Penguin shows what you can do with your iPad

American followers of the Cult of Apple now know what they’ll on Friday night April 2. They’ll be lining up to buy one of the first iPads. They’ll have to wait a few more weeks for the 3G-connected models.

Consumers outside the US, including those in the UK, will have to wait until the end of April to get hold of what Apple CEO Steve Jobs describes as “this magical and revolutionary product”. There was no news of when 3G models would be available to non-American residents or how much they’ll have to pay for any version. The cheapest in the US is $499 or around £333 at current exchange rates. UK prices are expected to be higher.

Meanwhile, Penguin was at the FT’s Digital Media & Broadcasting Conference revealing some of its plans to reinvent books. There is a video of the presentation produced by media blog PaidContent.

It shows how a variety of mostly educational books can be made interactive with music, video and games. None of these functions are covered by the .epub format which is becoming the de facto standard for e-books. “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 e-books,” said Penguin Books’ CEO John Makinson.

Most of the examples he demonstrated on the iPad were versions of the lavishly illustrated books created by Penguin subsidiary Dorling Kindersley. The whole show was reminiscent of the way CD-Roms were promoted in the 1990s as a way of extending the power of print.

Indeed one of the leading proponents of these “coffee table” CD-roms was Dorling Kindersley. In fact, the prohibitive cost of producing such works helped wreck the company financially and led to its takeover by Penguin’s parent company Pearson.

The problem then was that customers saw books as intrinsically more valuable than CDs even if the latter actually cost more to produce. Clearly Penguin hopes this attitude has changed. The iPad, however, is designed to be connected wirelessly to the internet pretty much permanently. This means Penguin’s products have to compete with everything that’s available on the web, often for free.

It’s not surprising Makinson is talking up the potential of the iPad as he expects ebooks to make up 10 per cent of book sales next year, up from four per cent in the US now. The one thing that seems to be in book publishers’ favour is they’ll be less concerned about giving Apple the standard 30 per cent it gets on sales from its apps store. Booksellers normally take 50 per cent.

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