I have just had a preliminary look at Jason Van Veldhuysen’s upcoming e-book, A Boxer’s Guide: How To Prepare For Your First Fight.

Jason asked me to make suggestions for back matter, like recommended reading material, etc. After I saw what he was doing with what I will call ‘video footnotes’ I told him to nix the back matter and just go with these video links.

The problem with a book like this is the wording of body mechanics. Most ‘how to’ combat arts books have just used a mass of sequential photos with captions. Jason wrote this book as a written description of how things are done, in order to help coaches [who it seems make up a sizable portion of his YouTube viewership] with their verbal instruction. He initially mentioned that he would use some photos pulled from his hundreds of training videos to supplement the written instructions.

What I see in the works here with these ‘video footnotes’ is much more exciting; a video link to an instructional video in the e-book itself, where it is pertinent. It will be interesting to see how this goes. He even mentioned he was shooting supplementary video for the book. I should be getting a review copy sometime this summer and will post a heads up then.