Penguin Prepares iPad Book Prototype

Penguin Books, one of the world's biggest publishing house, has showcased an interactive eBook platform, designed to exploit the advanced functionality offered by Apple's iPad tablet device.  

Explaining the significance of the move, John Makinson the CEO of Penguin, who incidentally demonstrated the eBook format at an event in London, said that the iPad is the 'first real opportunity' for a paid distribution model, which will allow them to offers more than just eBooks to their customers. 

According to the demonstration given by the CEO, the company is planning to offer eBooks embedded with audio, video and streaming capabilities, creating a highly interactive environment for the customers. 

The demo showed a children's book that could allow children to color drawings along with reading, book titles that allow live chat among readers with similar taste and human anatomy book that allowed users to zoom in on particular body parts and play animations explaining their working. 

Makinson also announced that the company was planning to develop eBook content as applications for the iBook store, which will be online eBook platform for the iPad tablet device.

He also added that "The EPUB format, which is the standard for e-books at the present, is designed to support traditional narrative text, but not this cool stuff that we're now talking about."