A picture book about a giraffe on safari in South Africa is set to go digital next month, betting that the next generation will embrace electronic media from the word go.

All in all a real book is much more beautiful when a child is holding it in his hands, but ebooks as a medium have a future as well, said Felix Busse, whose Vielflieger Verlag bills itself as the world's smallest publisher (http://www.vielflieger-verlag.com/).

Little Giraffe Guckindieluft on Safari is the second in a series of books about the giraffe penned by Busse and illustrated by Cuban painter Victor Moreno.

It includes text in English, German, Spanish, Japanese and Chinese to appeal to a world audience.

The book is available as a hard-cover edition and should also appear as an ebook on Apple around the middle of next month for iPhone and iPod Touch downloads, Busse told Reuters at the Frankfurt Book Fair.

This is a chance for me to be present on a new market and I want to use this opportunity to have global distribution, said Busse, who runs his one-man publishing house when not working as an airline flight attendant.

He guessed he could sell around 1,000 copies of the book in electronic form. It costs 14.95 euros ($22.26) in hard cover and 2.99 euros in digital format.

(Reporting by Michael Shields, editing by Paul Casciato)

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