The folks at Noble Beast broke into publishing enhanced ebooks with their Kickstarter for Steampunk Holmes, which raised over $42,000, making it one of the top-funded drives ever in the Fiction category. Last month, they launched an ambitious new drive to fund Noble Beast Classics, an entire series of enhanced ebooks in the same vein. These pumped-up ebooks feature illustrations, music, maps, pronunciation guides, and more, helping immerse you in reworked versions of literary classics.
These books work via any web browser and are also engineered for the iPad. Since the launch, Noble Beast has also announced an Android version as a stretch goal, and GeekDad is the first to report their support for standard Kindle readers—the e-ink variety—which will have touch-to-activate character profiles, mechanical drawings, and maps.
But none of that matters as much as the stories themselves. For this new line, Noble Beast lined up a stellar selection of well-matched writers and artists. They include:
- Albert Berg and Cesar Sebastian Diaz on Moby Dick in Space
- Richard Ellis Preston and Brian Koschak on Alice and the Sword of Wonderland
- PJ Haarsma and Juan Gedeon on A Christmas Carol in Space
- Erin Keyser Horn and Alex Kosakowski on Never Safe in Neverland
- Matt Betts and Max Dunbar on Heart of Darkness in the Land of Monsters
- Emily Hall and Steven Russell Black on Pride and Prejudice Coven
- Ellie Ann Soderstrom and Jeremy Mohler on The Three Musketeers vs. The Four Aliens
- Scott Colby and Timothy Green II on The Scarlet Letter of the Dark Elves
- Ryne Douglas Pearson and Meg Gandy on Ghosts at the Center of the Earth
- Jesse James Freeman and Shannon Potratz on Out of Oz: The Witch’s Daughter
- Alana Joli Abbot and Steven Sanders on The Jungle Book Shapeshifters
- JRD Skinner and Big Mike Walton on The Invisible Man at the Island of Dr. Moreau
- Bonnie Burton and Alan Gallo on Small Town Dracula
- Geek Dad’s own James Floyd Kelly and Federico Dallocchio on Paradoxes: The Other Time Machine
On top of that, backers can also grab copies of PC Martin and Levi Hoffmeier’s Steampunk Holmes: Frankenstein, and PC Martin and Daniel Cortes’s Steampunk Holmes: Legacy of the Nautilus. Publisher Richard Monson-Haefel gives a good demonstration of how the books work in this video:
The drive ends on December 12, but there are still some early-bird rewards left for backers to grab now. If you know someone else who’d like these books, they’re even offering gift certificates for backers to use as holiday presents.
Disclaimer: Noble Beast also licensed my Shotguns & Sorcery novels to produce as enhanced ebooks. I backed Steampunk Holmes long before that, though.
Awesome write up! I’m honored to be one of the writers on this. It’s so fun to write interactive books.