The elegance of this demo belies the complexity of assembling something that sophisticated. Video would need to be produced and integrated with other content. Photos would need to be tagged so as to flow into the application in such a way as to be available in a variety of contexts. This will require sophisticated semantic tagging, application programming, and content management.

Development of an application with this level of sophistication, bringing together this range of media, will require that publishers transform themselves into information companies–organizations focused on delivering information in a wide variety of media via applications and integrated content platforms. That shift in thinking–and the organization restructuring necessary to support it–is something that I see few publishers moving towards fast enough (Developing a Kindle edition of one’s existing front list is not evidence of such a shift).

All that being said, if SI needs help developing the Interactive Tablet Swimsuit Edition, I could find some room in my schedule and subsequently share what I learn with the professional and scholarly publishing community.