When you add up the costs of shipping and printing, paper books get expensive very quickly. EBooks become an obvious alternative.
Then the problem becomes — which formats and devices do I support?
I’m a great believer that much innovation comes from never solving the problem as stated–and the eBook industry’s solutions ignore some fundamental problems.
Most eBooks deliver the type but not the typesetting. We worked very hard to choose a typeface and layout style that would create a definitive feel for Richard Geller’s books. The cover designs are unique and provocative. Line and paragraph breaks have been carefully manipulated at the bottom and top of every page. Good book design goes way beyond the cover and involves much more than dumping a manuscript into a template. When you lose the design, you don’t lose the story within the book, but you lose the story about the book—the story of how the author and designer cared about the details and held to standards that can only be read between the lines if they’re excellently typeset.
Then, there’s the idea of what devices support what platforms? Isn’t this just an outdated content-control model that failed as soon as people could peel music files off of the CD-containers they were forced to buy along with them? The music industry viciously fought MP3 downloads for years, and music fans returned that “loyalty” by sharing as many files as they could. An informal poll of my University students indicated that “nobody buys CDs any more.” The record companies got greedy and instead of embracing a new distribution system, they filibustered until Apple and Amazon rushed in to rescue them in exchange for a huge slice of their profits. And now, I’m supposed to buy a Kindle or some other piece of hardware that will end up in a landfill two years from now? I don’t think so.
And I’m supposed to carry a laptop, a phone-sort-of-device-thingy AND an eBook reader? I’m pissed enough that I can’t put my cell phone SIM card into my laptop, but I already have a large-screen device (the laptop) that can display beautiful color content. Someone is playing the hardware game with me. (And I’ll pass on that blue ray player and download my movies, too thankyouverymuch). So…
• We wanted an eBook that would run on the desktops of macs, PCs and linux machines.
• It would have to be internet-independent so someone could read a book on an airplane or anywhere there is no net access.
• It would preserve the exact design of the printed book upon which it was based.
• It would look and feel like a real book – with tactile pages and a sense of ink on paper.
We had seen flipbooks on websites before, and I’d even made a few of them. Numerous software engines and online services for this effect are available but I’d never seen one for the desktop. Also, most of them had very technical-looking navigation buttons that interfered with the look and feel of a book. Many worked by converting each page to a JPEG image that would distort or blur if resized. So additionally…
• Our eBook would have to have a good-looking user interface.
• It would have to load pages either as text or as vector graphics that could be scaled without distortion.
The first step was to buy a commercially available Flash pageFlip engine which cost about $75. This one had the added advantage of loading only a set number of pages into memory at a time – making it possible to get the book on-screen without having to load several hundred pages first. The source files were available which made it possible to completely customize the look and feel – and also to hack in features like a zoom slider that weren’t included with the original software. We also omitted a few features that weren’t relevant. Then, each book was exported to an Adobe PDF file and then split into one PDF for each page of the book. Each page was then converted to an individual Adobe® Flash™ SWF file which preserved the type and typesetting as vector graphics and had the added benefit of offering a very small file size for each page.
This gave us the online versions – leaving one last challenge; how to bring the books to the desktop.
Enter Adobe® AIR™ – a technology that allows anyone to wrap content made with web-development tools up into a package that can be downloaded and double-clicked on any desktop. We believe we are the first to launch AIR™ Ebooks and we think we’ve done a pretty good job of bringing the reading experience back into the eReader. I’ve had several people say they never thought they’d read a book on-screen until they saw our software.
There have been a few objections:
Are you planning to release eBook versions that are compatible with my insert device name here?
We may but it’s not an immediate priority. We have nothing against the Kindle or against Amazon or against any other eReader technology, but in the long run, we feel that the whole model of creating business opportunity by coupling hardware and software together is not a catalyst for good will and it ultimately adds more useless bulk to landfills as hardware obsolesces. Skip this next paragraph if you don’t like technical answers.
As for iPhones, gPhones and insert device letter here Phones, we’re fans, but again, there’s this unfortunate model of different companies forcing customers to use a proprietary application store. It didn’t work for the record industry and it won’t work for the software industry. These companies will ultimately have to choose between the proprietary model which offers short-term profits at the expense of long-term customer-loyalty and an open model that allows web and Adobe® Flash™ and AIR® developers to create mobile device applications. The choice challenges them because these technologies have the capacity to bypass things like the iTunes store. I think opening up is a good option for device companies anyway because the iTunes store has some other competitive advantages (such as huge selection and an existing tie-in to Apple’s very useful cross-platform iTunes software) that will likely keep it relevant. Also, many developers will be happy to distribute their software through an existing App Store as it’s an established, pre-wired distribution channel. Google’s Android phone operating system may be an interesting catalyst for this change as it’s open source and has few restrictions. In fact, it’s another example of hardware and software independence. Adobe® Flash Player™ has already been demonstrated on both the iPhone and the gPhone and I suspect that once it’s released, it will blow open these new development and distribution opportunities for people like myself who are web developers but haven’t invested in learning the programming skills for device-specific development.
The long and the short of it is that large eBook reader devices like the Kindle will likely be replaced by better laptop technologies that have longer battery life and more versatile screens. Kindle is not a difficult investment to make as far as file-conversion, etc. but we’re not sure we want to sell anyone “just the text” of a book. Why would someone buy less book at twice our price, anyway?
It’s a matter of not-very-much-more time before Adobe® AIR™ and Adobe® Flash™ make it to your mobile device of choice. Ideally, our eBooks could be downloaded and launched as they are, but it would not be a huge amount of work to customize them for mobile platforms. That’s the advantage of developing on a web platform like Flash™. If we’re two years early, it’s okay. The books won’t expire.
I also envision a variety of upcoming hybrid devices—tablets, etc.—that would offer compromises in size and functionality between a laptop and a PDA/phone. One can only guess what capabilities these devices will or won’t have but it’s a safe bet that many of the things they won’t do will be related to features that are intentionally disabled by the developers for purposes of keeping larger devices competitive. However, with enough time and competition, things will open up or get bypassed. I think our eBook technology is poised to take advantage of the most platforms in the shortest amount of time – even if that isn’t June, 2009 reality. We’re not married to anyone’s hardware even if we did get to the church a day early for the ceremony.
We’ll be taking the eBook concept into some new places over the next year, but I’m pleased with what we’ve come up with. You can find the first book, Whose Pot Is This? inside http://www.aSiteAboutSomething.com in the India temple Panorama (sorry, that’s the best I’ll do as far as hints) or you can open the “Emporium” with the cash-register icon and download that eBook for free from there. It’s a good book, and you may find that it’s content is just as relevant as the story of its creation.
Happy eReading.