Facebook has acquired Push Pop Press, the US startup behind Al Gore's Our Choice book-app for iPhone and iPad.
The developer announced the news on its website, explaining that "we're taking our publishing technology and everything we've learned and are setting off to help design the world's largest book, Facebook".
It seems this is a talent and technology acquisition rather than a move by Facebook to get into book-app publishing, though. "Although Facebook isn't planning to start publishing digital books, the ideas and technology behind Push Pop Press will be integrated with Facebook, giving people even richer ways to share their stories," explain co-founders Mike Matas and Kimon Tsinteris.
Our Choice will remain on Apple's App Store, with Push Pop Press' share of the profits from now on to be donated to Gore's environmental campaigning group The Climate Reality Project.
"There are no plans to continue publishing new titles or building out our publishing platform that was in private beta," continue Matas and Tsinteris in their statement. "We are incredibly grateful to everyone who has supported and expressed interest in Push Pop Press."
The value of the acquisition has not been announced. Both the company's founders previously worked at Apple, with Tsinteris having a role as a binary mixologist working on maps and location-based services for iPhone, while Matas was a human interface designer.
Our Choice was not just an app, but a showcase for Push Pop Press' publishing platform for book-apps, including an editor, a publishing and hosting service and a document format. The plan was to eventually open it out to external publishers.
Apps Blog interviewed Tsinteris in May 2011 about the company's plans. "We think that the app is probably one of the richest, most interactive forms of storytelling that exist," he said at the time. "One of our founding premises is to re-imagine the book."
Now it seems the duo's focus will be on re-imagining storytelling on the world's biggest social network. Tsinteris' closing comment in that interview about the primordial instinct for storytelling has added impact now: "It used to be travelling bards, now it's people tweeting or uploading Facebook pictures. Everybody is a storyteller at heart."
