Aptara produces the Vatican's first ebooks

From the press release:

Aptara, a pioneer in digital publishingsolutions, produced the Vatican’s first eBooks, an illustrated series of Pope Benedict’s weekly addresses dating back to March, 2006. With their first foray into mobile publishing the Catholic Church is expanding its reach to younger and more technologically savvy audiences.

Available from the Apple Store, the series contains 13 highly illustrated eBooks. Each of the Pope’s weekly talks focuses on a prominent figure in the Church’s history and is accompanied by elaborate portraits, paintings, and photos.

Designed for the iPad, Aptara produced the eBooks using Apple’s Fixed Layout formatin order to retain the art’s pagination from the printed editions.

“The adoption of eBooks by an institution founded before Gutenberg represents a significant coming of age for publishing,” said Dev Ganesan, President and CEO of Aptara. “The Vatican has a centuries old tradition of printing. So to be the first organization to help the Church embrace digital publishing is quite an honor.“

“Every new communication technology is important to the Church’s missionary activity,” said Father Giuseppe Costa, CEO of Libreria Editrice Vaticana, the Publishing Company of the Vatican. “Aptara made our first foray into eBooks smooth and successful. We couldn’t be more thrilled with the quality of the series, in fact the eBook version gives new life to the texts’ magnificent imagery.”

This was the first series of illustrated eBooks to appear in Italy.