Are Programmers Ruining Ebooks?

[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.

....

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

[ilovejedd]

Right... Cause we need a separate iPad app full of pop-ups and multimedia content for every single book...

[Giggleton]

From the title I thought this was going be a thread about epub standards and what not, perhaps that would be more enlightening than the article?

Plain vanilla text has been and will always be good enough.

[RainingLemur]

For some kids books, I can see this being a cool thing to have. But...like jedd's lover up above said... We don't need a separate multimedia "app" for every book.

[Graham]

Originally Posted by Giggleton

Plain vanilla text has been and will always be good enough.

Always?

Google image search for illuminated manuscripts

Graham

[kennyc]

[Daithi]

I like the Alice in Wonderland book. It has some great colors, nice graphics, and just looks cool. This type of thing certainly wouldn't translate to most books, but programming integrated with certain books provides an advantage that traditional books can't touch. This is especially true of any book that tries to teach you something. Just imagine textbooks that include interactive problems, or cookbooks with videos of food preparation, or home improvement books with videos, or a book on card counting at blackjack with an inline game, etc.

[bigtext]

My concern is that dedicated reading devices are going to go away because of all of this. Take a look at the news from B&N last week. Their sales were up, but these were sales for the color\tablet versions of their reader. They announced that the e-ink reader sales were below expectations. They manufactured too many. I would be curious to know what Amazon's numbers are because if they took a similiar hit and the Fire was selling well then there is a strong incentive for these companies to just produce one reader which is a color LCD. Sure you can read books on these devices, but not as comfortably as you can with e-ink.

There is another dimension here beyond eye strain or battery life that is discussed quite thoroughly in a book called The Shallows by Nicholas Carr. And that is immersing yourself in a book without distraction for a few hours really is training a type of focused flow state that is very desirable. This jumping all around with hyperlinks or videos or whatever creates a very distracted and unfocused mind. I used to be a big reader before the internet and computers, but got away from it from years. I'm convinced Carr's ideas are correct from my own personal experience and I've gotten back to reading with an improvement in some of my ability to stay focused and maintain attention. I don't think many non-readers whose only reading is on the internet can really appreciate the difference. But this is the majority of people and such people see little value in slow, black and white, e-ink displays. And I fear it is they who will ultimately set the market for what a "reader" is (i.e. Kindle Fire, Nook Tablet)

[xg4bx]

we may as well just have big boy versions of the kids books with the sound effect buttons on the side.

the only things i could see multimedia being useful for are non-fiction works i.e. footage of ww2 naval combat or whatever. i don't need some programmer or suit to tell me what a laser or zombie should sound like.

[Sweetpea]

This works great on books where you already have "enhanced" paper books: books with popups and other interactive stuff. Yes, you already have them in paper. All children's books, naturally. Usually geared towards children that are learning to read.


Will this really carry on to grown-up books? Doubt it.

Edit: books like these:

[carpetmojo]

[QUOTE=RainingLemur;........... But...like jedd's lover up above said... We don't need a separate multimedia "app" for every book.[/QUOTE]

Yeah, but, come on...... reading books is soooo hard and kind of... unnatural.

You have to concentrate on words for goodness sake........

[Sweetpea]

Originally Posted by carpetmojo

Yeah, but, come on...... reading books is soooo hard and kind of... unnatural.

You have to concentrate on words for goodness sake........

You're forgetting the worst part: you need to imagine what things and people look like!

Originally Posted by bigtext

My concern is that dedicated reading devices are going to go away because of all of this.

I'm confident that dedicated ereaders and eink readers are going to be around for many years, mostly for the reasons that you suggested. There may be fewer companies selling dedicated ereaders, but that's mostly because tablets will have higher volumes. (Partially because more people will want general purpose tablets and partially because there are more ways to convince people to upgrade their devices.)

[Graham]

Originally Posted by Sweetpea

You're forgetting the worst part: you need to imagine what things and people look like!

... knowing that some film or TV director's likely to come along later and ruin even that for you!

Graham

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by bigtext

My concern is that dedicated reading devices are going to go away because of all of this. Take a look at the news from B&N last week. Their sales were up, but these were sales for the color\tablet versions of their reader. They announced that the e-ink reader sales were below expectations. They manufactured too many. I would be curious to know what Amazon's numbers are because if they took a similiar hit and the Fire was selling well then there is a strong incentive for these companies to just produce one reader which is a color LCD. Sure you can read books on these devices, but not as comfortably as you can with e-ink.

There is another dimension here beyond eye strain or battery life that is discussed quite thoroughly in a book called The Shallows by Nicholas Carr. And that is immersing yourself in a book without distraction for a few hours really is training a type of focused flow state that is very desirable. This jumping all around with hyperlinks or videos or whatever creates a very distracted and unfocused mind. I used to be a big reader before the internet and computers, but got away from it from years. I'm convinced Carr's ideas are correct from my own personal experience and I've gotten back to reading with an improvement in some of my ability to stay focused and maintain attention. I don't think many non-readers whose only reading is on the internet can really appreciate the difference. But this is the majority of people and such people see little value in slow, black and white, e-ink displays. And I fear it is they who will ultimately set the market for what a "reader" is (i.e. Kindle Fire, Nook Tablet)

Thanks for that! There is the Atlantic article here:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/...s-stupid/6868/