The day after. This is a book design blog, so you’d expect me to write about iBooks, the dazzling ePub reader built into the iPad. But I’m not. (Well, I will a bit). And I’m not going to write about what features are lacking in iPad (first generation, after all) or if there’s even a market for this type of device: duh. And I’m not going to waste time debating the backlight. There are a lot more important things to do, such as figuring out how to design content for this new device. Notice: I said designing content, not designing e-books.
iBooks is a response to the market-driven phenomenon of people wanting to read hundreds of pages of text on a computer screen. Is that the best we can do, read text on a screen? Personally, I want to use an ultra-modern computing device for engaging with content in ways not possible merely with text. (Of course, I’m talking primarily about non-fiction here. I love literary fiction & the interplay of words, sentence after sentence, though I still prefer my novels in print. But that’s just a personal preference.)
And I’m not talking about enhanced e-books, which often mean no more than just some multimedia tacked onto the end. Adherents of e-books are constantly stressing the importance of breaking away from the concept of the printed page. Yet, the ePub reader on iPad uses a page concept & strongly reinforces the concept of the physical book (transplanted to the screen).
I’m interested in breaking away from the concept of the page & the physical book. But I’m not too interested in a lengthy stream of re-flowing text. The page, the physical book, & even the re-flowing text are all great in their own ways if you want is to read 80,000 words on a topic. But I seldom have that much time. But I am interested in learning. And don’t we read non-fiction because we want to learn?
Maybe I only need a stimulating 10,000 words arranged in even smaller, bite-sized chunks seasoned with imagery for obtaining an overview of a topic. A multi-touch screen allows me to interact with the content, furthering my retention of ideas. A playful, game-like component pulls me further into the narrative. (Remember, narratives don’t have to be linear or even textual.) I would buy such a product, a content app that started me along the journey of exploring an unfamiliar topic. I love to learn, I love to read. So what’s next: I would then purchase a more in-depth book on the topic (either in print or as an e-book).
Listen up publishers: you just sold me two separate products. Think about that.
How can digital media aid in learning about a topic in a visually engaging manner? That’s the challenge we should address in designing for the iPad. The iPad gets us a big step closer.
As I think about designing content for the iPad, I’m not thinking so much about ePub. I want to breakout of whatever constraints & restrictions imposed by the ePub rendering engine. The iPad provides a robust canvas. When I think of paid content on the iPad, I’m not just thinking e-books. I’m also thinking apps.
The app development environment for iPhone is superb and is the basis for the iPad SDK. There’s an NDA around the iPad SDK beta. So, no specifics here.
Here at sorodesign we are working to develop some apps for the iPhone & the iPad that revolve around content but are not at all what one would think of as e-books or even enhanced e-books. We’re experimenting. Designing for the iPhone & the iPad requires creativity. That’s exciting.
And what is required from all of us for devices like the iPhone, the iPad, & similar products from other vendors that will come along: new ways of writing, editing, designing, publishing, & reading.
As a high school teacher of media design and science courses, I’m wondering at the possibilities of creating iPad apps or e-books that act as interactive textbooks (say for a course in inorganic chemistry). Physical textbooks are as obsolete as chalkboards, and they’re pricing themselves out of existence, not to mention they’re out of date even before they get to print. So what do you see as the future of the textbook on the iPad? Steve Jobs mentioned it briefly in his keynote presentation. I envision an interactive experience for students that has layers of depth – like a series of nested sidebars, each one delving deeper into a subject (such as how beryllium s refined, for example) and going as far as a student has interest in exploring. It would link to on-line content and have multimedia fully integrated into the app’s interface, perhaps even virtual lab experiments that take advantage of the accelerometer. The possibilities are very exciting; the iPad will be much more useful for education that iPods or Palms simply because they are larger, yet extremely portable. As a media designer and science educator, I cant’ wait to get involved.
I’m an art director for magazines and I have been eagerly awaiting the iPad launch. Unfortunately, the introduction did not really centre around the future of magazines and newspapers, as I would have expected. All I saw was an uninspired page of the NYT and some other thing I do not even remember.
I do want to give designing a magazine for iPad a go and develop a paid magazine, including audio and video. But how does that work? How do I make a multimedia mag for iPad? Do I have to learn Cocoa now? So basically build an app every month that people buy a paid subscription for? There are so many questions still. If anybody can shed some light on this I would be very grateful.
@David: I think the iPad is a great platform for interactive textbooks. I share your vision for how digital textbooks might function on the iPad. What you described certainly seems possible on the iPad, depending upon the skills of the developer implementing the app. Easy to use tools for non-programmers may still be a year or two (or more) away. Regardless, the key to designing a great app is to figure out all the functionality in detail before even beginning the programming. That’s the first step and can be done without any knowledge of Objective C programming. Apple provides an excellent Human Interface Guidelines document that describes the functionality of the iPad. (That document is currently restricted to developers, but anyone can sign up as a developer, pay the $99 fee, and get the document.)
I love what you mentioned about the accelerometer in science experiments! The interactivity controls, along with flexible user interface elements, are what makes the iPad such a superior platform for learning environments. It’s unfortunate that Apple didn’t have a better demo for the content possibilities.
@Marcus: That NYT page was uninspiring.
The big question many will pose is whether you should create such multimedia magazines in ePub or as an optimized app for iPad. (Of course, PDF is also an option with such a large screen; multimedia can be embedded in PDF but this really doesn’t take advantage of the iPad’s interactive capabilities.) While ePub does support multimedia content, the display capabilities are going to vary widely (& wildly) among different e-book reading devices. And we don’t yet really know the display capabilities of the iPad for ePub or even if iPad’s ePub parser is accessible outside the iBooks app. But for the iPad I definitely would go for an optimized app. At the same time, an app also could be optimized for the iPhone. Apple highlighted the capability for any iPhone app to work on the iPad by doubling the pixels; But I think that’s probably a stopgap measure and won’t work too well on apps that are highly textual. Of course, it’s the iPad, not the iPhone, where a magazine layout can really shine.
You don’t need to learn Cocoa. But iPad apps, like those for the iPhone, are built with a special SDK (provided by Apple) utilizing Objective C & Cocoa Touch. It’s a bit daunting if you don’t have some experience with a C-like programming language. But those with experience in a scripting language & a good knowledge of programming principles can pick up how to develop for iPhone/iPad by studying the extensive documentation provided by Apple, along with a wealth of third-party books. Since the iPad uses the same underlying system as the iPhone, any books on iPhone development will be beneficial to those wanting to develop on the iPad.
For anyone lacking the necessary programming: read the iPad Human Interface Guidelines (HIG), currently only available to paid developers. Then, as I mentioned earlier, think through fully what the app should do, e.g., how the magazine should display & function on the iPad. (The HIG is required reading for understanding the capabilities of the device.) Then on paper: describe exactly how the magazine would function. And then use PhotoShop, Fireworks, or another graphics program to devise a mockup of each and every screen. Once you have all that thought out then you could hire a developer. All iPhone developers will be able to develop for iPad. I think the average hourly rate for an iPhone developer is $125-$150/hour. If you have everything thought out in super-incredible detail then it’s really going to help the developer and save time and costs. Otherwise, the developer will charge you for consulting, helping to analyze the requirements, & design the functionality of the app.
For a magazine app, which is likely to have a similar style & functionality from issue to issue, then I don’t think you want to develop individual apps for each issue. Develop one app that offers all the desired functionality & works as a container for individual issues. Offer this initial app (which is really only a container) for free, then charge a subscription for each issue. (It’s possible to sell content from within an app.) The container app can retrieve the content for each new issue from a secure web server & download it to the iPad. Now, this is where xml comes in handy to insert the content into the appropriately styled sections of the app. The container app also could notify the user that a new issue is ready. (BTW: The free container app is also a good way of promoting the magazine & gaining more readers/subscribers.) There also would need to be some way of specifying the desired functionality of each issue, as the arrangement of articles may vary from issue to issue but probably a simple xml listing could work for that. Whew, this is a complex program. Not insurmountable, but unlikely to be whipped up in someone’s spare time.
Of course, it’s possible to do individual apps for each issue if one wanted to go that route.
I think the iPad has great potential for magazines & allow us to keep the concept of those wonderful page layouts that art directors dream up, while also equipping the content with audio & video. I suspect companies will emerge eventually that offer services & systems for supporting the development of magazine-based content in a highly interactive manner on the iPad.
Meanwhile, a simple but elegant solution for retaining the look-and-feel of a magazine is to go through a service like Exact Editions. I really like what they’re doing, plus they have an iPhone app. And I suspect they will have something for the iPad. I wonder if they’re doing anything in regards to incorporating audio & video? And I just became aware of Zinio, which is doing something along the same lines with magazines & iPhones.
Anyway, the most important thing for you to do is to brainstorm & understand the possibilities. Then decide if you want to tackle the programming yourself or partner/contract with someone on that.
I’ve been searching the internet to find someone who shares a certain vision of mine. As a student, I would love to see text books become as deep in media and interactivity as you are describing, but I’ll be out of school by the time the fun interactive textbooks ever come out.
What I want to see, however, is a platform for narrative fiction that interacts with you, leading the reader through various mediums into the story. I want to see the first page of my story, the part about sitting on a bench watching a sunset. I want to see this page with black text on a background of pink to blue gradient, mimicking the sunset that I describe. As the reader continues to read, the colors change, just as the sky in the story would. When the reader gets to the part where I talk about the insects buzzing in the trees, I want the reader to slowly realize that he is can hear, faintly, the chirping of locusts. I want music to stir and swell at moments and when the customer finishes the page, I want the text to be white on a background of a starry skyscape.
I used to want to be a filmmaker, but since it takes an army to make a film, I decided to just write literature instead. Now I wish there were a way to create a cinematic experience out of reading a book. I think, perhaps, its possible.
One thing makes me doubt, though. One time, when I was a kid, we found the chasis of junked go-kart. We were excited at the possibilities and potential the thing held. We began toying with it, adding discarded lawnmower wheels to it, a plywood exterior, and about the time I was contemplating the logistics of putting in a motor, I realized that I was making a junky go-cart. This was disappointing because in the feverish excitement when I first claimed the scrap metal in the first place, my intentions, in no certain terms, were to make something spectacular. I realized in a classic sobering childhood moment that no matter what I did, I couldn’t get away from making the junky go-cart anything other than a junky go-cart.
Maybe a book is a book and a movie is a movie and never the ‘tween shall meet. I hope not, though. ‘Cause I’m getting the iPad and if this ‘tweener technology flops, so goes my hopes for cinematic literature as well as my $499.
A day or two after the iPad launch I emailed Apple and asked whether they had any guidelines, or plans for guidelines, that would give book designers some sense of path in designing eBooks for the iPad. Initially, I, too, am interested in interactive non-fiction books that allow the reader to hook up with more–in fact, multimedia–information on what they’re reading about.
I got an acknowledgment of my email another day or two later. And nothing since.
Perhaps many, many freelance book designers ought to email similar queries to Apple. I’m not sure I see the iPad getting much of a push from simply repurposing the works of major trade publishers. I really think its future lies in new work from independents working for al kinds of publishers: big, small, and self-.