Gramophone (The world's authority on classical music since 1923) joined the Exact Editions platform last week. The free trial issue has lots of intriguing articles:
Exact Editions and Osprey Publishing announced the launch of an initial group of apps for the iPhone/iPad market today. There is a full press release here.
Free samples of the books are available through iTunes from these icons
Philippi 42 BC:
The First Crusade:
Warsaw 1944:
Fredericksburg 1862:
Iwo Jima 1945:
These apps illustrate a couple of important points for publishers who are considering the iPhone/iPad market.
Vintage Life is the first magazine, projected to appear in print, to be launched initially as a digital magazine available through the Exact Editions digital magazine store.
A free app for the magazine Standpoint is now in the iTunes app store. The free app provides access to a portion of each new issue of the magazine as it is published. The rest of the magazine's current issue is searchable and viewable via thumbnail. With Apple's in-app purchasing, the user can, at any time, upgrade to a 30-day subscription (for £1.79). Paid subscribers also get access to the archived back-issues, whereas the free app only has a sliver of content from the current issue. When the next issue appears the previous sliver will drop out of the app. The app in its free and premium modes supports syncing (of the current issue within a wifi zone). We think this freemium deal is giving a very solid and generous service to the free app's users. How generous? This issue of Standpoint has 11 pages at the front and 7 at the back fully open, and these same pages are also open in the web service (open for a few weeks while the issue is current). The publisher decides how much of the content to make freely available, perhaps changing the parameters issue by issue. This is the first magazine to be using Exact Editions' recommended freemium model for apps. Potential readers can pick up the app for free and will then get a generous sample of the magazine on their iPhone whenever a new issue appears. We expect magazine publishers will like this, because it is a way of using the app store as a magazine kiosk that encourages potential customers to browse through free parts of the magazine. As Daryl Rayner (Exact Editions founder and MD) says "Apple's app store is the best thing to happen to magazines since the invention of the kiosk". Should the user inadvertently let her paid subscription lapse, the free app will continue to offer access to a few pages of each new issue as it is published, providing a gentle reminder of the availability of the magazine.
I recommend trying this free app if you have an iPhone or iPod Touch. When have downloaded it from iTunes make sure that you sync the content to the memory of the phone/touch. This will take a few minutes in the background whilst you are exploring the content, and syncing makes reading and browsing speedier. Also, explore the 3 different orientations of the phone when reading (three different behaviours, one in the portrait orientation, and two distinct views of the magazine in landscape). Here are some screenshots:
The best blog posting on the Apple Tablet that I have read this week is at Gizmodo, by Jesus Diaz, The Apple Tablet Interface Must be Like This.
Anybody blogging now about the Tablet has an excellent chance of being proven wrong in 5 days time. But the most interesting aspects of Diaz's piece are historical, where he speculates about the interface by thinking about what has already gone before, in which he notes that the iPhone has already changed our expectations about how an interface should work. The touch screen is crucial but the flexibility of the 'app-based' interface is also crucial. He is betting, and I am sure that he is right, that the Tablet is going to be an extension and development of the iPhone interface and of its operating system (this is not going to be Mac/OS). Diaz sees the iPhone as having already established a crucial break with the 15 year reign of the desktop metaphor for usability. The genius of the iPhone is that it has shown how a small device can be a succession of information appliances in which the special features of each application are captured in the specialised interfaces which belong to each application (or 'appliance').
When it came out, people instantly got this concept. Clicking icons transformed their new gadget into a dozen different gadgets. Then, when the app store appeared, their device was able to morph into an unlimited number of devices, each serving one task.
In this new computing world there were no files or folders, either. Everything was database-driven. The information was there, in the device, or out there, floating in the cloud. You could access it all through all these virtual gadgets, at all times, because the iPhone is always connected. Gizmodo
Well, I am frankly delighted that this world of windows, files and folders is on the way out. Documents too are under notice of termination! I am very excited about the way in which information appliances will give us many more models and metaphors for the way that our software should work. Gestures will replace commands and trial by touch will replace error.....
But before we chuck all the paper-based metaphors out of the window (along with the files, the folders, the waste baskets and the .docs), I think that an age of software interfaces emulating information appliances is going to be very helpful and very preservative for some parts of our print and our paper heritage. Pages will stay with us. Tablets like pages and canvases. Libraries too -- we need a collective noun for a large collection of apps, and 'library' may be the group noun of choice. Above all, books, magazines and newspapers are great 'metaphors' for information appliances. They are information appliances par excellence, and they have in their 'soft' or emulation versions great potential for use on a tablet or an iTouch interface. Books, magazines and newspapers should behave and will teach us how to use the tablet interface in much the same way that they behave and teach us how to learn in real like. But they will not be the same. They will be software applications, appliances, apps, and so they will have much more potential for compute application. The main advantages of tablet-books or tablet-magazines or tablet-manuals, behaving somewhat like their physical counterparts is that we all know how the physical objects work and the virtual information appliance will work in a similar way to help our expectations and to help our discovery of how they are different.
I have no idea what the Apple digital publishing environment is going to look like when it is unveiled next Wednesday, but I bet that it is going to look much more familiar to book lovers, more retro, than most of us realise. If Apple have got their information appliances right digital books and magazines are going to feel more like real books than most digital publishing experts would have predicted.
The Exact Edition app platform now features full sync-ing of a complete magazine issue. We explained this here.
Shall we summarize the key features of the Exact Editions magazine app platform in rough order of importance!
Opera magazine now has its own branded App in iTunes.
The Opera iPhone Application offers access to the latest monthly issue as well as to an archive of back issues stretching back to August 2006. The week-long subscription costs £1.19, or $1.99, or €1.59. Renewing for a month costs £3.99, which compares to a news stand price of £4.99.
I am now hoping that the Opera App will now be reviewed 'operatically' if not 'ecstatically'
Today Apple approved and released our first revision to Exactly. This is the free App that can be used to access any of the subscriber services provided by Exact Editions. Version 1.3 has some cool new features:
Wisden on the Ashes, (the authoritative story of cricket's greatest rivalry) published by Bloomsbury, is now available through the Exact Editions platform for an annual subscription of £10. With 500+ pages of detailed reportage and statistics this will be on the shopping list of every geeky cricketer, or cricket enthusiast.
I was never much of a cricketer, but I have always been a geeky cricket buff. So what do you think of this scoreboard?
Strauss 22
Cook 10
Bopara 0
Bell 18
Collingwood 13
Prior 7
Flintoff 32
Doesnt that have an all too sickeningly familiar feel to it? And for your reassurance Bradman is mentioned 122 times in the book. England may be one up in the series but I have a feeling that Ponting, 41, may walk off with the Ashes again.
The Idler joins Exact Editions. This is not the original Idler in which many of Samuel Johnsons Essays were first published but (to quote Wikipedia) " a bi-yearly British magazine exploring alternative ways of working and living, still published today." Reckon that 'still' is a bit cheeky. What does Wikipedia mean? The Idler has just joined Exact Editions. Wake up wikieditors!
Apple yesterday accepted the digital editions App that we have been developing for some months. It is now has in the App Store. Exactly is the Free Exact Editions App, from which any title on the Exact Editions platform can be read on the iPhone.
Search for 'Exactly' in the iPhone App store and you will find it there, with this brief description:
Exactly brings magazines and books to the iPhone in their original full-colour format. Each page is delivered just as it appeared in the print edition, but with live links to web sites, phone numbers and more. Access free content from over 80 titles, or use your www.exacteditions.com subscription to read the latest issues on the day they're published.Free, gratis, etc
- Pinch or double tap pages to zoom.
- Swipe pages left and right, or tap the page edges to flip to next/previous page
- Use the animated thumbnail view to flick through the pages.
- Tap any page links to web sites, email addresses, phone numbers or maps.
- Tap contents-page links to jump to a particular article.
- Network connection required.
The Bloomsbury Library Online went live last week. It had been announced at the London Book Fair a few weeks ago. This is a library proposition in two senses: it is a plan for selling subscriptions to groups of books through public libraries, and it is a set of themed shelves of books from the overall Bloomsbury list. A proposition for libraries and a plan for offering a customisable and curated library from Bloomsbury. They explain the concept as follows:
.......... using existing technology in libraries across the country, Bloomsbury is rolling out a groundbreaking e-lending strategy which will allow readers to read collections of bestselling books at local library terminals or with the use of a library card on home computers and internet enabled devices.Bloomsbury's project required us to develop our platform in ways that we had not previously considered necessary. They wanted to be able to sell books as groups, and although this was not part of the formal requirement, we suspected that the next publisher to adopt this strategy would wish to be able to sell books in groups (ie 'shelves') but also to sell the same books as individual titles, both to individuals and to institutional subscribers. And the next publisher would want to include the same book in multiple shelves, and then remove them from some shelves.....There were also knock on effects on the way that the site would be navigated, the marketing pages within the site would unfold, and the way in which promotions to titles or groups of titles would work. Finally, we needed to understand what happens with renewals, when books are coming into and perhaps falling out of shelves in midstream? In short, what had looked like a fairly simple additional requirement led us to take another look at our ontology. Until this point about shelves came up, I dont think I had grasped that we already had an ontology. In January we did not have an ontology for shelves of books, but now we do. Since Bloomsbury appear to be capable of producing a lot more shelves, this is a good thing.
The Bloomsbury Library Online will consist of a number of themed shelves: children’s books, sports titles, international fiction, Shakespeare plays, reference books and more. They will launch with a shelf of Book Group titles including Galaxy Book of the Year, The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, by Kate Summerscale, Orange Prize longlisted Burnt Shadows, by Kamila Shamsie, word-of-mouth phenomenon The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, by Mary Ann Shaffer, and international bestseller The Death of Vishnu by Manil Suri. Embracing the advantages of the online format, users will be able to read the book, search the text, access author interviews, reviews, press features, and links to specially commissioned reading group guide. Bloomsbury web site
A massive new title is now in the Berkshire Publishing shop on the Exact Editions platform. The Berkshire Encyclopedia of China has nearly 1,000 entries and comes in 5 volumes in the printed edition.
The printed volume sets will be released and sent to subscribers shortly, but the whole work is now searchable and freely sampleable on the Exact Editions platform in the service we are running for Berkshire.
Here are some sample entries:
Climate Change—International Cooperation
Currency Valuation
Deng Xiaoping’s Southern Tour
Feng Shui
and we must have
Panda
not forgetting the complex index, with a lot of links.
The key thing about a big reference book such as this is that we can enjoy the richness of the search results. 163 hits for 'Deng', 17 for 'HIV', 106 for 'Canton', 16 for 'Guangzhou'. 'Nixon' gets 39! and 4 for 'Obama'. I wonder how many 'Obama' mentions there will be in the next edition?
Tank magazine which straddles the worlds of art, architecture, culture, literature and fashion, is now available on the Exact Editions platform.
This is the first IPC magazine to use the Exact Editions platform. Railway magazines seem to do well in this digital format (possibly because the archival search is strong).
Autralia and New Zealand joins the Exact Editions magazine store.
Focus on Africa published quarterly by the BBC World Service joins the Exact Editions store.
Two new titles have gone live today and both have me dreaming about the sun and beaches. What credit crunch?
