There’s little to report at first glance. I’m concerned about the books staying in the cloud, but we’ll come back to that another time. For now, there’s not much to differentiate the iPad experience from reading GBooks on the web.

The menus are basic. There’s an index, there’s search, there’s a (nice) progress bar:

This is good though – gimmicky in this context, but kind of wonderful if you’re reading something old (or the OCR is particularly terrible) – the ability to switch between the flowing text, and Google’s original scans:

All standard system fonts present and correct. Increased/decreased text size (and, oddly, three different line heights). Night mode.

But not much more. No selecting text, no copy and paste, which is useless, and means no bookmarking, for one big, obvious thing. This is already a killer feature for me, and I’d be interested to know if that’s across all the apps, and interested to see how long it lasts. There are, it’s just possible, murky legal times ahead for bookmarking in electronic texts. Google might be affected by this. Or they might just be rubbish.

And then I saw this:

Google I love you.

* Is there something interesting in the big players’ default offerings? iBooks arrives with, if I remember correctly, Winnie the Pooh, Kindle with the New American Dictionary.

At the weekend, the fruits of several months of work at Apt finally hit the App Store in the form of Enhanced Editions‘ first title: The Death of Bunny Munro, by Nick Cave.

Enhanced Editions ebooks are a different breed to most, as our mission is to work closely with publishers to obtain the best material, and take advantage of every possible benefit of the ereading experience. This means taking every feature you’ve come to expect from good ereaders – including bookmarking, full-text search, adjustable fonts and type sizes, night mode, tilt scrolling (on the iPhone) and so on – and adding exclusive additional content, and the real coup: full text-to-audiobook synchronisation. The latter means you can switch between the text and the audio without losing your place, and we hope it’ll get people excited, and prove that ebooks really can go to new places, over and above the physical book.

For my part, I’ve written a number of posts over at the Enhanced Editions blog explaining some of the thinking behind the design and user experience, such as serif vs sans-serif and audiobook integration. Other members of the team have also written about designing icons for the iPhone and our attitude to DRM.

We’ve been working on Enhanced Editions for just over a year, and it’s been great to have been part of the team, and great to have produced an app we’re proud of. There’s more to come here – and we should really talk about ebook pricing and convergence at some point – but until Obama arrives, go check out Bunny Munro in the App Store now.

*

P.S. The trailer’s another fine job by our friends at Asylum Films, who made 25th Estate: This Is Where We Live.

Really quite appalled by this, from Saturday’s Grauniad. Sony should sue. There’s a case that it’s about R&J, not the Reader, but I’m not buying it. Lazy, stupid, annoying.

It’s a thought, isn’t it?

After initial doubts – why would Amazon deliberately waste all that investment in the Kindle hardware? – I did come to the conclusion that the Kindle and iPhone demographics, while they certainly overlap, are by no means mutually inclusive. I don’t have figures on this, but my presumption is that the iPhone’s younger and/or early-adopter audience is not quite the same as the Kindle’s slightly older, less techy, but more hardcore booky audience (heavy genre readers, in romance and sci-fi, reading up to several books a week, are the core Kindle audience, I’ve heard). The Kindle’s larger screen and seamless connection to Amazon speak to a different audience than the iPhone’s portability and rootlessness.

Thoughts?

• Linking Books with the Web-Way of Thinking
• Treating Ebooks Like Software
• A Big Boost to Books as Apps?

I just want to voice something that has been bothering me a little about this (and given some current projects, may come back to bite me):

Books are not applications, or software. They are words.

I think there’s a danger inherent in regarding books as something to be run rather than something to be read. This argument is a bit hazy because a lot of book apps (such as booksinmyphone‘s Java apps) are really just wrappers for the text.

But by creating multiple versions of books – rather than agreeing on a single format (e.g. but not necessarily, ePub) and building separate software to display that – we’re heading down a road of locked-down, device-specific book technology that is antithetical to the nature of the medium, and costly to publishers. If only those publishers that can afford to spend the time (not necessarily money, the time alone has a cost) creating huge ranges of different applications can get their books onto the marketplace, it won’t be the rosy future for niche literature that some versions of the ebook story predict.

The sheer replication involved – reproducing the same lines of code over and over again for each book in a library – bothers even my low sense of efficiency and programmatic elegance too.

Of course, this development is not of the choosing of anyone in books. It’s a short-termist, technological hack, to get books onto closed platforms like the iPhone and other smart phones, and in large part it’s caused by the development of the App Store, which provides us with a sneaky way of getting book texts onto phones while there’s no equivalent of the iTunes Store for text files. But I’d much rather see a Book Store selling files to be read by standalone ereader apps than this glut of mini-apps.

Such a path would not prevent publishers building their own, branded and self-promoting, ereader apps, as I’ve previously suggested, but it would massively widen the interoperability of ebooks and ereaders, which readers will only thank us for. Perhaps we should be looking at some other hacks instead?

“The blogosphere has been buzzing since the App Store launched over last weekend with comments about ‘dozy publishers’ who have missed a great opportunity to make their books available on the iPhone. But apart from a few digital PR points scored against competing publishers, there doesn’t seem to me to be any huge value in first mover advantage here for publishers, unless we want to make the decision to become software developers.”

Sara Lloyd has responded over at The Digitalist to the many comments (including ours) on this issue. She strikes a note of caution, and suggests that publishers adopt a ‘wait-and-see’ attitude – in some contrast to her excellent, and must-read, book publisher’s manifesto for the 21st Century.

But what I’m interested in is the suggestion that publishers are not in the business of developing software. I think there’s an interesting discussion here, and a couple of points to be made.

Firstly, publishers – particularly Macmillan – are already in the business of developing software. Macmillan’s MPS Technologies division built the software, BookStore, which runs key parts of many publisher’s businesses, including their own. Indeed, they even launched ebook delivery sites based on this technology, although these appear to have gone offline. The big publishers employ developers for the web, for their IT systems, for much else, most of the time.

Secondly, who better than publishers to craft such software? Most ereader technologies are built by techies who put the technology before the reading experience: the combined skills of typesetters, print designers, editors and technologists that only publishers possess could, with the right direction, produce a far superior ereader app than any we’ve seen so far.

The development of the book has always been driven by publishers. Bookselling is a business, and while I’m far less convinced of the ‘death of the book’ than appearances may suggest, a terminal attitude of ‘wait and see’ does not indicate a healthy, growing industry. Publishers have the tools at their disposal. Why not use them?

The former is definitely better, and the reader of choice so far appears to be Lexcycle’s Stanza, an open epub reader that’s loosely tied to FeedBooks, enabling you to pull down a bunch of free ebooks directly, or search for a whole lot more. Getting ebooks (or any other files) onto your iPhone/iPod Touch is not easy however, which is where the standalone books come in.

AppEngines currently have a whole bunch of these in the App Store – the usual assortment of out-of-print classics and weirdness. They’ve swamped the Entertainment category, in fact, to the extent that they’ve posted an apology on their site: “We share your concerns that our ebook applications are taking up too much space in the App Store. … We will not submit any more books until the situation is resolved.”

No such apology from ZappTek however, whose Legends series of books are also highly visible in the App Store Entertainment category. But wait, closer inspection shows that all these books are by one author: Michael Stackpole.

So what’s happened here is that a single author (or friend of) has got a stranglehold on new, accessible literature on the iPhone. The iPhone is currently the most sought-after piece of tech on the planet. It stands a very good chance of leapfrogging the frankly rubbish Kindles, Iliads and Sony Readers of this world to become the default ereader of choice. And one man has seen that, and done something about it. It’s the literary equivalent of shouting FIRST! in the comments. I think he kind of knows it too.

Anyway, for chutzpah, genius, foresight: booktwo salutes him.

… and wonders why if it only takes one guy to craft a pretty good ebook delivery system *in time for the App Store’s launch* and get it out there, how long before some publisher fulfills their responsibility to the authors and readers, and does something similar? We want to read people, and while I have a lot of respect for Mr Catchpole, Serpent on The Station isn’t really my thing, but, as Peter’s noted, what else is there?

So, it’s finally here, and damn, it’s still ugly. Really, really ugly. Go watch the video demos (short one at the top, longer one lower down). But it has some things going for it.

There are a lot of touches I really like, like easy ordering of low-price ebooks direct from Amazon without having to be near a computer. Online back-up of your books is very smart – one customer losing their whole library after dropping one of these in the bath would pretty much kill it. The big page-turner paddles on the side will be good for peoples’ frequently contorted, curled-up-on-the-sofa reading positions, and the dog-ear bookmark is nice and friendly, although the purists will probably hate it.

But there’s a lot not to like, even beyond the let’s-party-like-it’s-1989 styling. E-ink just still isn’t good enough: there’s the ‘black flash’ as you turn the page, and the snail-like refresh speed means they’ve had to put in that scroll-wheel barometer thing in the side, which is not good. The whole feeds thing is a misnomer: you have to pick ‘your feeds’ from an Amazon-approved list (currently numbering 308), which is great if you just want Boing Boing and the NYT, but pretty rubbish if your tastes are more eclectic – and you don’t want to pay 99 cents for the privilege (is that a one-off or a subscription?). And the killer for me is that you can only read your own documents by emailing them to Amazon, who’ll convert them and add them to the Kindle ‘for a small fee’. Whoa. That’s just stupid. It’s also such a waste of the rather clever connectivity hardware they’ve packed in there.

Still, Amazon aren’t making this for me – they’re making it for regular, heavy readers, who are book- and not computer-focussed, which is an excellent decision – they will certainly please more people – and explains the video endorsements from Toni Morrison, James Patterson and others. It’s not for techies. We’ll see if the $400 price tag is attractive to non-techies.

It is, without doubt, the best ebook reader out there because it has the iTunes-like connection to all the books you can get, built in. That’s the USP. But I still don’t think we’re going to see mass ebook take-up any time soon, not until e-ink improves and we sort out a format that can move seamlessly between different devices, like mp3. If I can read it on this, I should be able to read it on my laptop, phone and even TV too.

And could someone please explain why they used ‘profligate’ (adj. utterly and shamelessly immoral or dissipated; thoroughly dissolute, recklessly prodigal or extravagant.) as their example word from the dictionary? Reminds me of this story.

UPDATE: For more on the Kindle, you could do worse than Buzzfeed’s roundup.

Flickr and many other services uses simple tagging to provide metadata around their content, but this system offers much more: additional content, outside the original system, curated by users, adding information back into the system.

I’d love to see a system like this for books. I search google and wikipedia all the time for additional information on things I discover between paper pages – imagine if this information could be aggregated and linked back to the original book, just like Adobe’s system. Googling dementia praecox from p. 31 of Eric Stanley Gardner’s The case of the rolling bones takes me to Wikipedia’s definition and further background reading on ataxia. Tagging these pages in del.icio.us or similar with not only information about them (ataxia, mentalillness) but why I arrrived at them (literaryreference, ericstanleygardner, perrymason, thecaseoftherollingbones) creates a network of metadata around the book which could be accessed by an ereader – or cross-referenced with other texts to create indexes of mental illness references in literature, medical references in crime novels, and so on.

The joy of this system is that it does not rely on the publisher and the reader agreeing on what’s important information in the book – publishers can still create indexes and concordances to their work, but readers can create and share their own indexes – so a mental health practitioners’ index to Perry Mason would contain differently weighted information to a policeman’s, for example. As with many of these ideas, non-fiction books would probably benefit from this much more than novels – can you imagine a cookbook where you got access to other readers’ researches as well as the authors and your own? – but I like to put fiction through these things too…

With new technology comes the need to rethink certain conventions. The above is clipped from a Macmillan ebook (link), and while I don’t wish to do anyone in particular down, and the technology is young, I think it speaks to a disparity in the understanding of ebooks: they are not simply paper books, scanned page by page and uploaded – or at least, they have the potential to be so much more.

Does anyone know, for instance, if there has been any research done into the difference in reading quality between pages and scrolls – that is, documents which fit the window, and are updated in blocks, and long documents which you scroll down to read? The page-turning problem was Andrew Marr’s greatest quibble in his article in the Guardian last week, and it strikes me as a ridiculous hangover from paper books. Why this need to turn a page of an electronic document?

That said, I know the difficulty of reading scrollable documents – I frequently find that I lose my place when it is time to scroll down, whereas a page layout seems to help the brain keep its place, knowing that the physical position of the reading point is not going to change in relation to its frame. But surely, there must be a compromise? Does anyone know any alternate methods (such as RSVP)?

All thoughts gratefully received, as ever.

[UPDATE]

And later the same day, as if by magic… here’s an example of the kind of thing I was talking about, made possible by ebooks: Live Ink (VentureBeat article) (Via).

I wrote about Adobe’s Digital Editions, its Adobe Reader-lite for ebook fans, a while back, but until today I hadn’t tried out Microsoft Reader – and what a pig it is.

Admittedly, it’s designed primarily for PDAs (hence the Cleartype technology), but for the flagship eReader product from the largest software company on the planet, you have to be disappointed – and understand why so many people’s first experience of ebooks is such a turn-off that it colours their whole appreciation of the technology.

From the blocky icon to the blurred logotype to the bland interface, the whole experience says ‘cheap’, which can no longer be tolerated in applications just because they’re free. MS Reader is short on features (bookmarks, annotations, highlights) and the ‘settings’ consists of five available type sizes – ‘smallest’ to ‘largest’ – and the chance to go fullscreen. Despite this, Microsoft Reader-formatted books are amongst the most available and downloaded out there, along with MobiPocket and Adobe, so it’s no wonder people have such low expectations.

The excuse that ebooks are primarily for PDAs doesn’t wash – this is the future format of all books, not just the ones you want to read on the bus. Hardware is currently doing the job of transforming people’s perceptions of ebooks with the elegant Sony Reader, the recently-announced Readius and concepts such as the Turnover, but they need software to match, software that both replicates the experience of reading that most people are comfortable with (clear type, intuitive pagination or smooth scrolling, bookmarking and annotation) and expands on this to provide new features which can only exist in the new technology (glossaries, hyperlinks, personal indexing, to name but a few).

Well, sorry, but it will. I believe that a majority of people will switch to reading ebooks very quickly once the technology closes the look and feel gap between trad books and eReaders. And one of the key advances in this is electronic paper: a neutrally coloured, flicker- and glow-free display visible at wide angles with very low power consumption. This has been improving for a while – E Ink’s imaging film is the stuff used in Sony’s Reader and others. The tech specs are lovely, and if it’s not quite identical to paper yet, it soon will be.

The advent of true electronic paper draws a little closer with Brit boffins Plastic Logic’s announcement of 150ppi and 100ppi fully flexible active-matrix displays using E Ink Imaging Film.

Stick a few sheets of that between soft or hard covers, and what have you got? Oh look, a book.