Project Idea: Book Mashups

I was thinking about online data earlier today (and yesterday) and I had this thought to try and spruce up online magazine articles, you know, make them nicer or more interactive for users to get more of an online experience through them when this idea hit me.

What if we took a classic book, like say Dracula (I use this because of the data available) and put it online. Most of you would say "Matt, that's already been done before. To death actually." To which I would say "Aha! But there's more!" I want to put the book online with an experience. Since Dracula is a series of post articles, it would make sense to organize the book like that. Chapter by chapter, entry by entry. Record audio tracks for the entries themselves, use more than the standard British fellow who reads all the audio books to do so. When all is said and done, use mashup technology to give the user even more insight into the book as it progresses. Kind of like footnotes on crack, but in a more intuitive light (and larger type).

Allow the user to explore the book in a new way by adding in maps, pictures, drawings, definitions, media excerpts, research articles, thoughts and anecdotes, biographical and research notes, etc. Allow the user to discover these through the interface without having them hammered into their eyesight every couple minutes or making it too hard to find (fine line with that one). In short, create an experience that the user can really get into, not just to be able to read the book, but to answer and explore the areas of the book that a reader might wonder about.

The process would of course, be extremely tedious. Each page would have to examined for references and the interface itself would have to constructed to support multiple APIs as well as some custom linking like the audio, indexing, search functions, etc.

Maybe this idea is crazy. Maybe someone has already done this. I don't know. But I have a feeling like this is where many of the web technologies of the future are headed, just with more general all purpose API control and mashup interfaces. Maybe I should start with a magazine article instead...