Penguin shows how the iPad will revolutionize book publishing

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We’ve already got a good handle on how periodical publishers intend on using the iPad to revitalize their businesses, but what about book publishers? Outside of just having another e-book platform to publish for, how can the iPad’s incredible multimedia and interactive capabilities be leveraged to transform the way we experience literature?

On Tuesday, Penguin Books’ CEO John Makinson tried to answer just those questions, demonstrating some upcoming books that will be coming to the iPad. Perhaps the most impressive demo was for the iPad version of the beloved children’s book, Where’s Spot? which has been transformed into an adorable interactive learning app. Penguin’s not stopping there: their Vampire Academy e-book is “an online community for vampire lovers” that features live chat between readers (a nice touch, but parents might get their heckles up at the idea of a real-life Edward Cullen prowling for pre-teens in the pages of their cildren’s book) , while a Paris travel guide switches to street map view when it’s put on a table.

Clearly, this is functionality that isn’t really supported by the ePub e-book format. Penguin’s going to be releasing their titles as full-blown apps: “[F]or 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,” explains John Maiknson. “The definition of the book itself is up for grabs.”

It’s not all good, of course. Makinson alarmingly threatened literature fans with a version of Pride and Prejudice including videos of Keira Knightly and Colin Firth bovinely lowing Jane Austen quotes in the video margins.

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What’s interesting about the presentation is that it hints that publishers will not so much publish e-books on the iPad as turn their titles into apps. Because multiple iPad book apps on a single device will inevitably clutter and become unwieldy, I imagine most publishers will release their own “library” apps in which their interactive books can be published as in-app purchases. The end result could be positively transformative: readers will finally start experiencing book publishers not just as printers, but as brands with their own distinct identities defined by the cleverness and presentation of their iPad book apps… something very few readers do today. With the iPad, Apple looks like it’s set to make the brand of a book publisher as important, or more so, than its individual titles. This is going to be very interesting indeed.

John Brownlee

John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.