When Mark Amerika created Grammatron 16 (?) years ago, who knew it would take the rest of the world so long to catch up?

Still, you have no idea how exited this article in the NYT makes me-enough to get me blogging again after umpteen months.

It’s always annoyed the hell out of me that writers were getting the short end of the stick in terms of cool digitools.  The itunes, DIY, online community model works for the music biz, but it took (and to be honest this is all still very new stuff) the creation of a functional and practical e-book reader (the Kindle, and it’s soon coming knockoffs) to actually make to idea of books integrated with media a tangible reality.

According to the article, some enterprising capitalist types are finally seeing the light when it comes to the multimedia options available to authors.  

Bradley Inman wants to create great fiction, dramatic online video and compelling Twitter stream — and then roll them all into a multimedia hybrid that is tailored to the rapidly growing number of digital reading devices.

Preach brotha! I’m giving these various services, including vook.tv (ugh, get creative people), WEBook and The Amanda Project, a year, maybe two before they really catch on and mainstream publishers either jump onboard and convince their authors to step into a new age or they get bumrushed by a slew of enterprising small publishers (Can anyone say Otherside Publishing…) steps in and eats their big ol tasty twitter, imeem, facebook flavored lunches.  And I don’t know about the rest of you writers/publishers/media entrepreur types, but I’m pretty damned hungry.

Check out the whole article here.