Industry Talk

With the WiFi iPads shipping for delivery in less than a week, I thought we should update you on our status.

Today (March 27) is the last day to submit apps to the App Store and be guaranteed they’ll be available on the iPad App Store on its official release date (April 3). For a while that was our goal, but as time went on we realized it would be in everyone’s best interest if we had a chance to see what PocketBible looked like on the actual hardware. The emulator we run on our Macs is good, but it’s not the real hardware. We’re concerned about performance and simple things like the usability of the user interface, given that we can’t really tell how big our buttons are or what it’s going to “feel” like on a real device until we have one in our hands.

So, we won’t release a product to the App Store until we have a chance to see it running on real hardware. So that means sometime after April 3.

The great thing about the iPad is that it runs our iPhone code pretty much as-is. The bad thing is that it runs our iPhone code as-is. The experience of running an iPhone app on the iPad will be less than optimum, but it at least will give the iPad a couple hundred thousand apps on day one. Ideally, every iPhone developer will be customizing their apps for the iPad, and that’s what we’ve been doing.

While the iPad is a mobile device, it has the screen real estate of a desktop or laptop device (1024 x 768). That means while we’re using our iPhone code as a base, we have to think like we’re developing for the desktop. Not a desktop computer with a mouse and a real keyboard, though, but a desktop computer you operate with your fingers and type on a pop-up keyboard. So the interface is an interesting intersection of desktop and mobile paradigms.

So what will be new or different on the iPad? First, You’ll have plenty of space on the screen for some controls to be present all the time, just like on your desktop where menus and toolbars are generally always there. This makes it easier and more intuitive to get around.

Second, the bigger screen means there’s room to split the screen and show you more than one book at a time if you want.

Third, we’ve taken advantage of this opportunity to add a frequently requested feature: The ability to search your entire library at one time. The larger screen means there’s room to give you both a search results browser and a library browser at the same time. We think this is going to be a great addition to the program.

Finally, you can expect changes to how you open books and navigate within books. It should take fewer touches to find your way around your library.

We’ll post some more details as we get closer to releasing the product. With the actual release of the iPad itself coming up, we just wanted to give you some advance notice of what’s coming. We think you’re going to like it.

The latest issue of Book Business magazine arrived this weekend and I was immediately drawn to an article by James Sturdivant called Author Royalties in the Hot Seat.  I wound up underlining two pieces of it, one that’s an interesting point and the other that I think is totally wrong.  First, the interesting point:

"One thing remains clear: There are few successful e-books unless there
is also a successful paper book [with it]," says Donald Maass, principal
of the Donald Maass Literary Agency in New York.

IOW, today’s best-selling, highest revenue-generating ebooks are nothing more than quick-and-dirty e-conversions of a print product.  OK, that’s not exactly rocket science but it makes me wonder when that will no longer be a true statement.

So when will a best-selling ebook not have a print equivalent?  I believe it hasn’t happened yet because the most popular devices don’t encourage anything other than quick-and-dirty p-to-e-conversions.  Heck, the Kindle doesn’t even offer full color let alone something like rich video.  That’s one of the reasons I’m optimistic that the iPad could be a major step forward.  You might not want to read a novel for hours on end with a backlit display but we’ll finally have a viable platform to support richer content.  The iPad could be the turning point where we finally have digital-first, and probably digital-only (since the rich content doesn’t have a print equivalent), products at the top of the best-seller charts.  We just need authors and publishers to leverage that potential rather than limiting themselves to simple conversions.

Back to James Sturdivant’s article…  Here’s the piece I choked on:

"The six big publishers remain the primary repositories of the absolute
best in fiction and nonfiction," Ethan Ellenberg says. "I don’t see that
changing. I think their reach is going to continue to be what it is, and
there’s no reason why, if we can find a successful model for selling
intellectual property … the big publishers won’t continue to do well.
The whole self-publishing market is really a variation of subsidy
publishing of 40 years ago. It ultimately is going to frustrate the
consumer, and they’re not going to get involved. Who can browse 100,000
books and say, ‘Oh gee, I really like this one?’ We need tastemakers; we
need professionals. I think publishers have tremendous strategic
advantages that are not going to go away."

No, no, no!  That’s the sort of entitlement mentality that leads to market disruption.  (It’s probably the same type of thinking that went on in the Blockbuster boardroom when Netflix and Redbox started up!)  Just because these publishers are the leaders today doesn’t mean they’ll be the leaders tomorrow.  And if you’re looking for "tastemakers", how about considering the community?  I’m talking about the same community that already writes reviews and helps customers figure out which book to buy on Amazon, for example.  Now apply that same approach to the self-publishing world and you’ve got the feedback of dozens, hundreds, thousands or more, not just the decision of an editor or a publisher.

P.S. — It’s no secret that I’m ditching my Kindle for an iPad.  In case you missed it, here’s a series of tweets I wrote describing "Kindle features I won’t miss."  I’ve also launched a new blog called iPadHound.  My Kindle days are numbered (12 days left, to be precise!) and although Kindleville still exists it’s officially on mothballs.  If you’re interested in following the iPad, be sure to grab the iPadHound RSS feed.

The latest issue of Book Business magazine arrived this weekend and I was immediately drawn to an article by James Sturdivant called Author Royalties in the Hot Seat.  I wound up underlining two pieces of it, one that’s an interesting point and the other that I think is totally wrong.  First, the interesting point:

"One thing remains clear: There are few successful e-books unless there
is also a successful paper book [with it]," says Donald Maass, principal
of the Donald Maass Literary Agency in New York.

IOW, today’s best-selling, highest revenue-generating ebooks are nothing more than quick-and-dirty e-conversions of a print product.  OK, that’s not exactly rocket science but it makes me wonder when that will no longer be a true statement.

So when will a best-selling ebook not have a print equivalent?  I believe it hasn’t happened yet because the most popular devices don’t encourage anything other than quick-and-dirty p-to-e-conversions.  Heck, the Kindle doesn’t even offer full color let alone something like rich video.  That’s one of the reasons I’m optimistic that the iPad could be a major step forward.  You might not want to read a novel for hours on end with a backlit display but we’ll finally have a viable platform to support richer content.  The iPad could be the turning point where we finally have digital-first, and probably digital-only (since the rich content doesn’t have a print equivalent), products at the top of the best-seller charts.  We just need authors and publishers to leverage that potential rather than limiting themselves to simple conversions.

Back to James Sturdivant’s article…  Here’s the piece I choked on:

"The six big publishers remain the primary repositories of the absolute
best in fiction and nonfiction," Ethan Ellenberg says. "I don’t see that
changing. I think their reach is going to continue to be what it is, and
there’s no reason why, if we can find a successful model for selling
intellectual property … the big publishers won’t continue to do well.
The whole self-publishing market is really a variation of subsidy
publishing of 40 years ago. It ultimately is going to frustrate the
consumer, and they’re not going to get involved. Who can browse 100,000
books and say, ‘Oh gee, I really like this one?’ We need tastemakers; we
need professionals. I think publishers have tremendous strategic
advantages that are not going to go away."

No, no, no!  That’s the sort of entitlement mentality that leads to market disruption.  (It’s probably the same type of thinking that went on in the Blockbuster boardroom when Netflix and Redbox started up!)  Just because these publishers are the leaders today doesn’t mean they’ll be the leaders tomorrow.  And if you’re looking for "tastemakers", how about considering the community?  I’m talking about the same community that already writes reviews and helps customers figure out which book to buy on Amazon, for example.  Now apply that same approach to the self-publishing world and you’ve got the feedback of dozens, hundreds, thousands or more, not just the decision of an editor or a publisher.

P.S. — It’s no secret that I’m ditching my Kindle for an iPad.  In case you missed it, here’s a series of tweets I wrote describing "Kindle features I won’t miss."  I’ve also launched a new blog called iPadHound.  My Kindle days are numbered (12 days left, to be precise!) and although Kindleville still exists it’s officially on mothballs.  If you’re interested in following the iPad, be sure to grab the iPadHound RSS feed.

Wade Roush recently asked three question about the iPad, one of which inspired this post.  That question was, "How much will iPad-only apps cost?"  It got me thinking about the different user experience between the iPhone and iPad as well as how not only apps can (and will) be priced differently, but content as well.

We’ve grown accustomed to paying only a dollar or two, if anything at all, for most iPhone apps.  I don’t expect that will change much going forward, but I do anticipate more successful higher-priced apps for the iPad.  As Wade points out, Apple will lead the way with their $9.99 iWork apps.  Although you could argue any one of the iWork apps is much more powerful than the typical iPhone app, I think the additional display surface on an iPad (vs. an iPhone) will lead to opportunities for richer applications and content content.

Publishers currently spend a lot of time trying to figure out the best user experience on the smaller screen.  Reference material in particular is tricky because you want to pack as much into one screen as possible.  Not only is that less of an issue with the iPad, the larger display lends itself to some clever things publishers will be able to do to enhance that smaller-screen content.

Does anyone remember VH1’s "Pop-Up Video" series from several years ago?  They took old videos and added value to them by popping up bubbles of behind-the-scenes info.  No matter how many times you saw the original video, you learned something new when you watched the enhanced pop-up video version.  Interesting factoids as well as silly trivia were added to the original videos and they were fun to watch.

Now imagine the same thing added to the small-screen version of a tutorial or reference work.  (Btw, I’m pretty sure Pete Meyers described something like this in his recent TOC session.)  If the original format worked well on the iPhone’s screen, why not make it even more powerful by adding richer functionality on the bigger screen?  This pop-up option is just one way to add value and I’m sure others will come up with even more compelling enhancements.  Ultimately though, you’ll be able to offer one product for the iPhone and something that builds on that same framework of content for the iPad.  Done properly, and if enough value is added, it’s easy to see where the latter could be higher-priced than the former.