A new company focused on creating ‘a new breed of digital books’, Push Pop Press today unveiled their teaser site, beautifully minimal in its design and purely hinting at what is to come. However John Gruber over at Daring Fireball wrote up a fairly lengthy post about Push Pop Press and a demo he had been given last week, praising it and giving some fairly detailed insights into what is to come from the company.
The teaser site offers up a description of the mission of Push Pop Press;
Our team is bringing together great content and beautiful software to create a new breed of digital books. Books that let you explore photos, videos, music, maps, and interactive graphics, all through a new physics-based multi-touch user interface.
The team over at Push Pop Press is undoubtedly one high caliber bunch of people, with Mike Matas, Kimon Tsinteris and Austin Sarner. Mike Matas, the designer and co-founder is most notably known for working on Delicious Library and his stint at Apple (which started the young age of 19) in helping design the original iOS. The other co-founder, Kimon Tsinteris is a software architect and worked with Matas at Apple on the Map app on iOS. Finally Austin Sarner is software engineer who may be familiar from his apps including AppZapper, Disco and Pennies.
Push Pop Press is working with Melcher Media, a New York based book publisher and unlike iBooks or the Kindle App, each digital book that partners with Push Pop Press will have it’s own individual app. Gruber speculates that such books are unlikely to be plain text novels but rather those which use rich multimedia.
In his review-esque post, Gruber focuses on a few things that he believes Push Pop Press have done well. Namely it is the fact that the app was unencumbered by any unnecessary user interface elements and says so eloquently that “the screen is the book, the book is the screen.” He also describes the physics engine that is implemented which makes the whole experience feel implicitly natural with elements having “a certain heft as you swipe and pinch them.”
All of us here at MacStories are quite excited by what Push Pop Press might bring to the iPad and iPhone with rich content delivered in a truly beautiful manner. I highly recommend reading Gruber’s entire post for much more detail, and I’ll leave you with one final quote from him.
This thing just begs for a gushing look-at-how-awesome-this-thing-is on-stage demo from Steve Jobs.
[Via Daring Fireball, All Things D]
