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.

Harper Collins vs the Real World

We're working on a really exciting e-book project at the moment, so I've been spending time digging around the e-book world seeing what's going on.

The other week Harper Collins decided that e-books sold to libraries could only be borrowed 26 times. Then they would expire. Give up the digital ghost. Cease to be bits.

It sounded bizarre - 26 times? Why not 25. Or 100. It turns out 26 is the amount of times a paperback would be lent before it became too shoddy and had to be replaced.

What?

I'm getting that deja vu feeling all over again. HC is trying to map an old economy model on to a new economy business. And guess what will happen - exactly what happened to the music industry. When Napster and others came along the market spoke loud and clear to the music labels and stores: "We love this music, but we believe, with the new models of distribution, lack of packaging and retailer markup, we really shouldn't be paying £14 for an album any more. You're choosing to ignore what the market is telling you, so we will take matters in to our own hands. Goodbye Tower Records, hello BitTorrent". The first to go were the stores (Tower, HMV, Our Price, Virgin) labels had to reinvent themselves as 360 degree merchandising machines.

The first company (Apple) to come back with a sensible counter argument ("OK, we'll reduce the price just a bit, but we'll make it super-easy to get what you want legally") won the day. They've now sold 12 billion songs, and over 10 billion apps (an unforeseen bonus with the ITunes model).

The second company to come back with a sensible argument, Spotify ("All you can eat - $10 a month), just passed 1m paying customers.

When you try to shore up an old economy model in a new economy, you're just delaying the inevitable. In a mirror of the record industry, bookstores are now closing with Borders filing for chapter 11 the other week.

Harper Collins can try this on for a while, but the market has spoken. And I'm not sure they're listening.

Facebook and Geeks

Ars Technica is one of the grand-daddies of tech blogs. It's been around for years, and about a year or so ago refocused to become even more technical, putting some daylight between it and sites like The Register.

So it's safe to say that readers of the site know their stuff technically speaking and are up to speed with the latest sites, apps and trends. Ars have a poll on their site today to gauge the use of Facebook. I voted and checked out the results - and was stunned.

As at today, 36% of readers never use Facebook and 18% have an account but never use it. More than half of all readers are just not engaged with the dominant social networking platform. Why?

A measured response. This audience won't believe the hype. They'll take a look, weigh it up and decide if it's for them. They're smart and they normally make good decisions.

Time poor. Geeks work hard and then either play hard or disengage with technology. They don't generally have endless idle hours to fill before going home time, and have better things to do with their evenings (such as they are).

Trivia-intolerant. Much of what I see on Facebook could fairly be described as pointless drivel. The Ars audience has a low boredom threshold.

A preference for privacy. Technically-savvy users understand (and may even be paranoid about) the use of their data and profile. They don't want private information shared, and prefer to control dialogue rather than have it exposed to scrutiny.

Low sociability. Lets face it - geeks aren't the most sociable of creatures.

So why is this important - who cares if geeks don't use Facebook so much?

Because they're the advance guard. Exposed to technology more than most, they will actually be representative of the rest of the population in a decade.

Busy, clued-up, a bit cynical.

Not Fading Away

To Grasmere last week, to the Innovative Interpretation of Manuscripts conference, organised by the indefatigable Jeff Cowton from the Wordsworth Trust.

As we edged along Ambleside in glorious sunshine, I mentioned to my taxi driver where I was going. She never learnt Wordsworth at school, she said, and had never been to Dove Cottage. He was just a name, and his work was irrelevant.

I spoke with Dr Luca Crispi from University College Dublin (formerly from the National Library of Ireland), showing some work we did with Joyce and Yeats manuscripts. Eighty people jammed in to the Jerwood Centre with others sitting in the lobby outside, and a further fourteen on the waiting list. It was a great event, the numbers proving that there's a real demand for information on this subject. Too often librarians can just do what they've always done. The charismatic Nat Edwards spoke about the Burns Birthplace Museum, and I was struck by the attention he'd paid to environment, and the erudite David McKitterick from Trinity College Cambridge illuminated us on the revolutions in writing.

I blogged not long ago about the centrality of special collections, and the importance of the user experience and interpretation. The conference gave me a new understanding of the need for leadership, knowledge sharing and collaboration in these areas.

Unless we can get user experience and interpretation right, it won't just be the taxi driver who doesn't know who Wordsworth is. Visitor numbers are declining at the homes of many smaller collections. I think we know how to fix this, but we will need to learn from those who already have.