What a coffee table e-book can do

Excellent Robert Scoble interview with Jean-Marie Hullot about his development of Fotopedia Heritage, an interactive compilation of photos of UNESCO World Heritage sites, compiled by photographers, app curators and the communityof users, and linked to aggregated information (currently drawn from UNESCO, Wikipedia and TripAdvisor) about each site. This is a first step towards personalised travel guides, and other applications Hullot has yet to reveal. Hullot describes how the essential components of the 'book', community, curation and iPad (or iPhone) technology are bound together by his team's understanding of software, a capacity he feels traditional publishers still lack.

Aside from the technical merits of the application, the delicious presentation of the photos (which are curated rigorously for quality) sent me straight to Google with thoughts (ahead of Hullot's travel application) of future destinations.

[via John Naughton]