After last week’s trip to the MFA when we discovered the musical instruments collection I remembered that the MFA had sent me an email telling me about a members-only deal on their new ebook. I never did figure out how to download a free copy, but it was well worth the $9.99 I paid for it to see all four of my big kids clustered around the iPad watching videos of musicians playing the very instruments we’d been looking at that morning, often in the musical instruments room or else in another thematically related part of the museum.
And full of beautiful pictures from the MFA, paintings and photographs, as well as the instruments themselves. The text looks interesting too and I’m sure some day I will read the whole book. Maybe even read parts of it to them. But I’m so very excited with this whole eBook format which embeds videos and audio files with the pictures and text. (140 illustrations with 23 video and 25 audio clips.) This is definitely an instance where the eBook is far superior to the paper version.
You can preview the book here, there are a couple of videos you can look at and some page layouts. (Just click on the book cover on the upper left, there’s a little + sign where it says Look Inside.)
Even if you don’t live in the Boston area and haven’t visited the MFA, this book is worth checking out.
