Open Air has published four interactive books for iPad: Speakeasy Cocktails (which I wrote about here), Master Your DLSR Camera, The Better Bacon Book and food52′s Holiday Recipes & Party Planning Guide. The books are priced between $4.99 and $9.99. All of the titles will now be available for iPhone.

Investors participating in the seed round include SV Angel, Charles River, 500 Startups and David Tisch. The company plans to use the funding to double its team to six people and to launch nine more books by the end of the year, CEO Jon Feldman told me.

Feldman previously led business development at CollegeHumor. Director of product development Alison Go is a former journalist at U.S. News & World Report and the Boston Globe. They met at Wharton, where they both received MBAs.

“Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) spent a year and a half to build eight textbooks,” Inkling CEO Matt MacInnis said. “In two years, we’ve built 200.” Inkling Habitat is available immediately to a “select group of publishers” in an early adopter program, and will be available to everyone later this year.

Inkling Habitat lets publishers create interactive e-books with HD video, interactive features and 3D content in a free, cloud-based program. E-books can immediately be published to iPad and the Web in HTML5, with updates pushed to both platforms at once. (Well, iPad is available now and Web publishing will be added later this year.) Multiple groups can collaborate on the content simultaneously, so a production editor in New York City can look at the same project as a designer in India, simultaneously. Every version of a product is saved, so changes can always be rolled back.

O’Reilly is a partner at launch. iPad publisher Open Air has already released three titles using Inkling Habitat technology, though the program has not been formally announced until today.

The program is free, but in order to use it publishers must agree to make the books they create with it available through Inkling’s store (in its iPad app and on its website). Inkling takes a cut of the revenues from those books. Unlike with iBooks Author, publishers can also sell the books they create through other channels (their own websites or as individual apps, for instance) and Inkling does not take a cut of those sales.

McInnis demoed the product for me and it looks very easy to use. It’s key for not just publishers but laso the digital content producers they work with — often, teams in India — to know how to use the platform. Inkling has already partnered with the two largest digital content producers, Aptara and Innodata, to train them and they are now ready to use it.

My first job out of college was at an independent publisher, and one of my tasks was to FedEx gigantic stacks of printed book files, marked up with red pencil notes and Post-Its, to a design team in India. (This was in 2006, not that long ago!) It was incredibly nervewracking, from my point of view — the packages got lost or sidetracked somewhere in India more than once, which I swear was not my fault — and just the process of sending them back and forth took forever, even though both our team in New York and the producers in India were working quickly.

Being able to log onto a cloud-based program, manipulate files directly, send notes to designers, publish immediately and always roll back if you make mistake is a total lifesaver — and may be regarded that way by publishers who have been wary to publish interactive e-books because it is so expensive. Also, because Inkling Habitat doesn’t charge for the platform but relies on a revenue share of the finished product, the company has an incentive to work with publishers throughout the proces. “Their win is our win,” said MacInnis, “and their failure is our failure.”

Inkling is based in San Francisco and has raised $17 million in funding.

Speakeasy Cocktails was written by “mixology journalist” Rob Willey, who has written for Details, Food & Wine, Bon Appétit, and The New York Times (NYSE: NYT). It includes over 90 minutes of video tutorials (how to swizzle) featuring Jim Meehan, founder of NYC speakeasy bar PDT, and Joseph Schwartz, founder of Little Branch and Silver Lining, along with recipes, an interactive map of speakeasy-revival cocktail bars across the world, and a history of the speakeasy during Prohibition. There is also a large buying guide with recommended brands of spirits and mixers, glasses and special tools like muddlers. Each item has a buy link–many to Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN), other to specialty mixology web stores. Users can take notes, highlight and bookmark.

The app is very cool, but, as Open Air founder Jon Feldman stressed to me, it’s also a good way to learn new skills. Print how-to books are, obviously, static; live classes are expensive and hard to get to; lots of web video is poorly shot and suspect. Done right, books like this might be able to breathe new life into the how-to category. The question is whether big publishers and guide books–like Wiley’s Dummies series–can adapt as quickly as small startups like Open Air. Dummies.com has added a lot of video to its website. Right now, on the homepage, there are videos about…how to use an iPad. But most iPad owners aren’t looking to a book series that launched in 1991 as their first stop for guidance. The audience that Open Air is targeting with its Speakeasy book app would never buy a Dummies book to learn how to use their iPad. The question for this group is whether it would ever buy a how-to book at all.

Feldman previously led business development at CollegeHumor and also worked at MTV. Director of product development Alison Go is a former journalist at U.S. News & World Report and the Boston Globe. Both received their MBAs from Wharton, where they met (this is starting to sound like a wedding announcement, which I did not intend). Open Air is hiring to fill its New York office and more books–on topics like wine, coffee, dog training, poker and bike repair–are in the works.