Today it was announced that Facebook have acquired Push Pop Press, the digital publishers and app designers behind the digital version of Our Choice. This was Al Gore’s sequel to An Inconvenient Truth and received much critical acclaim at the time due to it’s innovative nature and elegant structure.

Unfortunately it seems that Facebook acquired Push Pop for it’s app technology rather than because they want to start publishing e-books. This seems a shame. Traditional methods of publishing are failing; print books, though still popular, are increasingly failing to keep publishers afloat and they are turning to e-books to make up their losses. The problem with taking an industry that hasn’t seem much innovation since Caxton’s movable type and giving it a good hard shock is that they tend to react slowly; and when they do react they apply the same principles to the new media. A prime example of this is newspapers moving to digital apps and simply producing newspapers behind a screen, publishers are doing exactly the same thing. The added threat of a company like Facebook getting involved with the publishing business could drive them on to do great things, not to mention the interesting approach that Facebook would take.

Though Facebook is not threatening the publishing business this acquisition is an interesting glimpse behind the curtain at Facebooks plans on how to deal with the future and respond to Google+. What this glimpse means is still open to wild speculation though. Facebook has been acquiring designers for a while now and for an engineering based company does this herald a new direction for them? Well no, the most likely option is that Facebook is gearing up, with it’s journalist pages now gaining steam, to make significant moves into the tablet arena. Facebook for iPad is very close to coming out and one it’s more obvious competitors will be Flipboard, and if Facebook is going to move ahead seriously with it’s journalist pages it will need the design clout that Push Pop Press can give it.