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Writing has become more than words.  With the arrival of ebooks, ipads, smart phones, and tablets, books can now have words, photos, illustrations, videos, and interaction (like quizzes, comments, or sharing features).

To take advantage of this, you’ll need some extra help.  These tools can turn your plain book into an interactive multimedia experience.

Red Staple – still in beta, but this tool will help you upload your .doc text, format it for e-publication, add video, images, and links (thanks to Becky Blanton for passing this on).

Of course, unless you’ve been in a writing cave, you’ve probably heard of Apple’s new ibook author app.  It’s free, runs on Lion, and includes drag and drop images, interactive photo galleries, and free templates.  The books are gorgeous.

There is a catch – if your book is free, you can do as you like; if you sell it, you have to sell the full version (with the formatting and the interactive features), on the ibook store.  If you sell it elsewhere, you’ll have to reformat everything.

Oh, and Happy Birthday Charles Dickens.  You can download Dickens’ books for free (sorry, no videos included).