The iPad as a "bedtime computer"

The creator of the "A Story Before Bed" iPad app discusses tablets and the reading experience.

Jackson Fish Market, developer of the innovative A Story Before Bed service, is one of the few companies to fully combine video and web technology into a book-like product. Adults record themselves reading a bedtime story selected from the service's library, and children can then play the story back through a computer anytime they like.

It's not an exact replacement for books or in-person storytelling, that's true. But A Story Before Bed is in the same ballpark as the intimate and personalized experiences print book lovers vociferously defend. And now that the service has gotten the thumbs-up from Apple for its iPad app (iTunes link), the technological divide between reading a digital story and actually experiencing that story could narrow.

Given all this, I got in touch with Jackson Fish Market co-founder Hillel Cooperman to get his thoughts on the iPad's possibilities.

Mac Slocum: Why did you opt to develop an iPad app before an iPhone app?

Hillel Cooperman: We just didn't have time to ship both at once. We also think and hope the iPad is the ultimate form factor for watching stories recorded on A Story Before Bed. We love our laptops, but the iPad is the first real bedtime computer.

MS: How will the iPad app differ from the service you offer through the website?

HC: Our website lets you record and view stories. There's no front facing camera on iPhones, and no camera at all on iPads. Our iPad app lets you view the stories you recorded on your Mac or PC.

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iPad and ebooks: Lots of unanswered questions

An iPad simulator isn't the same as the real device, and that's going to slow things down

Right now people are conflating the whiz-bang demos from Wired, Penguin and the magazine world with the iBooks offering. In fact, no one can say anything right now other than that iBooks uses the EPUB format. Will books from iBooks be able to include custom fonts? Video? Audio? All unknowns.

If it's true that books in the iBookstore can include video, for example, what kind of video? Adobe promotes Flash video for use in EPUB, but of course there's no Flash in the whole iPad/iPhone ecosystem. So yes, EPUB is a standard, but the kind of content that would really showcase a tablet versus an E-Ink reader -- like video -- seems to have already fragmented before the device even hits the marketplace. That kind of fragmentation is going to deter publishers from doing much more than what they're already doing: making text-only EPUB for wide distribution, and doing the occasional book-as-app experiment (at a premium price point).

We're already seeing the tension between Apple's own interests and their control of the App Store with the announcement that many apps (notably the Kindle) won't be available in the App Store on release of the iPad because they haven't been able to test on a real device. And then ... how long until they release? That's totally up to the Apple approval process.

In our development of an HTML5-based web app, we've found that hardware profiles are key to making web apps really compete. Ibis Reader isn't nearly as compelling on an older iPod Touch as it is on an iPhone 3GS. By providing what is apparently a really sexy tablet that's capable of running video and games fluidly, Apple also widens the playing field to let web apps shine too. As the hardware increases in capacity, web apps become increasingly attractive as an end product, not just as a way for web developers to play in the app space.

Is the "e" in ebooks the new blink tag?

How one vowel creates a limiting design paradigm

Do you remember the blink tag? My gosh, I do. This was back when we were indiscriminately mixing our content and presentation, our HTML and our CSS, our data and its display. Usually you'd be graced with this tag in some horrible sort of "40% off!" fashion.

We'd all grimace at this abuse of the web (and even the most common sense of design). Why? Well, besides the tag itself being obnoxious, this was a classic case of taking your content and manually controlling how that content would look. That little bit of data -- "40% off" -- was inexorably and permanently linked with a bit of formatting -- the <blink> tag.

And you all know about this, whether your knowledge is localized to the blink tag, or just produced in a growing separation-of-content model for web design and development. Hardly anyone intentionally and consistently mixes content and presentation in web pages these days. CSS (and SASS, in some circles) simply makes it too easy to keep your style separate from your content.

So here we are in 2010, all design-sophisticates, separating our content from our style. Well, on the web we are. The more I listen and watch and involve myself in ebooks, though, the more I find myself thinking about the blink tag again. And while I think the term "ebook" is useful and possibly necessary for intelligent conversation, I just wonder if that little "e" in front of "ebook" might be on its way toward becoming the new blink tag.

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Trapping content on the iPad won't work, even if it's pretty

Wired's latest iPad demo looks great, but the app doesn't want you to leave

Wired is one of the few magazines I read cover to cover. It consistently exposes me to new ideas and topics. For that, I'm grateful (and a longtime subscriber).

But when it comes to the iPad, I really don't understand what the Wired crew is doing.

Design-wise, Wired's iPad demo looks beautiful. Take a look:

Yet, reading over this analysis piece by Reuters' Felix Salmon, I'm dismayed to see a return to the days of silos and closed content. Here's how Salmon puts it:

Wired doesn’t want to allow simple links in ads or stories which would open up in the iPad web browser, since opening the browser means closing the Wired app. Instead, web links will open in a pop-up window within the iPad app, which then gets closed, returning you to the position in the magazine that you came from. The whole ethos is a magazine-like one of a closed system with lots of control -- the exact opposite, really, of the internet, which is an open system where it’s very hard indeed to control the user experience. [Emphasis added.]

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Four short links: 11 March 2010

Digital Inclusion, Bookwriting Revealed, Chip Tips, and Mobile Marketshare

1. Digital Inclusion: How Do You Tell? -- [N]either means nor skills are simple binary states. A while ago, I was talking to a young man looking for a job, and asked him why he didn’t look online. Because it’s two buses to get to the public library and you only get half an hour, was his reply. Or being in a library myself and watching an older man asking a bit tentatively if he could use one of the computers and being firmly told that he could book a slot for three days time. He turned away looking crestfallen and without making a booking. It didn’t look as though he would be back. Remote, uncertain, and limited access is better than none. But it is hardly inclusion.
2. The Participatory Museum Process -- inside look at the writing of the book, and the surprises she received writing it. People preferred to comment on a finished draft rather than the work in progress. At the time, I thought people would be MORE excited to comment and help shape the book as I was first writing it than to comment on a complete draft. I was wrong. The second draft was offered to participants with a much more specific, time-limited ask, and it was much more successful than the open-ended "help me as I write it" approach to draft one. This makes sense - the second draft experience was much better-scaffolded - and it made me reconsider the extent to which participants want to be involved in the early development of other peoples' projects.
3. Finding Pin 1 (Evil Mad Scientist) -- some interesting knowledge about hardware that'll make you more informed the next time you peer quizzically at a printed circuit board.
4. January 2010 US Mobile Subscriber Market Share (ComScore) -- Android just overtook Palm, and is growing faster than the other smartphone platforms. And for a reality check, 28% of mobile customers used a browser on their phone. (via phandroid)

Four short links: 24 February 2010

Mapping Data, Publishing Advice, Data Packaging, and User Reputation

1. Maker! Map the World's Data -- web-based tool to make elegant maps from public data.
2. Flat World Knowledge, a commercial publisher of open textbooks (Jon Udell) -- notable if only for Publishers need to be device-agnostic in the broadest sense. The printed book is one of the devices we target..
3. datapkg -- a data packaging tool, so you can easily find and install datasets.
4. On Karma -- very detailed look at user reputation, full of great takeaways. As with the FICO score, it is a bad idea to co-opt a reputation system for another purpose, and it dilutes the actual meaning of the score in its original context.

The future of publishing lives on and around the web

Richard Nash outlines his gameplan for uniting audiences and content

I'm at the Tools of Change for Publishing conference this week interviewing folks at the forefront of the publishing world. I'll be posting a few videos here on Radar and you can find others at the TOC blog.

My favorite part of TOC is the energy. There's a lot of positivity coursing through the venue. There's a lot of forward thinking, too. And when you run into Richard Nash, founder of Cursor, you're encountering the embodiment of all that TOC enthusiasm. He's the anti-curmudgeon.

As you'll see in the following interview, Nash is passionate about the web's ability to connect audiences and authors with the topics that excite them. I found his thoughts on tagging really compelling (1:57 mark). It's a useful reference point for the organic nature of web communities.

Living Stories can reinvent the article

Google's Living Stories platform fills a big gap in the content universe

Content consumers -- the people who seek information but don't create or curate it -- are getting a raw deal.

Why? Because static articles don't capture the kinetic energy newsworthy topics generate. Real-time updates are flawed, too. Twitter can't offer context or deeper analysis. And RSS is most useful if you've got the time and energy to curate your sources. That's like gardening, though: some people love tilling the soil, but most just want to eat.

Until recently, there was no middle-ground content product. No service that combines editorial oversight with the archival quality of articles and the real-time info-drip of Twitter. But a few months ago, Google teamed up with the Washington Post and the New York Times to test a new content model called Living Stories that addresses the missing link in the content chain.

The first batch of Living Stories focused on things like health care, education reform, the war in Afghanistan and other broad topics with lots of viewpoints. Here's how the project was originally described when it was launched back in December:

Living Stories try a different approach that plays to certain unique advantages of online publishing. They unify coverage on a single, dynamic page with a consistent URL. They organize information by developments in the story. They call your attention to changes in the story since you last viewed it so you can easily find the new material. Through a succinct summary of the whole story and regular updates, they offer a different online approach to balancing the overview with depth and context.

Early execution on Living Stories wasn't all that impressive ("dull" was the defining characteristic). But the white-label look was just a starting point. Living Stories was built to be a tool; a new type of content platform. The real innovation would take place beyond Google's borders.

That's why yesterday's announcement that Living Stories is now available as an open source project is so exciting. Now we get to see what this thing is capable of.

Off the top of my head, I see three Living Stories projects developers at news or content organizations should immediately pursue:

1. If your company has topic pages -- many do, since they're SEO magnets -- look through your analytics and find the top 10. Create Living Stories around each of those topics and publicize the heck out of them.
2. Build out internal toolsets that let editors and writers create new Living Stories on the fly. That way, they can quickly plant a flag around a topic and then fill it out as additional coverage is produced.
3. Consider the public utility. Could the Living Stories platform become a community tool? A hub for targeted local events? News organizations get raked over the coals for missing big opportunities (classifieds, local search, etc.). Maybe Living Stories can play out differently.

The utility of Living Stories isn't limited to newspapers, either. A book publisher could post chapters or use it as an author portal. The timeline component could be adapted for family histories. Academics could chronicle research. It's a publishing platform, so you can do whatever you want with it.

Apple vs. Adobe vs. Content Creators

Lack of Flash support on the iPad could undermine publisher's tablet ideas

Remember when Wired's fancy tablet demo made the rounds a few months ago? That Adobe Air-driven prototype certainly stoked the fires of iPad enthusiasm.

There's just one problem: It won't work on the iPad. It won't work natively on the iPad.

Leander Kahney at Cult of Mac explains why:

Apple has rejected Adobe technologies like Flash and Air — with extreme prejudice. No one at Condé Nast appears to have seen that coming, even though the iPhone OS hasn’t supported Flash since its launch in 2007.

Maybe Condé Nast developers thought the iPad would run Mac OS. Or maybe they just got ahead of themselves.

Update 2/5: Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson notes in the comments, and in a follow-up piece at Cult of Mac, that the iPad's Flash limitations were known from the start. Wired will be available on the iPad, as well as Android and Windows.

Time Inc. ran into a similar problem just before the iPad's launch. Its Sports Illustrated tablet prototype was constructed around a wish list, not tech specs.

This is the first sign I've seen that the Apple vs. Adobe spat is spilling beyond the tech space. Content creators accustomed to the Adobe toolset -- particularly Air and Flash -- will have to recalibrate if they want to be on the iPad (and really, who doesn't want to be on that thing?). That means more development and a longer wait for consumers.

The iPad and publishers: A survey of early reaction

What really jumped out to me as I looked over the iPad's feature set is that the device is clearly built for media consumption. Movies, music, books, news -- the bread and butter content that keeps iTunes humming. That's good for Apple, obviously, but it also creates an interesting opportunity for publishers. They've got a new distribution mechanism and a new canvas.

With that in mind, I decided to filter the barrage of iPad coverage through a publishing lens. What follows are intriguing ideas culled from all sorts of sources. Most revolve around content applications the iPad may provide.

There's no way I'll catch all the good stuff -- there's just too much out there -- so please use the comments area to post links and commentary that grab your attention, publishing-related and otherwise.

Ebook pricing could get interesting

The iPad's release portends a price-point battle between Apple and Amazon. That's ebook pricing, not hardware.

The Wall Street Journal says Apple is pushing book publishers to set two ebook price points, $12.99 and $14.99, with Apple taking its customary 30 percent cut from any sales. They key word in all this is "set." The big kahuna of ebooks, Amazon, controls its pricing. Most bestsellers are parked at $9.99, which is below what Amazon pays a publisher for a title. Amazon is subsidizing its low price point.

But that's the present. The future is a different matter. The thought is that Amazon is taking a short-term loss on ebooks so it can solidify its position as the dominant channel. Once it owns the ebook market, Amazon can ditch the subsidy and force publishers to renegotiate pricing.

That's the fear, and Apple appears to be playing to it by giving publishers an option: get a measure of pricing control through Apple, or make more with Amazon but pray they don't rewrite the rules later. (Apple could always rewrite rules, too ...)

Update 1/31: Macmillan fired the first shot across Amazon's bow, which led to Amazon pulling Macmillan titles. Amazon has since backed down and reluctantly agreed to Macmillan's terms. The Wall Street Journal puts the disagreement in context:

It is expected that publishers will now seek to do business with Amazon and other e-book retailers on the same terms as with Apple. By setting their own prices, publishers would be able to eliminate discounting on Amazon and elsewhere that they believe threatens the long-term business model of publishing.

What's really interesting about this -- and kind of bizarre -- is that the binary Apple-or-Amazon thinking obscures an important point: mobile devices already offer publishers plenty of pricing options.

What about e-reader applications?

Steve Jobs famously quipped a couple of years ago that "people don't read anymore." Well, I guess Apple changed its stance on that one. The new iBooks app -- and accompanying store -- is a big ol' cannonball in the ebook pool.

Early discussion on a back-channel publishing list I follow has focused on how Apple will treat its new ebook competitors. Will established applications, like Stanza and the Kindle app, be removed? Kirk Biglione, co-founder of Medialoper, thinks competitors will remain in Apple's universe. Just don't count on sharing titles across apps:

Look for books to be added as a new media type in the device media library. The other reading apps may be able to co-exist as long as they don't access books stored in that library. So, for example, you probably won't be able to use Stanza to read iBooks. [Note: Kirk gave me permission to post his comments.]

One thing to consider here: Past inquiries from the Federal Communications Commission may soften Apple's competitive instincts. At least for a while.

Of course, FCC heat doesn't preclude Apple from a little friendly rivalry. Digital Trends picked up on the backhanded compliment Jobs gave Amazon during the iPad presentation:

... [Jobs] basically told the online retailer that we’ll take it from here.

The reading/viewing experience

Apple has already shown what it's capable of on the music and video front, so I'm curious to see how it handles the book experience. Early word is positive from folks who tested the iPad. Here's Gizmodo's take:

It's an optical illusion, but just seeing the depth of pages makes the iBook app feel more like a book than a Kindle ever did for me. The text is sharp, and while the screen is bright, it doesn't seem to strains the eyes—but time will tell on that.

Speaking of the Kindle ...

David Pogue, New York Times tech columnist and Missing Manual author, noted that the iPad is more responsive than Amazon's e-reader. Technologically, that's comparing apples to oranges since the devices have different architectures. But it's relevant if you're judging e-reader functionality. In a broader-view piece, John Gruber said speed is the iPad's defining characteristic. You can get a sense of the iPad's response rate in this TechCrunch video.

The iPad is backwards compatible with existing iPhone applications. That's useful if you've invested in buying apps or creating them. However, Joshua Topolsky of Engadget called out a display issue those "old" apps create:

It's kind of silly looking. A lone app in the center of a black screen.

More to come

I'll be adding to this post in the coming days as more analysis bubbles up. Again, please use the comments to point out interesting or informative links you come across as well.

Four short links: 27 January 2010

Science Publishing, iState of the Union, Synthetic Bio Obstacles, UK Government Cloud

1. Why I Am Disappointed with Nature Communications (Cameron Neylon) -- fascinating to learn what you can't do with "non-commercial"-licensed science research: using a paper for commercially funded research even within a university, using the content of paper to support a grant application, using the paper to judge a patent application, using a paper to assess the viability of a business idea.
2. The iState of the Union (Slate) -- humorous take on the State of the Union address, as given by Steve Jobs.
3. Five Obstacles for Synthetic Biology -- a reminder that biology is bloody hard, natural or synthetic. "There are very few molecular operations that you understand in the way that you understand a wrench or a screwdriver or a transistor," says Rob Carlson, a principal at the engineering, consulting and design company Biodesic in Seattle, Washington. And the difficulties multiply as the networks get larger, limiting the ability to design more complex systems. A 2009 review showed that although the number of published synthetic biological circuits has risen over the past few years, the complexity of those circuits — or the number of regulatory parts they use — has begun to flatten out. (via Sciblogs)
4. UK Government to Set Up Own Cloud (Guardian) -- will build a dozen data centres (each costing £250m) and push for open source on central and local government computers, eventually resulting in thin clients and "shared utilities". (via jasonwyran on Twitter)

Four short links: 22 January 2010

notmuch Email, Mobile Processing, Realtime Mocap, and Making Money from Books

1. notmuch -- commandline tagging and fast search for a mailbox, regardless of which mail client you use.
2. Processing for Android -- pre-release versions of a Processing for Android devices. Mobile visual programming makes for interesting possibilities.
3. Binary Body Double: Microsoft Reveals the Science Behind Project Natal for Xbox 360 -- machine learning to recognize poses and render in the game at 30fps. It's a basic real-time mocap and render.
4. The Monetization Paradox -- interesting post by Charlie Stross about the quandry of authors. he proposed $9.99 cap on ebooks replaces the high-end $24 hardcover. Not only does it mean less royalties for the authors, it means less money for the publishers — or, more importantly, their marketing divisions. Here's a hint: if I wanted to spend my time marketing my books I'd have gone into marketing. I'm a writer. Every hour spent on marketing activities is an hour spent not writing. Ditto editing, proofreading, commissioning cover art, and so on. This is what I have publishers for.

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