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?

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!

What has bought about my change in reading habits? The shift from print to digital. Could it be the iPad? No. Could it be the Kindle? No, not on its own. It’s the handy, little iPod Touch.

A couple of years ago I scoffed at the notion that any serious reader would even bother reading on the iPhone and its miniature screen. Surely that couldn’t be comfortable, so I thought. Then I tried it. Works for me. It’s not the optimal reading device but the iPod Touch is incredibly comfortable to me for reading.

I’ve always done much of my reading in bed at night. That worked well when I didn’t have to worry about bothering anyone with light from the bedside lamp. But now I read mostly in a room that is entirely dark. Try that with a Kindle.

Someone will surely scream, “You’ll ruin your eyes.” I’m not sure. Certainly it can’t be worse than reading in very low light. But my eyes feel quite comfortable with the display if I turn the brightness down to the lowest setting and set the page background to a creamy yellow. (I also prefer my print books on a cream colored paper rather than bright white.)

I do find the Kindle an acceptable e-reading device but the need for a light source is somewhat irritating, but maybe that’s just me. And I’m certainly not anti-Kindle or attempting to argue that the iPod Touch should be everyone’s choice for e-reading. I do like using the Kindle app for the iPod Touch. Ultimately, I think the Kindle app on various platforms is going to be more important than the Kindle itself.

But I love reading in the dark. I’m again spending a couple of hours reading each night. I’ve missed that. Glad to have reading back in my life.

Over the past few months my reading has shifted entirely to digital.

That’s largely due to circumstance. Down here in rural Argentina it’s not easy to come across a bookstore, particularly any stocking more than a few titles in English. What is a heavy reader like myself supposed to do? Even though I have a stockpile of unread books in print, I’ve always been one to want more reading material. Constantly. Digital serves that purpose.

I wonder if I still lived back in the U.S. (or some area with reasonable access to a well-stocked bookstore, library, or even reliable Amazon deliveries) if my reading habits would have changed this dramatically. I tend to think not. Even now, if I really had the choice then I would choose print. But that’s largely a personal fondness for printed books. Yet, maybe not.

The technologies are evolving rapidly. I can now envision a future without print books, but POD might provide that option for a long time to those who prefer their reading printed. I have long thought that the only printed books that would survive as off-set productions would be highly designed books that made use of quality paper and materials. That probably will survive as a niche market. But with the rapid adoption of tablets (iPad, for now), then even those books will have a digital counterpart. All of those books will have beautifully designed digital versions. Some buyers/readers will prefer digital, some will choose the gorgeous print version.

I don’t sense the physical book will be dead in 5 years, as predicted. But that point is certainly hurtling towards us faster than I would have thought a year or two ago. Ultimately, maybe it will be a generational change, another ten to fifteen years: 2020-2025.

Ah, and my choice of e-reading platform? It’s mobile but not what you think. More on that in the next post.