From Penguin’s CEO, John Makinson:

We will be embedding audio, video, and gaming into 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 digital content as applications, to be sold on app stores, in HTML.

Penguin will be selling these “books” not in the Apple bookstore but in the app store. They are more app than book, which brings up an interesting question that people will likely debate for some time: where does one draw the line between an ebook and an app? For book publishers, who are moving by choice or cowpoke across the digital frontier, it’s an important distinction. For young readers, who already consume their stories with a side dish of community and gaming for dessert, this distinction doesn’t matter much.

Tags: ebooks, ipad, Penguin