Seeing The Iceberg eReader In Action

I decided to stick with my "future of the book" theme again today.

I want to revisit ScrollMotion, an app developer who made news back in December with their iPhone ebook application, the Iceberg Reader. The company had landed deals with half the Big Six publishing houses and were talking to the rest.

The New York Times reported here on December 23:

Scroll Motion, announced this week that it would begin selling e-books for the iPhone from major publishers like Simon & Schuster, Random House and Penguin.

Wired wrote about the Iceberg Reader here on December 22:

Having these big names is a big step forward for iTunes itself in becoming an e-book shop and the iPhone in becoming a legitimate e-book reader and competitor to products like the Kindle and the Sony E-Reader . . .

Each book is a separate application using Scroll Motion's new reader technology called Iceberg and is wrapped only in the FairPlay iTunes DRM, putting Apple directly into the e-book business by allowing them to pick up a certain percentage of each sale.

I first mentioned the company in my blog of January 16th here.

To be honest, I kind of blew the Iceberg reader off when Publishers Weekly said here on December 23:

Like the Kindle, books can be downloaded wirelessly, though unlike the Kindle which sells most titles for $9.99 or less, prices for the Iceberg-formatted books are the same or more as retail list -- $27.50 for the Paolini [Brisingr], $23.95 for the Kneale [When We Were Romans], $12.99 for the Westerfeld [Extras] ($2 more than the paperback).

Yesterday Publishers Lunch reminded me of the Iceberg Reader when they said about it:

. . . a new app [from ScrollMotion] shows what makes this technology different from popular text readers from Stanza, eReader and Shortcovers: the graphics. They have adapted James Patterson's graphic novel DANIEL X into a paid iTunes app that "plays" the book more like a video (and gets around the lack of Flash for iPhone/iPod Touch).

Here's a link to the promotional video on YouTube.

The video is impressive . . . even if pricing the ebook higher than the paperback is absurd.