From codex to code: will books become apps?

Publishers watch developments in the music business these days like hurricane belt weather men, anxious for signs of the next maelstrom headed their way. But the news isn’t always bad. In August, Wired published an article (The Album Is Dead, Long Live the App) that seemed to point to better weather ahead for those trying to make a living out of putting content online.

Music acts, it  seems, are beginning to release their work not as single songs in the iTunes music store but as iPhone apps, bundling in videos, photos, news, games, concert listings, and/or community features such as photo sharing along with the tracks, and pricing accordingly. Sighs of relief can be heard all round at with what looks like the return of a traditional model – the album – updated for the new millenium, and a chance to add value online rather than just strip out cost.

Apps = added value

What an app offers over a straight download is the chance to add value not only through inclusion of other media, such as video and audio, but also through ‘community’ (in the sense of connection to other users with similar interests), and through the ongoing provision of relevant, timebound content. An app is updateable, opening a channel for daily, even hourly communication between vendor and purchaser, and for further sales or upgrades. There is a clear applicability here to subscription-based publishing models (which has not been lost on Pearson, for example, whose FT App is offered in both free and paid subscription flavours through iPhone).

Numerous reference and educational titles are already offered for sale in the iTunes App Store, but the possibilities offered by publishing a book as an app are only beginning to be explored.

Our RMMOnline product for Wiley Blackwell, featured previously on this blog, shows how user-generated content can extend the usefulness of an authoritative text online, which in this case is central to an important area of professional practice. Text is no longer static, but can be commented on, localised and updated. As an app on a smartphone, such a product would become mobile, freed from the necessity for its user to be at a computer – adding usefulness, adding value. This is just one example: the possibilities are numerous.

Why back the app?

It is, admittedly, fairly early days for the smartphone app. In a market riven by uncertainty about which of the available devices, platforms and standards (e.g. Kindle, Stanza, epub) stands a chance of surviving, the cost of developing for iPhone, just one format among many, might look high-risk. However, this is a fast-changing marketspace.

Worldwide, more books are currently read on iPhone than on any other e-book reader. And the app concept isn’t limited to iPhone. Google’s open source mobile OS Android has a similar logic for third-party development, and while growth of 79% for the iPhone OS is forecast in 2009, shipments of smartphones with the Android are expected to increase by a whopping 900% (source: Strategy Analytics, May 2009) with a veritable who’s-who of manufacturers queuing up to put it on their hardware. Remember that Android, unlike the iPhone OS, is not tied to any particular hardware platform.

Where do you stand in a standards war?

Apple has revolutionised the mobile computing market with the iPhone, and the platform is seen by many as a long-term play. But pundits are already beginnning to envisage a future where the computing landscape is dominated by rivalry between Google and Apple in the same way as the Apple-versus-Microsoft face-off dominated the 1990’s and most of the noughties, with Google similarly having the edge through sheer ubiquity. The app concept is firmly entrenched in both platforms, and a future duopoly such as this, though it would have many downsides for consumers, would at least be helpful for publishers – having only two major platforms to contend with rather than the present bewildering patchwork of platforms and standards.

Technology futures are notoriously difficult to predict. Moreover, this is a situation with a lot of variables. But Kindle versus Reader is certainly not the only game in town: single-use devices like these might not even have a future in the long term. In the end it is user behaviour that will hold the key to what happens in the future: whatever proves to be the most useful and attractive way for people to get the information they need will dictate how the markets move. And as we all know, readers (note the lower case ‘r’) can be enormously fickle.