Walrus: a pioneering ebook start-up in Paris

That’s the title of a very interesting article in Publishing Perspectives.  Here’s a bit of the beginning:

PARIS: In this early era of enhanced e-books, start-ups in the business have to remain nimble. Consider Julien Simon who runs Walrus, a French enhanced e-book publisher and creative studio. Simon and his three partners work with EPUB 3, the newest format for e-books that offers, among other things, scripted interactivity and embedded multimedia. Until last month Walrus’ enhanced books were uniquely readable as iBooks on Apple devices because of the platform’s ability to read videos. Then, in mid October, Apple introduced a new operating system for the iPad and numerous updates, including one for iBooks. The Walrus partners woke up to a very unpleasant surprise: the iBook update seemed to have done away with local storage, which enabled iBooks’ memory to recall choices readers made or points earned while reading one of Walrus’s game books.

“We are very annoyed and are waiting for information from Apple,” said Simon, who three weeks later has still not received an explanation from his contacts at Apple.

“Luckily this does not, theoretically, have an effect on all our books but it may change many things for interactivity in EPUB, especially for our Kadath [book] project which we might have to create as an application.”