Sam Missingham of Futurebook
has a review of War in the Pacific. She says that this app (book?) is making the distinction between an app and a book unclear.
Adam Wills, Digital content sales manager at John Wiley & Sons has reviewed this app for FutureBook: Carlton Books and Gameloft have created more than a reading experience with this app. The reader is immersed more deeply in the text than they would have with the print edition or a vanilla eBook. The question that this raises with me is at what point does an eBook become an app? It’s quite tricky to pin War in the Pacific to a given category. On one hand it is a richly illustrated book with some additional media enhancements but on the other hand it is a user platform packed with media content which transcend the confines of the book …
War in the Pacific is a book app which has many of the hallmarks of a game app. As soon as the app loads the speakers are filled with the kind of dramatic soundtrack one would expect from video games and epic tv series, such as HBO’s The Pacific. The app is a very good digital and enhanced version of the print book. What we have here is an example of how devices, such as the iPad, can bring books to life and enhance the reader experience. …
Or perhaps it’s an attempt to convince people that eBooks can’t simply be books, they need to be something expensive, something with so many bells and whistles only a few major publishers can afford to do them for only a small number of books. To me, the entire ‘enhanced’ book movement is a solution looking for a problem.
Rob Preece
Publisher
It’s not a book. It’s not an eBook. It’s an app for exploring the history of the Pacific war. I don’t see it having any implications for eBooks at all.
Clearly this is a new and exciting way of presenting information that is enabled by the iPad/app environment. It has a huge future. But not related to eBooks. imho.
Howard, I agree 100%.
Although it not really new. I can remember computer software going all the way back to my Commodore 64 similar to this, although probably not as refined. It’s just that now with tablets (and smartphones) these types of things are much more portable.