
But we wonder—will the ambiance and sound effects enhance your reading experience or distract you from the words on the page? Check out the demo below for a look at the technology and let us know what you think in the comments.
Read more: http://www.portfolio.com/views/blogs/the-tech-observer/2011/08/24/booktrack-brings-soundtracks-to-electronic-books#ixzz1lAtVQCuE 
"It turns out that Booktrack is a fun way to read. The music adds atmosphere and suspense. The sound effects are entertaining. Some people may find the added audio distracting, but for me, it flowed right along with the story." more -->
CNet: August 25, 2011
Booktrack: Sound Effects, Mood Music for E-Books
Books just kind of lay around, requiring your imagination to do all of the hard work. E-books add a little bit of gadget-y pizzazz to the process of reading. Or you can go completely nuts with Booktrack, an iOS app that adds soundtracks and sound effects to your reading material.
The first entry in a planned series of sound-enhanced books is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes mystery "The Adventure of the Speckled Band." The most important point to note is that these are not audio books in the usual sense. There's no Hollywood star reading the text to you.
I'm a Holmes nut. My office is decorated like 221B Baker Street. I've read this story more times than I can remember. I was a little skeptical about what the Booktrack reading experience would be like.
"What makes this approach interesting is the underlying technology, which syncs the changes in sound with your reading speed, which is something the application learns as you go." more -->
ReadWriteWeb: August 24, 2011
Startup Launches E-Books With Soundtracks For Immersive Reading
The digital age just gave birth to something few of us were clamoring for, but that might turn out to be a worthwhile experience: books with soundtracks. Booktrack, a startup that publishes e-books containing movie-like soundtracks, went live with its first few titles yesterday.
The result is a Kindle-style e-book with music and sound effects that play in the background as you read. The books are sold as stand-alone mobile applications, currently for iOS with Android support reportedly underway.
The company, which recieved funding from PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel, launched with a new book called "The Power of Six" by Pittacus Lore, along with a few free titles.
When we downloaded Sherlock Holmes: The Adventure of the Speckled Band for iPad and started reading, scene-appropriate, cinematic-sounding music began playing. A few paragraphs in, we could hear the crackle of a fireplace and later, creaking doors and footsteps. Some of the sound effects were slightly distracting, but just subtle enough that they didn't interrupt our reading.
What makes this approach interesting is the underlying technology, which syncs the changes in sound with your reading speed, which is something the application learns as you go. Some readers might find the tiny triangular icon sliding down the margin of the page as you go distracting. For others, it may be akin to using one's finger as a pacer while reading a book.
For some people, this more immersive reading experience might be the perfect antidote to endless digital distractions, allowing for more sustained focus on reading long-form material.
The product has been met with mixed reactions. Some are open to the possibility that this may be part of the future of books, while others, like Wired's Charlie Sorrel, find the experience to be distracting and unnecessary.
URL: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/ebooks_with_soundtracks.php 
