In London on Tuesday Penguin CEO John Makinson demonstrated what the company believes books will look like in the new iPad world – or at least how his company envisions they will look.
They’re not really books at all, but rich immersive interactive experiences. Everything from children’s books to textbooks to teen vampire fiction will exist as custom iPad apps. Quotes and video after the jump.
Much of this is due to the limited capabilities of the ePub format for eBooks. There’s going to be lots of experimentation on pricing, formats and multimedia.
“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.
“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.”
When asked about giving up 30 percent of gross revenues to Apple, Mackinson was actually pleased with their pricing model. Apparently, in other types of agency models, retailers typically get 50 percent so this is actually a step up for them. paidContent has more details.
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