Penguin to turn e-books into audio/visual experience

Penguin plans to kick start e-book sales with enhanced digital editions of bestsellers. Plans for interactive e-books go beyond embedded video and audio.

Penguin CEO John Makinson told the FT’s Digital Media & Broadcasting Conference that e-books will hit 10% of book sales next year, up from the current 4%.

The demos presented at the conference gave insight into how Penguin might work with the newly launched iPad. Vampire Academy - a new book for children - will connect its readers with an online community for 'vampire lovers' where they can chat with fellow readers. A new Paris travel guide switches to a street map view when placed on a table.

Penguin plans to use the industry standard epub format for its books, making them instantly compatible with many readers and allowing the development of applications for devices such as the iPad.

“The iPad represents the first real opportunity to create a paid distribution model that will be attractive to consumers,” Makinson said, nothing that, “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 (and) creating a lot of our content as applications,'he said.

A copy of Pride And Prejucide might conceivably come with videos of Keira Knightly and Colin Firth, but we need to understand how much the consumer will pay for that, we need to engage in dynamic pricing."

See the full presentation