Category Archives: Uncategorized

A Look at forthcoming Penguin iPad Books

Penguin-iPad-Books-Apps

Penguin Group CEO John Makinson revealed some of the company’s forthcoming titles that’s coming to the iPad at the FT Digital Media & Broadcasting Conference in London yesterday [paidContent:UK].

“We will be embedding audio, video and streaming in to 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.”

As shown in the video below, the “books” resemble more like applications than traditional e-books, just what we would imagine books to be on the iPad, “very interactive learning experiences.” In fact, Makinson says that most of the “books” will be sold through the App Store as opposed to the iBooks Store.

“So for the time being at least we’ll be creating a lot of our content as applications, for sale on app stores and HTML, rather than in ebooks. The definition of the book itself is up for grabs.”

When asked about the 30/70 Split with Publishers, Makinson replied with, “this is better than the equivalent print agency model, in which publishers let retailers keep 50 percent.”

iPad to have video calling, SMS and file downloads?

ipad-sdk-page-video-calling-sms

The iPhone OS 3.2 beta SDK has been available for just about 2 days now. And today, engadget has uncovered some interesting groundwork being laid in iPhone OS 3.2 that could possibly hint at future software features and the next generation of iPad.

According to a trusted source of engadget, there’s some basic support within iPhone OS 3.2 for video calling, which explains the empty space at where a front facing camera would have been perfect in the leaked iPad photo. Front facing camera in the iPad 2?

“We’re told that there are hooks to accept and decline a video conference, flip a video feed (which suggests a front-facing camera) and — most importantly — run the video call in either full screen mode or in just a portion of the screen. That means you’ll be able to chat and do other things at the same time, which could mean there’s at least some type of multitasking going on here. “

front-facing-camera-iPad-hole

There’s also some code buried in iPhone OS 3.2 suggesting support for file download in the browser and mysteriously, SMS and phone capabilities. However, the SMS and Phone part as noted by our editor Christopher Kirk, could simply be some left over iPhone code. Only time will tell.