How Penguin envisions books on the iPad [Video]

Penguin's one of the heavyweight publishers that's looking to provide digital books on the iPad, and this is how it sees how interactive reading on the tablet will pan out.  Shown are demos of a children's book, a read on anatomy, and an augmented-reality intergalactic GPS system.

Penguin Books' CEO John Makinson sees that ebooks may hit ten percent of overall book sales in a year, but the .epub format, which is the standard for ebooks at the present, is designed to support traditional narrative text, not the remarkable content that you're seeing in the video.  So for the time being he declared that they'll be creating a lot of their content as applications, for sale on app stores and HTML, rather than in ebooks.

The very definition of a book will possibly be redefined with the coming of the iPad, and other future devices.

[PaidContent via Gizmodo]