Penguin's iPad-formatted books shown off, making waves
By Laura June 
posted March 4th 2010 11:23AM
posted March 4th 2010 11:23AM
posted March 4th 2010 11:23AM
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Would you ever give a $499+ device to a toddler/infant? ......
@bloody toast i wouldn't give one to a 2 year old. not unless he was sitting in my lap and I was holding it.
but my 4 year old nephew is allowed handle an ipod touch by himself and does fine. and he's smart enough to understand that he has to sit and hold it in his lap.
@bloody toast
Yes. If it benefits her intellectually. My pre school daughter uses several apps on my iphone and ipod touch under supervised conditions. She's three and I can see direct results in her ability to read better, do better in math etc. The larger screen of the ipad would make it much more interactive.
The ipad has excellent potential.
This sort of thing is okay for books on travel, cooking or photos, but when I want to read a novel I just want words on a page, I don't want to have a multimedia experience.
It's all about the quality of the content. In the past ten years, many textbooks have come bundled with multimedia CD Roms which were effectively useless. They simply did not go into enough detail in the videos to actually make them useful. However, there was a video I saw for the online version of the book molecular cell biology which really helped me understand how kinase based cell signaling.
The thing that people always tend to forget though is that for most difficult to understand topics, there is simply no replacement for sitting there and putting in the time to read the material.
I love demos.
At every intro to each feature, they show the person holding the iPad with 2 hands. Then they let go of it to use it.
I guess the iPad has a float feature?
Ok, granted it's a concept demo, but I'm leaning towards "not impressed" at this point.
A lot of that seems quite pie-in-the-sky given the amount of on-board memory - for now.
The most interesting thing is the idea of online communities around books. You can make, in effect, an extended and very micro-level book club. People could comment on specific pages, etc. Having ongoing discussions as you move through the book.
The only problem might be the repetitive nature of it - with all the new people often making the same points that all the prior readers already made..
"This reminds of the early days of CDROMs - tons of crappy content made just because "it was there"."
BINGO! These aren't books they're "Interactive infotainment" , I wonder how Vooks have been selling.
Isn't all of this available on the web? Why do I need an APP for that :-\
Let's develop these things in HTML 5.0 instead so it can be used everywhere.
Payed app is supported only wery few places outside america. More than half of the sold android phones CAN'T pay for apps. Nobody counts that.
Those aren't books ... they're apps
Books are simply content -- text, images, even video -- rendered in a uniform interface. Apps are individually developed software programs. There are huge cost and overhead differences between those things.
- mattmchugh
Consididering some college textbooks run $500+++ this is an incredible idea. Just seeing what they did with the human body textbook, one would be able to physically learn so much more at such a faster rate for relativly the same price.. Count me in! This is technology at it's best. Hands on 3 dimensional learning that you can process so much simpler.. Awsome.
Knowing Apple, eBook versions of those textbooks through the App store will still cost $500+.
what happened to blocking apple content? I was just browsing with my happy apple-ness free engadget but the filter didn't block this :(