My fingers are actually itching as I write this. I can’t type the words out fast enough.

You see, the buzz for the last day is the “advent” of new “video books” with Jeff Jarvis leading the pack of six new titles from HarperCollins which will seemingly pioneer this new format in the Web 2.0 age of YouTube, video podcasts and camera phones. Jarvis’s offering will be, according to Engadget, “23 minutes of the man speaking to your face in front of a white backdrop, and retails for $10.” And that’s one of the kinder descriptions of the new video book format.

Jeff Jarvis and the video book

Media outlets are running with this story, asking how this fits with the future of the industry.

Well with four decades under my belt, I’m finally at the age where I’m starting to say, “You young whippersnappers don’t remember…”

Because back in 1994, the interactive video book was being pioneered during the age of “multimedia” in New York City by a brilliant fellow named Bob Stein. His NYC-based firm The Voyager Company, was using the whiz bang format of the time — CD-ROM. Now you may laugh, but even today the 15-year old interactive video titles he produced would put almost any high-end Flash-based web site or DVD-based content to shame. He signed on some incredible authors to turn their brilliant words into rich, interactive and compelling content — Marvin Minsky, Don Norman and Stephen Jay Gould to name a few.

I’ll never forget the Don Norman CD-ROM, “First Person: Donald Norman – Defending Human Attributes in the Age of the Machine” where a small, 2-inch tall video version of himself would pop up on screen and explain his views on user-centered design. (Review here). Norman was an Apple Fellow, and one of the most respected minds on usability.

Don Norman, Chroma keyed

The digital text of Norman’s three books was included with the CD-ROM, and video bites helped explain his examples. Voyager spent a lot of time filming him against a chroma key screen, so he appeared like a true sprite floating on the page. It was rather advanced at the time.

Now it wasn’t all peaches and cream. The content was limited to a 640×480 box, and because it was CD-ROM based, it was fickle. Each time the operating system or QuickTime was updated, you always held your breath and hoped the CD-ROM you paid north of $30 still worked. (I seem to recall my disk was Mac-only, no Windows support). I’m sure I still have the box and disc in storage somewhere, but even if I had it in-hand, I’d have to find an old Macintosh to play it, which is one of the big drawbacks of the format.

After some Googling, I found the blog of Peter Merholz, who actually worked on the Voyager title. He even lamented he doesn’t own a copy of the Norman CD-ROM anymore, but reflected on the value of having experienced it:

This is an odd way to read a book, but it also meant that I engaged with the text to a level of depth I probably wouldn’t otherwise. And, as has happened with so many other people, when he criticizes thoughtless door design, or the lack of mapping between the controls of a stove and the burners themselves, I had that “Aha!” moment. And as I continued reading about conceptual models, system images, recognition versus recall, affordances (affordances! and in the CD-ROM, there’s a little video of Don describing affordances using a book, talking about how a book, among other things, affords scratching), the power of forcing functions, the photo of beer keg handles used to distinguish controls in a nuclear power plant.

Don’s book opened my eyes to a field I had never heard of. With this book, he essentially brought the notion of “user-centered design” to a wide audience. (He had earlier worked on “User-Centered System Design,” but that was pretty much strictly for academics.) And though it would be a few years before I practiced user-centered design, it was this book that set me on that path.

It’s hard to describe to newbies how much CD-ROMs were the center of the “multimedia” universe back in early 1990s. Apple was fully committed to the format, and even supported a consortium of prestigious universities around the concept of multimedia CD-ROM authoring.

I was smart (or simply lucky) enough to see beyond CD-ROMs earlier than most. Back in 1994 when I was creating the first new media classes at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, we indeed were set to teach CD-ROM authorting with two of my teaching mates — Vernon Church of Newsweek Interactive and Pamela O’Connell of CMP/Information Week. At the last moment, a few weeks before class started in December 1994, I convinced them to take a big risk, and go with this new thing called the WorldWideWeb and a weird program called Mosaic. I think I made the right call. [ref]

But in a sense, we are only now catching up to compelling content created in that golden era of CD-ROMs.

I wrote in my book The Wikipedia Revolution about the history of Apple’s Hypercard (launched in 1987), and how Ward Cunningham was in effect trying to re-create the capabilities of Apple’s product in the creation of the wiki in the 1990s.

I believe the case will be similar with people following Bob Stein’s Voyager titles. He spent time with the authors and cared about creating compelling content, even if the market wasn’t ready.

Fifteen years later, the “video book” in HarperCollins and the Amazon Kindle is trying to recapture what Stein started, even if it seems they aren’t aware of how advanced this format had come before it died on the vine.

Sadly, the business model didn’t really work. He wound up making a company called Night Kitchen to develop a cross-platform multimedia authoring system called TK3 which was quite respected in its time, pre-2000. He was last involved The Institute for the Future of the Book.

Anyone thinking about the future of the video book definitely needs to study the original pioneer in this space, Bob Stein.