Penguin demos iPad books

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4 March 2010 12:57 GMT / By Duncan Geere

Penguin has laid out some of the ways in which the iPad could be used to present ebooks in a presentation given by CEO John Makinson. There's some interesting ideas in there, including the ability to use the iPad's accelerometers, and to connect to a webchat among fans of a particular book.

"The iPad represents the first real opportunity to create a paid distribution model that will be attractive to consumers", said Makinson. "The psychology of payment on tablets is different to the psychology on a PC". Translated, that essentially means: "people don't know they can steal stuff on a tablet, yet".

Penguin says that it sees ebooks as representing 10% of its sales in 2011, compared to 4% in the US currently. "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".

Does an app fall under your definition of "book"? Share your thoughts in the comments on whether Makinson is heading down the right path in redefining his content as mobile applications, rather than just piles of dead tree.

Via: paidcontent.co.uk

Full tags

Software, iPad apps, iPad, Penguin, ebooks, eBook readers