Irene is a complete new way to read digital books. More precisely this iPad app offers the possibility to interact with a book besides just reading it. So it turns the passive reading of a story into an active participation. You read narratives in a whole new engaging way and can be a part of the story telling process.

Let's blur the lines between fiction and reality:
The app uses the whole technology which already exist within the iPad. For example – of course – the touchscreen and gyroscope to interact directly with the book.

But furthermore the camera, the microphone, the speaker or the gps sensor will be also useful, because e(!)books can be more than "just" texts. But don't get us wrong: Irene doesn't want to hinder your imagination - she wants to play with it, with you. Irene isn’t just imitating books like other ebook readers and doesn’t want to replace them either. It’s a fully independent app. That’s important:
Irene is another way of reading and story telling - not a replacement. You could also say, this app could be a new genre of story telling.

» Do I have your attention now?

“The book is not the important part. The book is the delivery system. The important part is the story and the telling. Books will always exist, but they’ll not be what they are now. But this is ok. The future is gonna be, what the future is gonna be.”
Stephen King
(CNN Interview 2010)

If you ask technically interested most younger people about books you often get the answer: “welcome to the ebooks – books made of paper are outdated”. But is that so? Such discussions started with the first ebook as it started with the first mp3-file. And their are still a lot turntables out there.

Both sides have good and bad arguments, which were brought together so many times. You can’t leave your ebook reader at the beach, when you want to go swimming and for instance you can’t take your whole book collection with you, if you have to work in another country for a time. There are a bunch of these comparisons with no ending.

The only feature of ebooks, respectively the eBook stores, which is really important and can’t be offended is the fact, that everybody is able to be an author overnight. You don’t need publishers anymore to spread your work. This became popular on iTunes and other music stores, so why it shouldn’t count for books as well. But as stated before, the actual ebook market is just too young to make divinations. The time will tell.

The Problem is that you can't substitute something, if you just imitate. And that's what the current ebooks are doing: They're just digitalized books, without new features or development.
Irene wants to change that.

“The world of learning is changing so rapidly that no one can predict what it will look like ten years from now. But I believe it will remain within the Gutenberg galaxy — though the galaxy will expand, thanks to a new source of energy, the electronic book, which will act as a supplement to, not a substitute for, Gutenberg’s great machine.”
Robert Darnton
“The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future”

From 2000 - 2007 ebooks were still a niche product and more sneered than loved. The market grew and fell nearly every year. Even the first Kindle by Amazon in 2007 couldn’t alter this situation. But just two years later the ebook turned the game around. The marketing models for e-books were being reconsidered and better hardware developed.

After the first Apple iPad and the new Amazon Kindle 2 in the beginning of 2010 Amazon announced that they firstly sold more

ebooks than hardcover books (140 e-books for every 100 hardcover books, including hardcovers for which there was no digital edition). Apple sold more than 300.000 iPads and the customers downloaded 250.000 ebooks on the first day.
Today ebooks are more in demand than ever. So I think it's time to go one step further: a new generation of interactive ebooks.

» Discover Irenes features

“"The man who does not read good eBooks has no advantage over the man who can't read them.”
Mark Twain