If you’re under the impression that vooks, the book/video hybrid, are the e-book equivalent of a garage band, check out John Makinson’s vision for them. Makinson is CEO of Penguin Group, a company that reserves its garage for executive limos. Makinson recently demonstrated before a London conference how his company’s books could spread their digital wings on the iPad. See a video below.

Penguin “will be embedding streaming audio, video and gaming into everything that we do,” he told the conferees. “We’ll be creating a lot of our content as applications.”

Which means they are forsaking epub, which “is designed for narrative text but not this cool stuff that we’re talking about now” and “for the time being at least we’ll be creating a lot of our content as applications.”

When an august publishing personage like John Makinson starts talking about “cool stuff,” you know the revolution has seized the mainstream.

For more about vooks, read If They Asked Me, I Could Write a…Vook?, and for more about ePub, check out What is ePub and Why It’s Important to You?

RC