[kennyc]

Chris Stevens on Alice for the iPad, Book Apps, and Toronto: a Q & A
By The TRB | Issue Two | January 9, 2012

alice and cards 241x300 Chris Stevens on Alice for the iPad, Book Apps, and Toronto: a Q & A TRB: Released in the spring of 2010, Alice for the iPad became a huge, Oprah-featured hit that is credited with convincing reading publics of how book apps could be even more fun and engaging than paper books. How many times has Alice been downloaded by now? Were you surprised by its reception? How have traditional book publishers and book reviewers reacted to it?

CS: Alice is installed on over 500,000 iPads. The reception was a surprise, especially since most of the design work was done out of my bedroom in London. The initial reaction from traditional book publishers was one of awe and confusion. Alice was only out a few days before I found myself in a boardroom at HarperCollins explaining to a bunch of people in suits how we’d managed to beat them to the top of the book charts on the iPad. For a while they thought I had the key to the future of publishing—they thought that if they could extract the secret to what made Alice a success, they could revitalize the market. The excitement surrounding the iPad led a lot of publishers to suspect that Apple might be able to bolster the industry, but—just as it always is—great content, not technology makes a popular app. I told them what I did, but they didn’t seem to get it.

Book reviewers were generally positive about Alice, although The New York Times wrote a scathing piece about how the massive popularity of Alice for the iPad would lead to the extinction of the careful-reader, reducing our attention spans and quiet engagement with literature. The NYT wrote of Alice: “The question is what will become of the readers we’ve been—quiet, thoughtful, patient, abstracted—in a world where interactive can be too tempting to ignore.”

But they forgot to actually put a question mark at the end of that question, so perhaps all hope of “thoughtful” readers is already lost – for the NYT at least.

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http://www.torontoreviewofbooks.com/...vens-on-alice/