Blair Underwood aspires to book stardom

[June 04, 2010]  NEW YORK (AP) -- Blair Underwood hopes to make it big in books. The actor is starring in a series of scenes for a new digital book technology called Vook, which combines digital reading with high-quality video.

He debuts in "From Cape Town with Love," the latest installment in the book series by Tananarive Due and Steven Barnes, where he plays the recurring character Tennyson Hardwick.

The technology transforms reading the novel into a multimedia experience by abridging the text and supplementing video to move the story along. Instead of the hard copy's 350 pages, the electronic version requires only 85. But thanks to key scenes -- ranging from two to five minutes -- at the end of some chapters, the reader comes away with a full experience.

[Associated Press; JOHN CARUCCI]

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