The Briefcase in the Hall

It's standing next to the pew, by my front door. It's a black leather briefcase my wife bought me in 1993 or 1994 when I started Armadillo Systems. "There" she said, "now you're a businessman".

I haven't used it for years, so it's going to the charity shop. In its day I used to carry vast folders of paper around. Printouts of letters, contracts, checklists and sketches. It's day has passed.

It was in 2005 when I was spending a lot of time with Microsoft in Seattle that I realised paper had died. In meetings, 10 or 15 people lined up either side of a long table would open their laptops almost in unison, tappeting away throughout the meeting, every comment and thought filed away ready for copying and pasting, ready to later justify or judge. Times had changed.

Then the other week I was in another meeting. This time in a coffee shop. All three of us pulled out iPads and silently stabbed at our on-screen keyboards. Times had changed again. No formal meeting rooms and no formal filing system. Coffee and the cloud rather than formality and folders.

Over the last weekend, Apple sold 4m new iPhones with their latest voice recognition system, Siri. Make no mistake, this is the beginning of another big shift, this time not from paper to keyboards, but from keyboards to voice.

This won't define the future of how we relate to computers, but it will surely point the way.

Unripe Apples

It was the summer of 1985. I was working for a financial institution as part of my degree in an office made of grey. The walls were grey, the suits were grey and the floor was grey. Ties were pink or yellow though.

We had two computers in the department - an IBM XT and an IBM AT. One was better than the other, but it was hard to tell which, as they both had green screens and ran DOS. They were hooked up to an enormous dot-matrix printer that would go "screeeek, screeek" as it spewed out reams of stripey paper.

Down the road was a computer shop that had just started to sell things called Macs, which didn't look at all like the PCs. I persuaded them to lend me one for a couple of weeks. I think it was a 512k running System 1.1. Over that two weeks the entire company must have crowded round my desk.  

"Look at that nice screen"

"Wow, it has pictures on screen"

"What's that box on a wire on your desk? What you move that box and that little pointer moves at the same time?"

"Do that thing with the font again".

It just changed everything. Computers moved from the domain of the data-processing guys to everyone. We could suddenly envisage them being useful in all sorts of ways, not just as gigantic calculators.

You know the path we've trodden since then and it doesn't need revisiting here, but I wouldn't be doing what I do now if it wasn't for Steve Jobs. 

For which I'm grateful.

eBookTreasures II

OK, here's the second post about eBookTreasures. In the first we covered the background, today it's technology and UI.

Prior to 1.1 iBooks had done a similar job to most epub readers, but then the iBooks team saw the writing on the wall and adopted many of the epub3 standards - HTML5, CSS, Javascript as well as fixed-width books.

Fixed-width was the starting point. You can embed images, pretty large ones if you want, in regular epubs, but they don't fill the screen. You don't feel like you're reading a book. The device acts as a frame, and then the app acts as a frame within that. There's no suspension of disbelief there. Fixed-width changed all that. Books can butt up against the iPad bezel and suddenly you're leafing through a manuscript, not reading an ebook. And with the iPad's 2m pixel ceiling for image size, you have plenty of headroom to drop in nice high-resolution images. That got us started.

We then wanted a very stripped down UI, that let the book just be the book, but we wanted some subtlety too. Discrete arrow buttons bring up custom functionality. We animated these using jQuery classes, and then wrote some Javascript to do things like flip Leonardo da Vinci's pages the right way round, play MP3 audio files and do some image swapping.

The latter is important, as it swaps the page bitmap for a blank page bitmap (custom-coloured for the book it's placed in) with system text embedded in it. This allows for the text to be searched, taking advantage not only of iBooks rather nice search function, but also it's highlighting and dictionary functionality.

For these generic pages, as well as the introductory pages, we used CSS to allow for easy customisation. Our objective here is to build a template or engine that will give us the chance to build new books very quickly and easily.

This is a key differentiator in what we are doing. We didn't want to build a big "bet the farm" type app model where huge development costs go in to building each book. This is more like a large number of smaller bets, meaning it's easier to get partners on board, easier to scale and easier to fine tune.

The HTML5 capabilities of epub3 are allowing us to easily embed video, which will be a feature of a forthcoming title, and getting to grips with all these capabilities puts us in a good place for working on more complex ebook projects in the future should we want to.

For all of this we had to test against lower-end devices like iPod Touch and iPhone 3G, which operate with much less RAM and an older GPU. We were really concerned about performance on these devices. In the end, Apple advice was to go for quality, so we did (using the high-res files for example) and the low end devices cope OK. An iPad2 gives a snappier experience than an iPad1 for example, but the latter is plenty usable.

Overall I guess we built up to 400 test epubs of various sorts over a 3-4 month period. Different bitmaps, different code, breaking changes as Apple released new iBooks builds, UI tweaks, you name it. Ironically though, the technology set we are using is the lowest we've used in many years. This hasn't been a project with huge technology hurdles, just UX and marketing ones.

One of the things we have our eye on is the Kindle approach to facsimiles. So far we've seen Kindle Print Replica appear out of the ooze, but this primitive life form is nothing but a PDF in a DRM wrapper. Plenty of scope for evolution there.

Next time I'll look at the business model and the barriers to adoption.

eBookTreasures I

This will be the first of a couple of posts on a new venture we've just launched called eBookTreasures.

Basically it's like Turning the Pages for iPad, but you get to download and own the book. If you're having a hard time visualising this, take a look at a video.

I want the posts to cover the background, the technical approach and the commercial model. I think it's worth doing this as so many things fall out of this project: open vs closed standards, Apple vs Kindle, free vs paid, social media vs traditional marketing.

This post is on the background.

Around summer 2010, the iPad had just launched, and whilst we had been looking at what TTP on mobile devices might be for quite a while, this launch acted as a catalyst to take another look.

Our options were:
- build an iOS app
- build an Android app
- create an iBook
- create a mobi file for Kindle

Building an iOS app condemned us not only to a lifetime of support, but also the need for an Android app at some point. And then maybe a WinPhone 7 app. No chance - we were never going to get Angry Birds style volume so the development costs couldn't be justified. Plus the Android app store was a black hole made of nasty.

We actually made a few mobi files to see what they looked like on a Kindle and the answer was predictably ugly. They looked OK on Kindle apps though, and we really wanted to use Amazon as a channel, but the deal-breaker was Kindle's charging model - 10p per Mb on top of the 30%. One of our books came out at over 200 Mb, so we'd have to give Amazon £20 per download, with resultant ridiculous pricing. Another one crossed off the list for now.

So we looked at iBooks. The iPad was great, but in summer/autumn 2010 iBooks was like Kindle - no support for graphical books.

So we waited, and then came a rush of updates to iBooks. Essentially they added a slew of features from the forthcoming epub 3 standard before it was ratified. Woo-hoo! Fixed-width pages, support for Javascript, CSS, HTML5. Now we could build the books we wanted. True digital facsimiles of the greatest books in the world with interpretation and enhanced features like narration.

This felt good to us. The iBook platform uses the open epub standard, so the books should have a life outside of Apple when epub3 is supported by other vendors, we can offer a great user experience, and a slick delivery mechanism.

The strategic technical decision was to let someone else build the app. So Apple do the heavy lifting in building, testing and updating iBooks, and we develop a model to cost-effectively populate the app with our content.

This allows us to focus on our customers, not the technology.

The approach is also the one we plan to use for all other platforms - to use the Kindle platform and apps to reach into Android/Windows/WinPhone 7 and Kindle devices, rather than build our own platform.

The only thing we knew we were missing was the volume that the Amazon channel could offer, but we figured we could make up for that given the impressive nature of out launch partners (the British Library, Natural History Museum etc).

We soft-launched in August and have spent the last few weeks ironing out some wrinkles in the metadata, so now would be a great time to tell us what you think.

A Change of Pace and the Pace of Change

We're working on an Apple project at the moment, and I was thinking back to January 2007 when we launched Turning the Pages 2.0 to coincide with the launch of Windows Vista, and what has happened to Microsoft since then, and what has happened to Apple.

Since then Microsoft has got back into shape with Win7, which is where it ought to have been all along, and finally launched sort-of viable phone software that hasn't got much traction yet. Kinect has been big but hardly changed the world. The cloud strategy is still unconvincing, at least to me.

Apple meanwhile has in the meantime launched the iPhone (60m+ sold), iPod Touch (100m+ sold) and the iPad (35m+ sold), redefined mobile computing and along the way sold about 13 billion apps and the same number of songs. In mobile computing and gameplay everyone else is left for dust. The pace of change is truly staggering.

And then there is the cultural sector. Sure, you've put on some exhibitions, and maybe done some digitisation, but does your institution look very different from 2007? Probably not. For some it does though. The National Library of Norway has reinvented itself as a digital library with two thirds of all staff engaged in digital projects.

In January 2007 Microsoft was worth around $293bn and Apple $78bn.

In April this year Microsoft was worth around $213bn and Apple $321bn.

How far has your institution come in those 4 years?

* update* Apple announced 15 billion app downloads by 6th July. That's 5 Billion downloads in 6 months. Heading towards 1 billion/month. I think I need a sit down...

The Glories of Cambridge

"And on your right is Trinity College, where they discovered splitting the atom and creme brulée".

I'm in Cambridge, at the Wren Library, and the disconcerting patter of the guide in the punt drifts over the immaculate lawns.

The self-aware beauty of Cambridge never fails to impress, and the more you dig, the more there is to be impressed by. A Russian doll of varied cultural glories. From the Cam and the backs to the elegance of Wren's library. Then inside to the astonishing carvings by Grinling Gibbons, who worked boxwood like putty, and on to the shelves to see the Trinity Apocalypse in all it's prurient, appalling glory. An age when the consequences of sin had to be spelt out, lest the fabric of society be completely jeopardised.

Occasionally, when I tell people what I do, they are overcome with sad envy, sweating, as they do, for uncaring American corporations. Occasionally I feel lucky and today was one of those days.

The Power of Reproduction

When the Royal Couple got married, the bit my son was most interested in was (predictably) the flypast. Wanting to know what a Lancaster bomber looked like, I dug out my old Big Book of Aircraft and found a picture. But interleaved next to the picture of a Lancaster was a piece of tracing paper that I had used 30 years ago to trace a wobbly outline of the plane that I never got to transfer to a nice clean sheet. Maybe teatime or homework interrupted me, and the tracing paper lay sealed up in this book since the late 1970's.

What efforts we used to go to to reproduce pictures and maps.

Secure the tracing paper to the picture with paper clips. Pick a soft pencil (HB or B) and carefully trace the outline. Remove the tracing paper and affix over a clean sheet of paper. Pick a harder pencil (H) and retrace the outline you just made, pressing hard enough to leave an impression on the paper underneath. Don't press too hard or you rip the tracing paper and you have to start again (a problem if you're tracing a map of the world). Having removed the tracing paper pick any pencil or pen and follow the indents along the page, twisting and turning, until you have a representation of a bomber (or the coast of Norway) appear on your page with surprising fidelity.

Fast forward to today. Type "Lancaster bomber" into Google, narrowing the search to Images. 99,400 results. Hmmm. Colour or black and white, cockpit or whole aircraft, flying or stationary…Right click, copy, paste and the image (copyright permitting) is ours to do with what we want. Information wants to be free and now this collection of bytes has been let loose to appear whenever and wherever we like.

As we fill our repositories with digital images, we're allowing for a myriad of unexpected, unpredictable and unknowable future uses, with entirely unforseeable results. A chaos theory of image dissemination.

And a long way from tracing paper.