TREEbook: An e-book format that allows for multiple story-lines

"TREEbook" stands for Timed Reading Experience E-book. As the name implies, this new e-book format will allow the reader to experience a story tailored to their reading pace and preferences.

This is from treebook.com:

Built into the code of each TREEbook™ are time triggers that are set off based on your reading habits, such as your average reading pace, which day you’re reading, or even how long you read, leading you to each successive branch within the story. With the interplay between time triggers and story branches, different readers can experience various results of pivotal moments within the same TREEbook™. If, for example, you read that the hero has ten minutes to dismantle a bomb but your real life forces you away from the TREEbook™ for fifteen minutes, you could return to the story in the aftermath of the explosion. If your friend is reading the same book, depending on her reading habits, her experience may be different. For example, the hero could save the day. The outcomes would lead you and your friend to even more diverging branches of the story.

. . . .

The story grows with you.

The very first TREEbook™ novel (release date 2013) will be The Julian Year by award-winning horror author Gregory Lamberson (The Jake Helman Files, The Frenzy Wolves Cycle). In The Julian Year, Julian Weizak, an obituary writer in New York, celebrates his birthday alone in a bar on New Year’s Eve. At the stroke of midnight, scores of homicides break out on the East Coast.

Julian discovers twenty thousand murders are committed that night in New York alone, with the epidemic spreading across the country and the world time zone by time zone. At midnight each day thereafter, millions of people become homicidal maniacs, contributing to the biggest killing spree in history. It looks as if the chaos can lead to only one end: the extinction of humankind.
- About TREEbook

I wonder how this would work for book clubs? You ask: How did you feel when the hero was blown up by the bomb? only to have everyone look at you uncomprehendingly because in their versions (they didn't have to get up to baste a chicken!) he was saved.

Although I love exploring new technologies, it seems as though this one could be frustrating. Having the action continue on even when I'm up doing something else? I don't know about you, but the day I got a Personal Video Recorder (PVR), one that allowed me to freeze whatever program I was watching so I could go off and do other things, was one of the happiest days of my life! (A fact which makes me think I've likely spent too much time watching TV.)

What do you think about this new technology? Would you buy a TREEbook?

Cheers.