(Via Wired) Al Gore wanted the iPhone app version of his book Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis to be a cutting edge multimedia environment. When he approached developers and Apple-employees Mike Matas and Kimon Tsinteris about the project they “realized that in order to reproduce Gore’s book, they needed tools that didn’t exist yet…. The result of the project was Push Pop Press, a full-on publishing platform that the pair have been developing for about a year-and-a-half.”

While Al Gore‘s app is certainly impressive in a glorified science textbook fashion, the most compelling part of the story is that Push Pop Press plans to make their publishing platform “very affordable” so that it can “aggressively compete with Adobe.” Just as iMovie and cheap video-editing software democratized the YouTube world, an affordable and easy-to-use publishing platform could allow authors and publishers to cheaply enter the app market.

The question remains: can an infusion of digital bells and whistles change the fact that the majority of iPad owners have never read a book on the device?