And for those who wonder what the heck "skeuomorphically" means: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skeuomorphism

and pronunciation http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/skeuomorph

Sounds like a great product and I'd bet it will be a huge success. Remember when the iPad first came out the top selling paid "app" for the first 2-3 months was the "Elements" ebook. It was a much simpler version of what Gruber described, but it sold like hotcakes. After you buy your $500-800 tablet, you want some software to show off how cool it is and a few well produced nature/cook/science books that have physics based demo features will do that perfectly.

The comment about content being hard to product is right on. My guess is that they will publish just a few books a year, but they will be amazing looking and beautifully produced.

The problem with this model is obviously going to be producing the content and I'm surprised Gruber doesn't mention that.

Distributing books this way will add a lot of complexity and cost to an already expensive workflow. If this format succeeds I imagine it will have more in common with "games" than it has with traditional "books". The model for funding and producing these "books" would therefor probably be more similar to how games are produced.

After reading your comment I immediately thought of the Choose Your Own Adventure and Fighting Fantasy books I loved as a preteen.

I'm surprised he would say that there's no joy in the Kindle experience. Perhaps on an iPad the Kindle app isn't stellar for magazines, etc. -- but that's because the iPad is much more suited for consuming media than reading actual books...You can't hold/control it with one hand like a Kindle and the backlight wears you out quickly.

Maybe I'm being hard headed, but for books that aren't related to programming, I don't think I'd want any multimedia being dropped in to the pages... Right now I would say the reading experience on an actual Kindle is unmatched, and the other apps are just there to support the hardware and add convenience.

I've bought maybe 15 titles through Kindle (on the iPad) and I don't have a problem with the Kindle app but I really do have a problem with the quality of lots of the conversions - these seem to vary between acceptable through to downright shoddy.

So while I don't think there is a problem with the quality of Kindle itself some of the content has been converted in a way that really hurts the experience for me.

> the reading experience on an actual Kindle is unmatched

The reading experience for books made of text, yeah. This isn't that.

As a kindle user, how do you find textbooks with diagrams in them? I heard they lack the resolution to display diagrams crisply.

I generally buy a hardcopy, or do pdf. I use the kindle to read books primarily (not textbooks, news, periodicals, etc), but I definitely agree that some of the conversions with images aren't great and diagrams aren't always crisp.

Does anyone have any input using actual textbooks on a kindle, or kindle dx? The iPad is great for diagrams/textbooks so long as you aren't reading pages upon pages at at time.

I foresee a huge number of celebrity chef cooking books…

Interesting. Kindle just announced their "Kindle Singles": http://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=2486013011

Downloading an "app" requires effort and more to a degree, commitment. Browsers will get faster or Safari will become the nerd-age IE.

It's not primarily about speed or even the mentality of the purchaser: It's about giving the designer of the software (and the books) the power to create a better user experience. If the books are really as good as Gruber claims, then that will lead to sales.

As long as there are non-trivial differences between hardware platforms, there will be room for native apps.

I honestly don’t see why native apps would require more effort and commitment than web apps, at least on devices with app stores of some kind.

Native apps can use some app store infrastructure where you enter your details once, websites would have to rely on PayPal or other services and you would have to enter your details over and over again. Paying in some app store has less friction. I can kind of see your point for free apps, searching some app store for an app and downloading it kind of seems more complicated than googling it and taping the link, I can’t (yet) see it for paid apps.

When buying books at Amazon you only have to enter your creds once, so that's not really an issue.

What people tend to forget is that developing "apps" on the iOS platform is automatically restricting your market to those who have or can afford the devices it runs on. Just because the business model worked on the web for Amazon, does not mean that you can build an "app" for a closed platform owned by a competitor and get similar results.

I'm more frustrated that no iOS e-reader solution accommodates extremely large libraries, allowing you to easily sort/filter by author, genre, series, etc. (Stanza comes closest.) If we have gigs of storage, why not carry around every (e-)book you own?

This situation is doubly bad with books as native apps, even with "folders", which still have caps and how many entries they can hold.

I don't see any reason why PPP's application would appear (on the outside) any different than any other eBook reader app.

I mean, I guess from the sounds of things it's up to them - they could deliver their books as apps, making them first-class citizens on your home screen, but that would get annoying fast.

If Push Pop Press is going to rely on people using the iPad with one hand as their home page shows, they may find themselves short on users.

Are you advocating using two hands, or none at all?