With the iPad set to debut at month’s end, one publisher is already demonstrating how it plans to adapt its print books to the new interactive digital media.

London-based Penguin Books recently demonstrated a series of interactive e-book titles the company is prepping for Apple’s iBookstore and the iPad, according to AppleInsider. Anticipating that e-book sales will grow from four percent of Penguin’s sales now to 10 percent next year, chief executive John Makinson said, “the iPad represents the first real opportunity to create a paid distribution model that will be attractive to consumers.”

For their part, Penguin appears poised to take advantage of the challenges of new media. “We will be embedding and streaming audio, video and gaming into everything we do,” proclaimed Makinson. “This will present us and the platform owners with technology challenges.

“The .epub format, which is the standard for e-books 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 sell on app stores in HTML, rather than as e-books.”

The Penguin exec also appears to understand that it’s anyone’s guess how consumers will react to the changes. “The definition of the book itself is up for grabs,” he said. “We don’t know or understand at the moment what the consumer is prepared to pay for. We will only find answers to these questions by trial and error.”

Makinson also appears to support Apple’s 30 percent agency model for the iBookstore, which has been the subject of some controversy among publishers. “There is an argument for saying Apple needs the content,” he said. “That they should be paying us for our content.” But the exec dismisses such an idea and said the agency model is actually better for publishers in the long run.

“We’ll have to become more innovative and take some risks,” Makinson concluded. “We’ll need above all to listen to our readers, to understand what they want and what they’ll pay for. But if we can do all that, which is a big task, I agree, we’ll have a great and varying digital business.”



(Image and video courtesy of AppleInsider)