Penguin Will Reinvent Books With iPad

Penguin CEO John Makinson speech to FT’s Digital Media & Broadcasting Conference, London, 2nd March 2010:

The iPad represents the first real opportunity to create a paid distribution model that will be attractive to consumers. 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. The definition of the book itself is up for grabs. 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.

(via paidContent.Org)