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Thames and Hudson has released an iPad app version of Michael Embacher’s Cyclepedia, the coffee-table book on iconic bicycle designs. The app is available in the iTunes store for £6.99.
Comedian and Mac fanboy Stephen Fry said the app was "as mesmerisingly beautiful an iPad app as you could ever hope to see."
He added: "Full of innovative but intuitive ways to navigate, this is like the most beautiful, informative and deliciously lovely guide to bicycle design as you can imagine. And if you think that bicycles are a rather humble, banal and uninteresting field of industrial design this will make you think again. Stunning."
The app features an interactive collection of 100 bikes "that have changed cycling history," said a statement from Thames and Hudson.
App users can spin every bike 360 degrees and zoom into details up to 20x magnification.
Each bike is shown with text that recounts its story. There are also video clips, original brochures, contemporary advertising, engineering drawings, and rare illustrations.
Users can organize and browse bikes by year of manufacturer, style of bike, make and name, country of origin, frame material, and weight. There are also swipeable animations of 23 fold-up bikes.
The strap line for the app is: "Let your fingers do the pedalling."
Embacher owns a Vienna-based architectural design company and has a private collection of 200 bicycles. He originally self-published a photo book of his collection and once this became a best-seller the rights to the book were acquired by Thames and Hudson.
