iPad Book Mock-ups

Ryanlinks , , No Comments

One of my favorite books of last year was Neil Stephensen’s The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer.  Long story short, the story hinges on this nearly magically computerized nano-whazzit book thing.  The book dynamically changes as the protagonist grows older, tailoring its message to help her develop into a fine leader of mice…or something.  Look, I can’t do it justice…just read it.

I read that book first on my Kindle, then finished it on my iPhone after the Kindle died an unfortunate death.  At the time, I felt  that I was a little nearer to that world of an actual smart book.

Looking at this recent video from Penguin books, it looks like the iPad will take us a bit further down the road.

Additional videos get a little more high-level, talking about how best to deliver content rich books. Use the ePub format that iBooks and most of the book world (excluding Amazon) uses or create “Apps”.  ePub can support linking to external sources, pictures, and some other simple features, but lacks the ability to bring this really slick stuff to devices. Enter Applications-as-books.  Up shoot, you can make it much smarter, more dynamic, and richer. Downside, this is a bit more complicated then converting a text file to be read by a machine. Also, they would need to go through the Apple App Store, which is pretty incredible but can chafe some developers.

Who knows where this will go. I don’t. But I think it will be pretty cool.

via gizmodo