The Classics (iPhone App) — Penguin Group USA

With the gradual but successful adoption of e-reading by bookish folk across the globe came the challenge for traditional publishers to level their marketing strategies at the newly established niche ruled by Nooks and Kindles and e-books and reading apps. A few publishers remain adamant in their devotion to publishing books in good old bound-paper form, but many companies have long allocated a great deal of their resources toward electronic publishing. Penguin, the largest publishing company in the world, is of the latter inclination.

Reinforcing the renowned publisher’s already impressive e-arsenal, which includes the electronic versions of most of its backlist and new releases and the “Amplified and Enhanced” iPad editions of literary greats like Jack Kerouac’s On The Road and John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, is the Penguin Classics complete annotated listing iPhone app. Nope, the free app is not a collection of e-books under the Penguin Classics umbrella. (If it were it wouldn’t be free.) Rather, the app, released in celebration of the 65th anniversary of the Penguin Classics imprint, is basically an online catalogue of classics, optimized to be easily accessed right from and on your iPhone-clutching palm.

The app is centered on exploration of books which bear the Penguin Classics imprimatur. Items in the catalogue can be searched by title and by author, but two main categories are provided: Essential Classics, which includes perennial bestsellers and Pulitzer Prize winners, and Newest Classics, which lists books recently added to the Penguin Classics arm.

Added to these usual modes of exploration in the app are a couple of nice twists. One is the Discover Classics section, where you can search for items that match all four parameters (subject, genre, time period, region) that you either specify or let the iPhone select automatically by giving your device a shake. Most combinations of automatically generated parameters yield no results, but the app is quite reliable in returning results for parameters that reflect what you do want, e.g. Rudyard Kipling’s Captains Courageous, a sea adventure set in America, for the parameters “science,” “bildungsroman,” “20th century,” and “United States.” The other twist is a nifty quiz section, where you can test your knowledge of the classics with questions as easy as “What does the letter A symbolize?” in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (adultery) and as difficult as “What do Candide and his friends discover finally makes them happy?” in Voltaire’s Candide (gardening).

Clicking an item on any list—which can be viewed also in a display that mimics Apple’s cover flow by turning your iPhone’s orientation to landscape mode—opens the information page for the selected book. There you can bookmark the title or record whether you’ve read it or want to read it. Sharing options via email or Facebook are also provided. Of course, there is a “Purchase” button, which strangely leads to the checkout page not for the e-book version but for the print copy of the book. A lot of classics reside in the public domain and their e-book versions can be created for commercial purposes without worrying about publishing rights, but many are still stuck in their transition from paper to pixels. An in-app e-bookstore is perhaps underway, but it will probably launch only when e-rights for most books are dealt with.

Penguin would be remiss not to include a social networking layer to the app, so the developers turned to Facebook integration to take care of that aspect. In this day and age, e-reading is becoming more and more associated with e-sharing. So it’s baffling why, in this app, Twitter (the other immensely influential sharing site) is noticeably absent.

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Free. Compatible with iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. 10.1 MB, version 1.0, 28 June 2011.

Cross-posted on What’s On iPhone.