In my opinion the enrichment of books is one of the main topics on the iPad. So far we have already seen some great examples. Inkling drives into this direction, but it is not about “entertainment-books”, but rather about “learning”. Inkling is plattform to bring school-books to the ipad – but not as boring PDF-like copies of the paper-based books. Inkling books use the advantages of the iPad to offer more features: multimedia content like interactive graphics or movies are kind of obvious. But really cool is the “notes” feature. You can take notes everywhere in a book and – and this is the clue – share these notes with other students or teachers. They can read your notes and even interact with you through the notes, but writing an own note. Notes can be accessed directly in the text or through a notes menu, that keeps all of your notes as well.
New books can be easily purchased from within a book. According to the developer the digital books are cheaper than their printed pendants. The range of available books is quite basic yet (and only US books), but hopefully more will follow. In my opinion this is a great idea well done and hopefully more Apps like this will follow.
