Penguin Books have given a demonstration of what their Apple iPad app will function like when launched.
'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.
It's interesting to see how publishers are working with the iPad. Rather than creating boring ebooks that you read from cover to cover, they are making completely interactive books allowing children and adults to delve right in to the book. One example shown on video displays a page with the innards of a human body on. When clicking the heart the iPad zooms in and opens up the heard. When tapped again a 3D animated heart is displayed rotating on the screen.
When launched the interactive books will be sold through the app store rather than the iBooks store and they will be installed as apps rather than sitting on the bookshelf.
'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.
It's certainly going to be interesting and cool to see some great applications launch on the higher resolution screen Apple [AAPL] iPad. We've already seen what the Wired iPad app will look like (again, fantastic). The WSJ App was also mentioned yesterday.