After Rovio last week put out a teaser for its very first book app, with an announcement full of addled-looking pigs, today it’s unveiled the actual product: it’s an app for a cookbook about eggs — which happened to be the subject of Rovio’s first printed book effort, too. Bad Piggies Best Egg Recipes is being put out first as an iPad app, the company announced today at the Frankfurt Book Fair. It is also a sign of Rovio’s increasing efforts in the Chinese market. Among the international editions will be a Chinese language version of the app, featuring some new recipes and photos, which will sell in Apple’s Chinese App Store.
After launching its first book app around the genre of cookery, Rovio tomorrow is planning one more step expanding its brand. It’s announcing a deal with the European nuclear physics research organization CERN to provide it with Angry Birds learning materials as part of “Rovio’s new learning brand.”
While this is one more step away from gaming for Rovio, it’s still looking to leverage something else the company has really nailed with its Angry Birds franchise: interactivity. Here, it comes in the form of “informative, surprising, and colorful egg recipes” and social media integration so that users of the app can spread a bit of egg love with others. (Apologies to those with egg allergies.)
Book apps, indeed, are different from e-books for their often more graphic and interactive interfaces. It may be that with the rise of tablets (as opposed to e-readers), we may see the line between e-books and book apps become even blurrier, with publishers looking to put in more interactivity across all of them.
“We wanted to create a cookbook that brings a family together to actively do things together with the characters they all love,” said Peter Vesterbacka, Mighty Eagle and CMO, in a statement. “It’s fully interactive at every stage — from seeing the illustrations come to life to sharing photos with your friends and family.”
He tells TechCrunch that this is just the first of many book apps to follow, so we may see other themes besides cooking and eggs come into the mix.
The app features the same recipes that were in Rovio’s Bad Piggies Egg Book when it came out in print in 2011. It also has some nifty features added in: an egg timer, photos of the finished dishes, and eggs that are animated with surprises inside. And because it’s an app, Rovio can update those with cross marketing and other things as time goes on.
Rovio is working some of its usual pricing strategy with the book. It will retail in the App Store for $4.99 (or local currency equivalent), but if you buy now it costs $.99. More on the book in the video preview below.