Robert Moor reviews multimedia book apps, including Al Gore's Our Choice:
Inset into the text of each page are photos, which can be unfolded and enlarged by un-pinching your fingertips. Occasionally, these images lurch to life as BBC News-style videos, audio slideshows, or brilliantly conceived infographics. … The problem with Our Choice is that among the elephantine hi-def images and infographics, the text gets buried. Reading it feels like flipping through a coffee table book: grazing the lush images, you avoid eye contact with the daunting gray bricks of text. If this is the future of the book, then the book is indeed doomed.
Along similar lines, Laura Miller looks at "Chopsticks," an interactive book app geared towards young adults:
I think fiction works in part by eliciting an imaginative investment from its reader. Instead of the access to the characters’ inner selves that prose usually offers, "Chopsticks" shows us what they look like, what they draw (Frank, Glory’s boyfriend, is an artist), what they pack for a trip, what they scribble in the margins of the books they’re reading. From these clues, the reader is invited to imagine not just what’s happened, but how the two principles feel and think about it.
The Dish 