While at Apple, Mike Matas (@mike_matas) helped write the user interface for the iPhone and iPad. Now, co-founder of Push Pop Press (@pushpoppress), he's helping to rewrite the electronic book. In the above video he demos the first full-length interactive book for the iPad – with clever, swipeable video and graphics, and some cool data visualizations to play with. The book is Our Choice, Al Gore’s sequel to An Inconvenient Truth.
Be sure to read the discussion started by David Wees (@davidwees) titled “What is this ‘ebook’ missing?”
I'd have to argue that this ebook is missing some of the most important features of the interactive Web.... [W]hat I see is interactivity with static content, which in my mind is a dead concept.
...Most importantly, how is this book integrated with social media? How can we comment on the book, annotate it, share passages of the book with other people? If I want to share the book, like we can do easily and all the time with print text, do I need to share my entire iPad? How do we tag content? How do we set multiple bookmarks, so we can go back and reread our favourite sections? Can I read the same book on my laptop? Is it possible to make edits to the book when I see errors or omissions, or just want to play with the text?
In today’s digital age, we should be very suspicious of any ebook which doesn't offer all of the features listed above.
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