Penguin has been demo'ing its latest range of Apple iPad friendly electronic books this week, with rumours flying around about the planned release of Apple's latest uber-toy in the US later this month.
Kid's favourite Spot the Dog makes an appearance in the iPad books demo video which shows a mini-game where you can colour in Spot and another one where you shake up the iPad to mess up a room and then have to tidy it up.
Which of course begs the question: "Are you seriously going to let your children play with your new expensive Apple toy?"
Dogs, bodies, pads
Dorling Kindersley is planning an iPad version of The Human Body whereby Apple fans can zoom in on different parts of the anatomy, for varying reasons of education, titillation and delight.
Dorling Kindersley's Starfinder lets you use the iPad's built-in compass and GPS to let you point the device at the sky to identify stars. Which is clearly Very Cool.
Penguin Books' CEO John Makinson says that the Apple iPad will be "embedding audio, video and streaming into everything" it does.
"The iPad represents the first real opportunity to create a paid distribution model that will be attractive to consumers," Makinson told FT's Digital Media & Broadcasting Conference. "The psychology of payment on tablets is different to the psychology on a PC.
"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.
"We don't know whether a video introduction will be valuable to a consumer. We will only find answers to these questions by trial and error."
Via Paid Content
Your comments (2) Click to add a new comment
lickydog
February 10th 2011
2. The days of custom code and workflow to produce limited functionality are long gone - with modern development tools and standardised interfaces/toolsets the production costs have plummeted to a tiny fraction of the budgets in those times. Sales were OK, but like a Ponzi scheme, the biggest money was selling on to other publishers (in this case international) - the crunch came when the titles got bigger and more data-driven - the cost of translating each word meant that the more content rich (thus expensive) titles were never going to pay for themselves. 'A Million Words' is a nice strapline for a reference work, but not to a Spanish publisher having to pay 30p a word translation. The stack collapsed somewhat with products practically given away to recoup costs. That said, it was also costly to develop with a large team out of central London - outsourcing and off-the-shelf tools had not really developed sufficiently for distributed project collaboration.
iOS in 2010/11 is somewhat different, as this is plugging content into a well-maintained framework, with a self-managing market (where no one removes titles from the retail space to clear shelves for the latest games)
If the publishers have the balls to see it through for the long run, and the playback environment lasts for a few years, then the product can ship at an attractive price - say £9 rather than £29... trouble comes when you try to clear your investment and expect peak profit in under 3 years - that might just not happen for the niche titles - and you want to have those in place to cover the market.
Oh, and their first title was Musical Instruments for Microsoft - oooo that was a classy piece of software :) niiiiice audio - you don't get that attention to detail these days.
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ralphh
March 4th 2010
1. Why does this remind me of the 1990's interactive CD rom boom and bust? All the publishers got hot for it, but nobody bought... I suspect the "Human Body" is a relaunch of their first 1995 CD rom...
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