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.”
This is GREAT- the iPad will actually ENCOURAGE people to read. And to also impulse purchase iPad e-books, rather than wait for an Amazon snail mail, or drive to a bookstore.
I think this is going to be HUGE, and RESCUE the book publishing and newspaper publishing industries. Just like the iPod and Itunes, which saved the music industry from a total collapse.
I think the price of the Ipad is to hight so I won’t buy it right now, maybe later if the price dropes.
Really? this projcet will low our reading cost as readers by ipad or other elctronic devices. Book traditional book or e-books are should be paid, before reading them. oppsite we can found many free apps and games of ipad like ifunia resources of ipad(ifunia ipad column). This is an interesting phenomenon, isn’t it?
Thats a great news. Now reading will be so easy. And i can save as much as ebooks i want.