Penguin Demos iPad Formatted E-Books

Penguin Books' CEO John Makinson offered a first-look demo of some books headed to the iBookstore during a presentation in London on Tuesday.

"The iPad represents the first real opportunity to create a paid distribution model that will be attractive to consumers," he told FT's Digital Media & Broadcasting Conference. "The psychology of payment on tablets is different to the psychology on a PC."

"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."

"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."