The Beatles Yellow Submarine Illustrated Book is Free in the iBookstore

iTunes is featuring a free book download right now that is pretty awesome–The Beatles Yellow Submarine. This illustrated book features animation, and is read by the English actor, Dean Lennox Kelly. The original Yellow Submarine cartoon debuted in 1968, with The Beatles playing themselves as Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Here’s the iTunes description:

This enchanting illustrated book captures the same magical spirit found in the film. The Beatles’ journey to save Pepperland from the music-hating Blue Meanies is filled with surrealistic humor, wit, and clever references to The Beatles’ song titles and lyrics. In this iTunes exclusive, clips from the movie have been included throughout and can be viewed either embedded in the page or at full-screen. The book also contains interactive animations as well as sound effects and music clips. Download the book for free right here and enjoy it on iBooks on your iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch.

The book is actually pretty neat, and is children will love it. Animation occurs on each page and there are options for manual or automatic page turning, plus options to turn on/off narration. It’s a fantastic free download that’s full of multimedia. Images below:

The Beatles finally made it into iTunes last November. The decades-long delay was due to a dispute over Apple Computer and Apple Corps, the business holding company of The Beatles. Apple settled their trademark issue with The Beatles in 2007.

To get the songs into iTunes though, The Beatles had to resolve rights with their record label EMI. Steve Jobs and Eddy Cue orchestrated the iTunes deal, as described in the biography by Walter Isaacson:

“Steve and I thought about all the things that we could possibly do,” Cue recalled. That included taking over the front page of the iTunes Store, buying billboards featuring the best photographs of the band, and running a series of television ads in classic Apple Style. The topper was offering a $149 box set that included all thirteen Beatles studio albums, the two-volume “Past Masters” collection, and a nostalgia-inducing video of the 1964 Washington Coliseum concert.”

We all know what happened. Apple followed through with their above deal, and eventually it was a huge success with over 5 million songs and 1 million albums sold in two months time.

Click here to download the book. It’s for both the iPhone (and iPod touch) and iPad. Let me know what you think of it!

Thanks Keith for the heads up!