When Chris Zimmer looks at most e-books, he sees something tantamount to an electronic photocopy, but he believes they can be so much more.

Zimmer, a career filmmaker, has teamed up with Kirsten Tomilson, CEO of Lunenburg-based game producer Fourth Monkey  Media, to form Helix Media Publishing, which they hope will soon be producing an e-book a month.

Zimmer and Tomlison believe e-books should be more exciting than black-and-white reproductions of the printed page. They should be interactive, multilingual, with audio and video components, links to games and access to chat rooms. They should feature animation and possibly windows with authoritative information on a subject.

“The art form is still changing and the interesting part is where these forms are evolving and coalescing,” said Zimmer in an interview in his home overlooking St. Margaret’s Bay. “It’s that new literature, that space that I’m interested in.”

Still an early-stage company, Helix Media intends to be an online enterprise that will initially publish 12 interactive, illustrated and animated e-books beginning next year, mainly for people between the ages of 22 and 45.

The team has already begun adapting Amphibya – a Russian science fiction classic – into an e-book, featuring remarkable animation. Helix uses rotoscope, an animation technique in which animators trace over live-action film movement, frame by frame, to produce the stunning video complementing the story.

Tomlison explained that she hopes to produce software that will digitally perform the rotoscope process, thus cutting the costs of production. She added the software would be groundbreaking technology in itself and could be a profit-centre for the company.

Helix Media is one of the five finalists from the South Shore region in Innovacorp’s I-3 competition. The regional winners will be named on Jan. 26. The company is looking for a first-round private investment of about $250,000 and estimates it will need $5 million in funding in the next three years.