My quest for find ways to create rich mutli-media eBooks continues. As of today, I have not found any interesting authoring tools that are based on open-standards like the ePUB format. Several videos of prototypes for content delivery are floating around the interwebs, some of which I relays in a previous post here (see UPDATED: Popular Science’s Magazine of the Future. Is this the Textbook of the Future, too?).

This morning, via wikipedia’s’ entry on Comparison of e-book formats, I found this video of a rich format the platform that is being developed by Penguin books. 

And yet there is no word from anywhere or anyone on how content will be developed in these formats. A reasonable person will say that publishing houses are keeping these locked up so that they can maintain some competitive advantage in the new marketplace. (A conversation with an acquaintance who is in highed publishing strongly suggested to me that there is some terror associated with open-source publishing.) It’s also fair to guess that these platforms for rich, multi-media delivery will be highly proprietary. How long will it take for an analogue that is based on open standards and alls for the free development of content? An ePUB on steroids? If you know, please let me know.