e-Books as Mobile Apps?

[Bob Russell]

This is an interesting article at Book Business Magazine about e-books and mobile applications.
http://www.bookbusinessmag.com/artic...-411785_1.html

With the huge growth of e-books and the swarm of e-book devices that are coming out, everyone in publishing is interested. Many acknowledge that it's the future, even if people continue to use paper to some extent for a long long time to come.

But I've always assumed it was better to have e-book reader software and then ad books. This article got me thinking... what would it be like if the book was a whole app, and is there anyone that would prefer that approach? (It definitely would be simpler for the casual reader, even if it would annoy the advanced user.)

[susan_cassidy]

The link you posted just keeps timing out for me, so I can't read the details. Based on just the premise you gave, it seems to me that a book-as-application would be bad. A support nightmare for the publishers, too. You'd have to install the application, presumably on a laptop or smartphone, and not all laptops or smartphones are the same, so they would need tons of different versions that would run on the different places. Where is the advantage? It's hard enough to get just the text formatted by them into different formats, much less with a built-in hunk of software.

Not to mention that it wouldn't work on e-book reader devices.

[pholy]

In addition to the above criticisms, the book-as-app leads to all sorts of possibilities for malware like the Sony rootkit. Why should we trust the book publishers to write good code if they can't write good html?

[Who are you?]

But it might be an additional distribution method for the Apple's or Microsoft's mobile application stores. And it's easy, no need to figure out if Stanza can read an ePub book, instead just download the book app and you can start reading.

[ilovejedd]

Originally Posted by Who are you?

But it might be an additional distribution method for the Apple's or Microsoft's mobile application stores. And it's easy, no need to figure out if Stanza can read an ePub book, instead just download the book app and you can start reading.

It already exists in the iTunes store, mostly for public domain works. Can you imagine library management, though? It really isn't something for the avid reader.

[Madam Broshkina]

I think that a stand alone app for a book like the Da Vinci Code might be interesting. You could have the book, Links to specific locations mentioned in the book, perhaps some kind of puzzles that are based on the book. That might hold some value for some people.

[thianliongpatpoh]

Originally Posted by ilovejedd

It already exists in the iTunes store, mostly for public domain works. Can you imagine library management, though? It really isn't something for the avid reader.

While the Kindle and Sony versions for James Patterson's The Angel Experiment is widely promoted as a free ebook, the iTunes version is not. For a time, you can download The Angel Experiment as an iPhone/iPod Touch app from iTunes (US Store).
Book management for avid readers is sure got messy when we have dozens of these eBook app. I tend to like an ebook app with capability to add ebooks. So far, we have stanza, kindle app, ereader app, bnreader, and some others. Each have capability to buy ebooks from the reader app linked to their respective online stores.

cheers

[Crowl]

Originally Posted by Who are you?

But it might be an additional distribution method for the Apple's or Microsoft's mobile application stores. And it's easy, no need to figure out if Stanza can read an ePub book, instead just download the book app and you can start reading.

Apps need to get approved to go onto the app store and you would think that just having an ebook section on the app store or itunes would be a more efficient way to get the ebook out there than locking it in some custom app.

Now for some stuff, going with a more multimedia option could be the right approach e.g. a language course, but for a normal novel it seems a bit too much like doing something for the sake of it than for any actual benefit.

[fugazied]

I wonder what kind of pricing they would use for these hybrid book-apps?
The actual ebook hardware is advancing so quickly that the default readers may add this kind of functionality themselves.

For example readers will probably be able to grab locations from books and provide more information on those as you read, all kinds of multimedia stuff can be inserted into the books automatically. The internet already offers half of the functionality they listed though.. I mean why the need for an integrated dictionary app in the ebook when it could be replaced with a simple web browser in the reader.

[bill_mchale]

The article left me scratching my head regarding what actually is considered an ebook app... One of the people in the article claimed that the 'apps' were usually epubs or pdfs... and that they were licensing xml (Which would be kind of tough since they don't own xml.. they must mean a custom xml format). Ultimately though none of those formats can work without a program capable of reading them... So when they talk about e-book apps, it must include such an application specific to the book.

In any case, my general thoughts on the matter is, that custom e-book apps make sense when we are talking about reference works or other specialty books that are not generally designed to be read through. Encyclopedias, dictionaries, technical references all would probably be best served by applications designed especially to suit them. I expect in the future ebook readers might well be able to handle books like those which really can have rather dynamic content. For novels though? No, just regular epub is fine.

--
Bill

[Hellmark]

I personally wouldn't think the each book is an app approach would be all that good, because as is people are having app overload. How many people do you know on their iphones have page after page after page of apps? Not to mention, it locks you even more to that device. At least with DRM as it stands on most ebooks, you can read it on more than one device at a time, but with apps, it is your smartphone or not at all.

[WillAdams]

We've had this before --- Living Books, Voyager Books, William Gibson's memorial to his father, &c.

To my mind, it's only interesting if they extend things and provide capabilities which aren't doable in more traditional ebook formats, say something like:

http://aleph0.clarku.edu/~djoyce/jav.../elements.html

William