Stealth Startup Turns Al Gore’s Book Into Interactive iPad App

Stealth startup Push Pop Press gave the TED audience a sneak peek at its app Tuesday, with co-founder and former Apple designer Mike Matas showing off an interactive iOS version of Al Gore’s book Our Choice.
The app essentially adds a rich, interactive layer to the book — which was first published in print in 2009 — in an interface that is both elegant and adds value to the reading experience.
For example, there’s about an hour and a half of video content, 20 interactive infographics, and all photos can be plotted on a map so the reader knows precisely where it was taken.
One infographic that illustrates environmental issues particularly well — and demonstrates the possibilities of the interactive medium — lets you adjust an individual country’s deforestation and see the impact in equivalence to cars off the road. Another lets you click on any state in the U.S. and see its potential for wind energy output.
Gore also steps in to narrate parts of the book and add color to the text.
The interface goes far beyond what one would find with Kindle or iBooks. The entire screen is occupied by content, and multimedia items can literally be lifted off the page using finger gestures. You can also pinch and zoom on just about any piece of content, and you can move through the book’s various chapters using your finger to scroll. All of it also plays nicely on the iPhone, though the company has no immediate plans to expand beyond iOS.
Our Choice is the first in what the company hopes will be many titles to leverage Push Pop’s technology. Matas, who joined Apple at age 19, told me after his presentation, “Most of what you see here is done in a reusable way so we could build another book like [this] very very easily.” He can see the company’s wares being used for content beyond books (magazines would make a lot of sense), though it would perhaps be overkill for certain works, like novels.
That said, Matas wasn’t ready to talk about the company’s business model and whether he plans to license the technology or collect a revenue share from publishers that use it (or both). He’s also not yet sure what Our Choice will price at, though we’ll find out when it hits the App Store at the end of March.