Push Pop Press acquired by Facebook
Last year Push Pop Press set off to re-imagine the book. We created a new way of publishing and exploring text, images, audio, video and interactive graphics, then teamed up with Melcher Media and Al Gore to create a new kind of book.
Context & Ripple Effects
Push Pop Press spent its first year proving a point: with Melcher Media and Al Gore as partners, it built a publishing format that fused text, images, audio, video and interactive graphics into what it called a new kind of book. That demo made it one of the most visible studios in touch-first digital publishing.
On August 2, 2011, Facebook bought the company outright — a completed acquisition, not a licensing deal. The New York Times' Bits blog immediately framed the open question the deal leaves hanging: why would a social network buy an e-book publisher? The announcement describes the team and its technology moving inside Facebook, with no stated plan for the book format itself.
First-order effects
- Push Pop Press ceases to exist as an independent publisher: its team and its text-image-audio-video-graphics technology are now Facebook assets, and the studio's roadmap belongs to a buyer whose core product is the news feed, not the book.
Second-order effects
- Melcher Media and authors like Al Gore lose the flagship toolchain that defined their interactive-title ambitions, pushing publishers of rich e-books back toward other platforms or in-house builds while rivals watch whether Facebook folds the format into its own media experience.
Third-order effects
- The deal fits a consolidating pattern in which large consumer-web platforms absorb small interaction-design studios chiefly for talent and technique rather than products — shifting innovation in reading and media formats from independent startups onto platform roadmaps, where publishers become dependent users rather than co-developers.
The trend: Social platforms are acquiring interaction-design studios to absorb their media-format expertise in-house, pulling digital publishing innovation under the umbrellas of a few large networks.