Jack Kerouac’s – On The Road

Just as book fans around the world are awakening to the promise of tablet-based reading, here come Sal Paradise, Dean Moriarty and the Beats – racing full-throttle from the pantheon of American literature and onto the iPad. In Penguin Books’ new On the Road Amplified Edition for the iPad, Jack Kerouac’s seminal novel finds the perfect place to roam. The tablet environment elegantly joins the novel and its incredible cast of real-life inspirations to enrich and deepen the reading experience.

As the designer and developer for On the Road, 1K Studios was honored with the task of helping Penguin’s Editorial team bring this unique product to life. The depth of supplemental content compiled and curated by Penguin is truly breathtaking. To deliver this content to the reader, we strove to create an engine that treats the pure reading experience as sacrosanct, while offering unobtrusive and intuitive ways to expand and explore related content. Some of the principles that guided the design:

• Preserving the beauty and original style of the type-set page
• Placing indicators for enhanced content in the margins, where readers are used to seeing notes
• Displaying enhanced content in “overlay” pages, to create a conceptual separation of the novel and its supplemental material
• Making content and navigational functions easy to access with your thumbs – i.e. creating a comfortable read
• Using a page metaphor for interactive navigation wherever possible, to maintain the feel of a book

We hope you’ll download a copy of On the Road and experience this incredible work the way that it was – in our opinion – meant to be read. Please let us know what you think.

Click here to visit 1K Studios Apps Micro Site to learn more about this and other great 1K Apps.

Click here to go directly to the iTunes App Store to purchase your own copy of On The Road.