I came across an article about an interesting advertisement for a book:

It’s an interactive book cover, which is a lot of fun to just play with, but it really begs the question about the future of ebook covers.

And it makes you think.

What else could be done? How else could we sparkle up the electronic version of the book cover? There are already what are called “ebook apps,” which is really just a fancy way of launching the book on an iPad (or other tablet) without having to  open an e-reader first. (You can also add other components to an ebook app, like a game, but that’s a little off topic.) The cover images of your basic Kindle are, at the moment, static. But we’re not so far away from seeing interactive covers on such ereaders.

The two big obstacles are memory and finding a program to utilize to run that cover. Meaning, what would you build it in? Flash? HTML5? The e-reader has to run that, which takes CPU resources, which slows your reader down, which would also hog memory …

We’re probably not quite there yet. But almost.

In the meantime, just play with that cover. Go on, play with it.