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.”
According to Berthold Thoma, CEO of Hutchison Austria, The carrier will be offering the iPad for folks in Austria. Purchasers willing to be bond to a 2-year data contract (29.90 Euro, 5GB/Month) will get a 333 Euro/$455 discount. Frankly we still don’t know international pricing for the iPad, so the final price after the discount is a mystery.
