Apple ‘Angry Bird’ App to Become a Cookbook

The creators of the wildly popular iPhone app are planning to launch an Angry Bird cookbook.

Rovio Mobile, the Finland-based developer of the Angry Birds game, is self-publishing the family cookbook, which will feature egg recipes (not poultry, lest a bird become angry).

Peter Vesterbacka, Rovio's head of marketing and business development, told mocoNews that Rovio had briefly considered partnering with a traditional commercial publisher.

They offered to help us make the book, in exchange for 90 percent revenue share, he said. It was a short discussion.

The book will be published as a physical volume and as a mobile app. A distributor for the volume has not yet been named.

Rovio recently acquired Kombo, a Finnish animation studio, with the goal of developing Angry Bird animated content for a broad audience.

Angry Bird is a simple, comedic game that involves combat between angry wingless birds and the evil green pigs who have wronged them. The swine, who have stolen their eggs, are sheltered by structures made of various materials. The user launches the birds using a slingshot at the pigs and their structures, with the aim of destroying them all.

Angry Birds has been downloaded 200 million times since its December 2009 release, and Vesterbacka said that the app was on its way to accumulating 1.2 billion hours of usage in the United States. A February 2011 article in MIT Entrepreneurship Review labeled Angry Birds as the largest mobile app success the world has seen so far.'

Still, Vesterbacka insists that advertising revenue from mobile apps is insubstantial, hence Rovio's intensive efforts to extend the Angry Bird brand through merchandising.

It's not a hobby, he said.

[Source: mocoNews]