The world of iPhone & iPad is dangerously seductive. It’s easy to get drawn into a months-long development process to build an app filled with swipes, taps, and an array of gestures for controlling the interface. Resist that urge. Resist trying out all sorts of variations in the interface. (Explore those in prototyping tools, not in real test versions of the app.) Keep it simple. Users appreciate that.

And simple gets your app to market faster. The reality is that most apps sell very few copies unless you have a solid marketing campaign in place. As with any form of publishing there are few blockbusters in the world of apps. If you’re aiming for a successful app, have funding for four to six months of development, along with six months of marketing. Start marketing while the app is still in development.

A mentality of build it and they will come is naive. With that atitude your app will sell only a few copies on its first day of release. The app store gold rush is long over. Further, there’s no longer a bump in sales for new apps appearing in the new releases of the app store. Apple proudly cites hundreds of millions of users with credit card numbers on file with iTunes. But people are not going to find you through the app store alone. Your own marketing has to bring them.

For the last year a side venture of mine has revolved around the creation of travel guides for iPhone (and its sibling the iPod Touch). As with many startups, most of our early efforts were consumed with organizing, planning, and prototyping. In August we finally launched Endless Mile.

Our first title is the specialized guidebook Recoleta Cemetery in app and e-book formats. Endless Mile guides do not aim to encompass everything that a tourist needs to know about a city. We’re not setting out to compete with Lonely Planet, Rough Guide, Time Out, Frommer’s, Rick Steves, or any of the other major guidebook publishers. Our guides, selling for a just a few dollars each, are intended to supplement those standard resources (as well as non-traditional tools such as TripAdvisor. We don’t provide lists of hotels, restaurants, or even an exhaustive listing of sights to see. We leave that to others.

Instead, we offer destinations in context. Our guides appeal to curious travelers who want to understand why a particular building is historic or why a spot is considered a landmark. Our digital guidebooks serve as a companion for your journey, as well as a way to remember your visit and share the memory with others.

Why not just Wikipedia?

A significant number of travel apps derive their content from Wikipedia. And the blogosphere is filled with reviews praising the wonders of wondering around a city looking at whatever you like and learning about that spot from Wikipedia. We certainly encourage wandering even though our apps provide a more curated experience of a city. (My business partner in Endless Mile is a long-time tour guide for Rick Steves, so there’s a strongly guided focus to what we offer.) I use Wikipedia all the time to get a gloss on a subject but the sterile writing style forced upon entries in Wikipedia leaves me yearning for a more engaging read. For travel destinations that’s where Endless Mile fills the gap between encyclopedia article and a full-length book on the topic. And, in some cases, such as with our own app on Recoleta Cemetery: there is no other in-depth coverage in any language, in any format, than what we provide.

Perspectives of a developer turned publisher

In a series of posts I’ll be sharing my experience with developing apps and e-books. Topics to be covered include soft launching a first app, utilizing the same content for app and ebooks, establishing a publisher as a developer on the iTunes app store, building an engine as a template for producing multiple apps, offline vs online mapping, app marketing and the web, designing a five-star app, and more.

E-book apps such as Kindle and iBooks provide excellent capabilities for reading long, continuous prose whereas custom apps offer superior mechanisms for presenting narratives that significantly incorporate a range of options, including animation, audio, images, and video as well as new forms of interacting with the book.

When an app serves our purpose most will accept its limitations. We’re seeing that most clearly with all the e-book reading apps. Some people hate iBooks simulated page turning with the faux borders of a print book. Others prefer the more basic approach of the Kindle app. For reading long-form narratives most of us who have embraced e-books tolerate the idiosyncrasies of the Kindle app or iBooks since accessibility and portability far outweigh any disconcerting aspects of reading on a screen.

And that’s the difference between print and digital, and largely now the difference between e-books as apps and as ePub: apps can offer much more than reading on a screen.

The highly acclaimed Our Choice, Push Pop Press’s production of Al Gore’s text, is a remarkable example of how book apps can engage readers in learning about climate change, even offering an animated primer on how electricity is generated for those of us who never quite grasped the origin of electrical currents, underscoring the capability of an animation to convey more meaning than a static image. The static image needs more elaboration whereas the animated image is instantly graspable.

John Gruber properly analyzes the differences between e-books as known via Kindle/iBooks apps and the type of e-book offered up for example by Push Pop Press:

Kindle and iBooks seem to have the goal of reproducing what is possible in paper books. Yes, iBooks supports embedded video and audio content, but it does so in a way that feels as though Apple pondered what it would be like if you could play video on a piece of paper. Push Pop’s concept strikes me as far more ambitious: What can we do with the idea of a “book” if we eliminate the limitations of ink and paper, rather than mimic them? E-books that aren’t merely rendered by software, but rather e-books that are software.

It’s easy to see why textbooks will transition to this format and why companies are working to develop educational apps. Textbooks are not at all about reading long-form prose but about absorbing modular content that is carefully constructed to facilitate learning.

While JavaScript-enabled interactivity will emerge for ePub-based e-books and, surely eventually, also for Kindle e-books, those e-books must still be fitted within the constraints of their parent app, e.g., iBooks and Kindle.

The Web browser itself is an app. Web apps already allow us to present content without embedding it inside the visual frame of a browser window. Expect a time when the frame around e-book readers will be removed, too. Over the next couple of years e-book reading apps undoubtedly will edge closer and closer to incorporating a broader set of browser-like capabilities — most importantly full support for HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript — so that the design and layout of e-books no longer must exist in the crippled state dictated by today’s iBooks and Kindle apps. But in that case: are e-books of the future anything other than Web apps?

My daughter Mila, born on the second day of this year, will grow up in an era dominated by multi-touch tablets, with ever decreasing thickness and ever increasing capabilities. (Her adulthood likely will be spent with even more flexible devices for consuming information.) Eagerly I will introduce her to reading. Already she hears my voice babbling as I read aloud what she will one day read for herself. Her generation, however, is poised to encounter the stories of the world in manners that are as yet only partially known.

She will come of age in a time when writing is not simply textual (though the careful use of words will persist…must persist). The world of 2030, when Mila is in college, will view one form of writing as a composition elegantly mixing many elements, among which will be words, images, sound, and video. A critical aspect in the coming decades is that the careful use and mixture of those elements must exist.

What do we call these compositions?

Those are not the books we cherish today Those are not e-books. They most definitely are not enhanced e-books. Neither are they documentaries. Technically, the compositions will be contained in some type of app. Maybe they’re just websites. Ultimately, they’re simply stories: narratives for examining the themes that engage civilization, compositions through which we learn and share our experiences of the lives around us.

(And the twenty-first century form of storytelling is as much about the reader as it is about the author.)

A word loosely tossed around these days by media companies is content. Content is often defined by the container. Book necessitates text, perhaps joined by the occasional image. What about other containers? For instance, documentary films necessitate motion images joined with voice-over narration. With the iPad possibilities exist for a hybrid exhibiting capabilities not found in either print or film.

Feeding the reading space of 2030, through whatever magical hardware brand dominates the delivery of digital media, will be apps that are hybrids of books and documentaries.

If we think of the iPad, though, as supporting a new genre then we should step back to examine the whole experience of reading, even asking what is non-fiction? (For the sake of this discussion I leave fiction for another day.) Why do people read and spend time with non-fiction books? Ultimately, I suspect the answer revolves around learning. The desire to learn prompts us to read and, preferably, have an enjoyable experience while doing so. Similarly, that desire to learn in a satisfying manner drives us to view documentaries.

The challenge is in exploring how to leverage the tablet platform for storytelling. The iPad brings a new way of reading. Likewise, it carries forward a new way of writing.

While the publishing community scrambles for today’s solutions, the real burden is on all of us to ensure that tomorrow’s writers & editors understand the elements of style required for creating the publications that will dominate the mid-century. My daughter will be less than forty years of age in 2050. Aspects of the world will be unthinkably different then. Much will remain the same, but the way humans communicate through media will continue its long trajectory. Perhaps what we’re doing now with apps will someday appear as quaint as magic lanterns or the early years of cinema. Undoubtedly, the techniques of writing and composition in a tablet-based digital environment will evolve with time, eventually forming accepted practices that support different types of reading experiences.

I find myself more interested in the world of apps, but I come across few apps I want to buy or even download for free.

I am reading a lot more lately, a lot of e-books, and there are plenty of e-books I want to buy. So what’s the problem?

Time

The amount of time I have for reading long-form narratives (say, 300 pages/80,000 words) is limited. Currently, I can reasonably read anywhere from 10 – 15 books a year. Some years ago I might have read 20 – 25 books a year, even though at that time I would buy on average more than 100 books a year. Most of those titles languished on my shelves. I simply could not have gone into a bookstore without buying at least one and usually two books.

Note: my e-book buying habits are very different. I don’t buy an e-book unless I know I have time to read it right then. I’m buying many less books now, except for the rare occasion when I still frequent a print bookstore. (That occasion is rare since I live in rural Argentina where no bookstores exist for miles.)

I love long-form narratives, both fiction and non-fiction. These works engage my imagination, exercising the mind. They don’t need enhancing with audio or video. That’s something different, other forms of narrative. I like those too, but not intermixed with my e-books.

With all my fondness for massive chunks of text, why are apps so appealing?

Apps stimulate my mind in ways not possible with long-form narratives. Apps have the potential to make more use of our senses.

There’s a full-color screen. Make use of it. Carefully. Thoughtfully. Words and letters are simply graphic marks that convey meaning. Visual communication through design presents other ways of enhancing meaning of words and letters when used intelligently.

Along with the graphical ways in which an app is structured and presented, there are the photographic, audio, and video aspects. Not all that need be present in every app. The app should focus more on substance and not overwhelm with possibilities.

Apps present opportunities for structuring and designing content into easier to grasp, bite-size components.

When time is a factor (as it usually is in most of our lives), then apps become a form of snacking on content or perhaps a small meal in itself. But I still want intellectual content with that. Not junk food. Most apps these days are still candy bars but apps also can be like pear & broccoli. More quality content is needed in the app world. It’ll come, I’m sure. I suspect at some point in 2011 I will spend more money buying apps than buying e-books.

Meanwhile, here’s a nice free app – a piece of broccoli – to snack on from the Poetry Foundation. Love the spin feature!