On Monday, Mike Matas of Push Pop Press debuted Al Gore’s e-book Our Choice to an enthusiastic TED audience. Our Choice utilizes interactive elements like animations to enhance the text for a seamless reading experience. It’s an app. It’s a book. It’s the next step in digital publishing. All for $4.99.

The player line-up goes like this: Rodale is the publisher, Push Pop Press is the creator of the platform (layout tool) that produced the book, and Apple’s App Store is currently the only distributor. According to software developer Matas, Push Pop plans to have the platform “widely available and be something both pros and students could easily use.” In other words, Push Pop will sell the ability to create advanced interactive books like Our Choice.

Consider people’s reactions to this. Some will applaud this advance in digital publishing and brainstorm ways to push the technology. Some will cringe at the idea of calling anything with videos and interactive graphs a “book.” The most telling reactions will come from those who can’t yet blog their thoughts: preschoolers.

Children will be maddeningly blasé about this evolution of digital books the way we are about color television. What causes the mouths of one generation to drop open causes the shoulders of another generation to shrug. That’s what makes technology wonderful. The best inventions and developments eventually integrate into daily life. My three-year-old daughter uses my iPhone more than I do. She grumbled when she realized my laptop wasn’t a touch screen. Her patience runs thin for games that require keyboard arrows. She can use a mouse, but it’s obvious touch-screen technology is more intuitive and user-friendly for her small hands.

Advances in e-books make us marvel. Still, many in and out of the publishing world think digital books are a fad. Then again, some people believed automobiles and The Beatles were fads, too.