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A couple of weeks before Apple announced the iPad, my wife told me she’d like to have a Kindle. I told her to hang tight, because Apple was likely going to announce a competitive device soon. They did, and we’re now set to pre-order the iPad in a couple of days. But exactly how iBooks will look and behave on the iPad, we’re not completely sure. The gang over at iPadInsider, however, have some video from Penguin that gives us our best idea yet.

At the FT Digital Media & Broadcasting Conference in London earlier this month, Penguin Group CEO John Makinson revealed some of the company’s titles that are coming to the iPad. “We will be embedding audio, video and streaming into everything we do. The epub format, which is the standard for ebooks at the present, is designed to support traditional narrative text, but not this cool stuff that we’re now talking about.”

The books, as expected, are more like applications than their print counterparts, with interactive elements and video abounding. This makes the books more for kids and more involving for adults. Of course, it’s the content that’ll actually move copies, and how comfortable the books are to read, we still don’t know (and likely won’t until April 3rd.

In the meantime, head on over to iPadInsider for the video of John Makinson’s presentation to see the iPad iBooks in action.

Read [iPadInsider]