An article from PaidContent:UK features two video clips from a presentation given by John Makinson, CEO of Penguin Books. Makinson spoke about Penguin’s vision for e-books and showed a demo of interactive e-books and content with audio, video, and chat functionality. At about one minute into the first video, there is a demo of an anatomy textbook. Students will be able to zoom into diagrams and view portions of the diagram in 3-D.
According to Makinson, Penguin is planning to launch much of their content as applications rather than e-books for Apple’s iBooks app. Makinson commented, “We will be embedding and streaming audio, video, and gaming into everything that we do. This will present us and the platform owners with technology challenges. The ePub format, which is the standard for e-books at the present, is designed to support traditional narrative text but not this cool stuff that we are now talking about. So for the time being at least we will be creating a lot of our digital content as applications, for sale on app stores and HTML, rather than as e-books. The definition of the book itself, as we can see, is up for grabs.”
