The terminology is fresh because the concept is fresh: “curated, additional content” on an e-book. Click on a word, a character, a place, and get transported to a definition, a drawing, or a map. Click again and the information disappears, leaving you just where you were on the page. Beneath the Ink calls these informational stopovers “binks,” and the young company is producing e-books with tons of them scattered throughout the pages.
Just to clarify: binks are not hyperlinks. “They are beneath-the-ink links,” says company CEO and cofounder Sherisse Hawkins. “You do not leave the book at all. You do not have to be connected to the Internet to see the enhancements.” The results are subtle, she says. “We don’t disturb your reading experience. We have simply added another dimension. We don’t touch the core content in any way.”
Books get enhanced in one of two ways. Authors can contract to have their books “binked” by the company, or they can do it themselves. If the latter, a Bink Assistant feature will make suggestions as to what content might benefit from a bink.
“The only limit to what can be done with binks is the author’s imagination,” says Olivia Tufo, PR and author relations manager. “Binks can be interactive panoramic images, GPS tracking and interactivity, data analytics, and much more. The possibilities are truly endless.”
Beneath the Ink technology is designed to work on all major devices and readers from Amazon, iBooks. Kobo, and Barnes and Noble.
Founded two years ago by Hawkins and Alex Milewski, the Boulder, Colo., company produced its first commercial book earlier this year, Emma Boling’s historical novel, Mistress of France, the first in a planned trilogy centering on the court of Renaissance France; the book won a Best Book Award from Digital Book World in the category Ebook Fixed Format/Enhanced—Adult Fiction. The book was also a Gold Honoree in the Benjamin Franklin Digital Book Awards handed out by the Independent Book Publishers Association.
At BEA, the company is celebrating the release of John Shors’s Beneath the Ink–enhanced version of Beneath a Marble Sky, a romantic retelling of the Taj Mahal’s myth and history published in hardcover in 2004 by McPherson & Company. (The book has been picked up to be a TV miniseries, Hawkins says.)
Visitors to the Beneath the Ink main booth in the Digital Discovery Zone (DZ1975A) will be able to see how the whole thing works: the author portal, examples of content on all sorts of devices, demonstrations on how to add things to an existing text.
The company also has a second space in the new-to-BEA Startup Alley, a place where publishing startups can show their wares and, today, compete for the opportunity to pitch to venture capitalists in attendance and win cash prizes.
