HarperCollins just announced the release of a “video book” — a 23-minute video that encapsulates the information found in What Would Google Do?, a business book by Jeff Jarvis. The video sells on Amazon for $9.99.

But is the video really a book? What makes a book a book anyway?

In his brilliant examination of the e-book market, past and present, John Siracusa points to a key problem with terminology:

In the print world, the word “book” is used to refer to both the content and the medium. In the digital realm, “e-book” refers to the content only — or rather, that’s the intention.

This is not the case with music, for example, where the medium and the content are separate. The medium changes — vinyl, 8-track, cassette, CD, MP3 — but music is still music. Music is the product. Music is what you’re buying. The medium is just a vessel, and that vessel changes ruthlessly. When a better, cheaper, faster, or more convenient medium appears, the music follows — with or without the content owners.

But books…there’s a lot of baggage attached to that name. Giant tomes, portable paperbacks, or standard hardcovers, they’re all recognizable as books. In the modern era, there have been no discontinuities of form on par with the those in the music industry to emphasize the separation of content and medium for the written word.

So a “book” is technically the medium — the printed pages bound between covers — but the information (non-fiction) or story (fiction) is the content, the stuff we’re really buying. In which case, to be really clear to the consumer, e-books shouldn’t be called e-books and videos containing information from a book shouldn’t be called video books.

If we look again to the music industry as an example, there are some packaging distinctions that help consumers know what they’re getting. People don’t buy music, they buy songs. Everybody knows that, generally speaking, a song will be 3 or 4 minutes long and follow certain conventions. Group a bunch of songs together and you have an album, also an agreed-upon convention. We’re still not talking about the medium (the CD or MP3 file) but some structure has been wrapped around the content, making it easier for us to understand, buy, and consume the product.

When it comes to information, we have chapters and we have books — one might argue that these are roughly analogous to songs and albums. But the word “book” is still firmly wedded to the medium as well. And so we arrive back where we started with only one word to describe both a collection of content and how that content is conveyed.

If you think that quibbling over word choice is a waste of time, consider the negative comments that have been fired at HarperCollins over the new Jeff Jarvis “v-book”.

The Washington Post describes the content of the video:

The 23-minute video has Jarvis speaking into a single camera with a white background. Instead of reading directly from the book, which was published last month by the company’s Collins Business imprint, Jarvis runs through the basic concepts in the book…

One commenter’s response:

It is impossible to pack the depth, research and resonance of What Would Google Do? (or any other long-form work) into a 23-minute video.

Clearly, he doesn’t consider the video to be the book in visual format, not a v-book. Instead, he considers the video an excellent marketing tool and says HarperCollins would have been smarter to give it away for free rather than charging for it.

So, could HarperCollins have avoided much of the criticism levelled at them if they hadn’t tried to tout the video as a different version of the book? I say yes. Semantics could have made a difference here.

Note: I have to give HarperCollins props for at least trying something new, even if it didn’t quite pan out the way they might have liked. They’re innovating, and no doubt they (and others) will learn with each new step about what works and what doesn’t.