Penguin Books jumps on the iPad bus

Is the Apple iPad going to become the de facto ebook of choice for the discerning reader?
Is the Apple iPad going to become the de facto ebook of choice for the discerning reader?

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

Adam Hartley