Thursday, March 04, 2010

Penguin Press's iPad Books. Simply amazing!

The Apple iPad is about to change the way we view books and will create an entirely new interactive experience that was only dreamed of a year ago. And it will be much more than just black-text-on-white books--if you wanted that, you'd buy a Kindle, not a giant iPhone with Wi-Fi, a huge LCD, and a top-of-its-class mobile processor. Are these game/video/audio hybrids really "books"? If Penguin's amazing examples are a sign of things to come, we may be asking that question quite often.

Penguin's CEO, John Makinson says:
"We will be embedding audio, video, and gaming into everything we do. The .epub format, which is the standard for ebooks at the present, is designed to support traditional narrative text, but not this cool stuff that we're now talking about. So for the time being, at least, we'll be creating a lot of our digital content as applications, to be sold on app stores, in HTML."
Watch this amazing demo of Penguin's offerings on the iPad.



Found via Fast Company
at

1 comment:

  1. Tim Barrus5:46 PM

    This is exciting. But why is every single mainstream publisher -- and all of them are gearing up for Ipad -- creating paradigms where in the context of a VOOK where video augments the longer narrative, that EXCLUDE the writer of the narrative. This has to change. It cannot be written in concrete like everything else is OLD media. The writer with a camera has a future. Otherwise, they are going to marginalize you to the equivalent of a widget.

    ReplyDelete