Over at eBookNewser, we have been tracking the Top Grossing iPad apps in the books category for the past two months.
So far, comic book apps and Bible apps tend to dominate the list, which isn’t a big surprise. Digital comic books benefit from the rich media afforded in an app format and the Bible is one of the top grossing books of all time in print, so why not in app form?
But over the past couple of weeks, classic literary works have also been popping up on the list. Penguin’s new app for Jack Kerouac‘s On The Road launched on Saturday and is already number 4 on the list. When T.S. Eliot‘s The Wasteland was released as an interactive app two weeks ago, the poem made Apple’s Top Grossing Apps list on its first day and has remained in the Top 10 ever since.
Each of these apps include the original text and special features. The On The Road app includes an audio recording of Kerouac reading, video interviews of other Beat writers talking about Kerouac and an interactive map of his travels.
The Wasteland app includes audio recordings of T. S. Eliot reading the poem at two different times in his life, original manuscript pages with Ezra Pound’s edits and videos of famous actors reading different portions of the work.