Yellow Submarine Free Enhanced eBook

Click to get the free Yellow Submarine eBook!

With the release of iBooks 1.5 a few weeks ago iTunes released this new interactive ebook based on The Beatles' 1968 animated film Yellow Submarine (as a tribute to Steve Jobs, who was a Beatles fan). Anyone interested in enhanced ebooks should pick it up as it includes some really nice features that are now possible in iBooks editions, including animated graphics, touch interactivity that triggers various events, video clips from the film, a read-to-me audio track with shaped SVG text layers, and, of course, plenty of music.

And best of all, it's free!

Even if you're not a Beatles fan, it's still a pretty cool ebook to look at. It's a good example of how to integrate enhanced features to augment the story and create an immersive experience, rather than simply tacking on a couple of marginally related videos and calling it "enhanced". Of course, with Yellow Submarine having been an audio-visual experience in the first place, the content lends itself quite readily to this new medium. It's exciting to see that this sort of thing can now be done right in an ebook, without having to build a separate app. So I'm hopeful we'll be seeing a lot more books like this in the near future.