Imagine that you’re reading an intense, gripping novel, completely immersed in the virtual world it has created inside your own head. A character walks slowly down an old corridor, and suddenly you hear the click click of footsteps on wood. Music swells. And you are knocked completely out of the book and back into the mundane world you usually inhabit.

This is the promise of BookTrack, a startup which brings movie-style soundtracks to the written word. The books are available for the iPhone and iPad (Android coming soon), and come with added ambient effects, spot sound FX and a musical score. The software tracks you as you read (a distracting little widget constantly descends in the margin) and plays the sounds at you in the appropriate places.

Thus, you may hear a clock ticking, music rising to signify a dramatic moment, or the beating heart of a terrified protagonist. Or helicopters.

If you think this sounds distracting, you’re right. I downloaded the (free) version of Sherlock Holmes: The Adventure of the Speckled Band for the iPad to test things out. The first thing you need to do is shut off the progress indicator, or you will feel constantly harried to read at a steady pace.

The Holmes novel starts with suitably filmic background music, and the ticking of a clock. Later, we enjoy a crackling fire (or paper being screwed up — it’s tricky to tell through the iPad’s terrible speaker. Headphones are recommended) and later, upon turning a page, I heard the sound of a a drawer being unlocked and a book pulled out.

It’s incredibly jarring. The beauty of a book is that the whole world is as real as you can imagine it to be. Adding tawdry effects doesn’t enhance the experience — it just makes the whole thing seem fake. You know how a bad visual effect can pull you right out of a movie? This is the same, only worse.

There are handful of titles available, with more to come. Mostly they’re the kind of thing you could find at Project Gutenberg and are therefore free. The one paid title, The Power of Six, cost $12, and preview videos can be watched before you buy.

I for one am looking forward to the obvious next step: making the on-page text into 3-D text. Awesome!

Booktrack product page [Booktrack]