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Booktrack: A soundtrack for books

By Carolyn Kellogg
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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.

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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?).

-- Carolyn Kellogg

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Carolyn Kellogg

Carolyn Kellogg is a prize-winning writer who served as Books editor of the Los Angeles Times for three years. She joined the L.A. Times in 2010 as staff writer in Books and left in 2018. In 2019, she was a judge of the National Book Award in Nonfiction. Prior to coming to The Times, Kellogg was editor of LAist.com and the web editor of the public radio show Marketplace. She has an MFA in creative writing from the University of Pittsburgh and a BA in English from the University of Southern California.

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