Anyone who has read an e-book in the Kindle App or iBooks knows that it’s not exactly a revolutionary experience. Sure it’s nice to be able to quickly save a place or look up a word in the dictionary, but they don’t really lend well to rich coffee-table style books. Well, that’s about to change.
Push Pop Press was started by 2 ex-Apple engineers, Kimon Tsinteris and Mike Matas, to create a self-publishing platform that will blow away any e-Book reading experience. These books are individual apps with embedded video and interactive graphics. In 2009, Vice President Al Gore approached Matas to produce an app version of Our Choice, their first showcase app:
After discussing the project, Matas and Tsinteris realized that in order to reproduce Gore’s book, they needed tools that didn’t exist yet.
“Kimon took a look at [the concept] and said that in order to build it we need to build a whole publishing platform,” Matas said.
The company intends to capitalize on their efforts of creating a toolkit for building media-rich book apps by releasing an app publishing tool for Mac to rival Adobe’s notoriously expensive software suite, which is used to create publications such as WIRED. Push Pop Press may even undercut Adobe on price and certainly ease of creation. “An interactive magazine, book, comic book or photo essay can be created with Push Pop Press in as little as 20 minutes, the programmers claim.”
Al Gore’s Our Choice Guided Tour from Push Pop Press on Vimeo.
Definitely worth buying: Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis by Al Gore [App Store, $4.99]
[via Wired]
