A NOT-SO-LONG TIME AGO in a publishing landscape kinda nearby, in a universe before Kindles spat fire, when EPUB was a bar in east London and ‘mobi’ was still a whale, when we carried bound bricks of paper, covers out for everyone on the F Train to see, a time when young girls spinning vampire tales on their blogs had yet to become publishing darlings, before British housewives were unknowingly getting off to Twilight fan fiction, and when we had yet to flip boards, be zite read or book pressed — back in this time, the year of 2010, the iPad emerged and we — Ashley Rawlings and I — ran a Kickstarter campaign to breathe life back into a book called "Art Space Tokyo" and, oh sweet lord, have things changed.
When we ran our Kickstater campaign, raising $25,000 was a pretty big deal. Now if you don’t hit $100,000 you’re a nobody, and if you don’t amass $1,000,000 you’re not worth blogging about. Crowdfunding went supernova and digital publishing, too, has shifted from a niche backwater to very soon becoming the way most books are sold.1 While it’s easy to see the material changes produced from crowd funding, some of the transitions, foibles and triumphs in publishing might be less obvious.
Platforms
In 1981 in the San Francisco Bay Area, two newspapers (the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Francisco Examiner) experimented with making their (text) content available for download by modem, and advertised this new service in full-page ads; of the estimated two to three thousand home-computer users in the Bay Area, more than 500 sent in the coupon requesting more information. Participating users were especially enthusiastic about the possibility of copy-pasting news content. In a KRON-TV news report on this experiment, the reporter Steve Newman imagined the future:
As part of our Kickstarter campaign, we promised a digital edition of "Art Space Tokyo". We’re finally delivering on that promise today. But more than dump some files in your lap and run off, we want (as we are wont) to fully open the kimono.
With an eye towards platforms, let’s look back on what has happened in the past two years, and make some sense of how we arrived here..
"Art Space Tokyo", digital
We’re publishing the digital edition of "Art Space Tokyo" in several formats, across multiple platforms, within two distinct ecosystems:
The web
"Art Space Tokyo" needed a touchable home. An online, public address for all its content. We gave it just that: http://read.artspacetokyo.com. The entire book is there. All the interviews, essays and art space information. Everything has an address to which you can point.
Why do this? I strongly believe digital books benefit from public endpoints. The current generation of readers (human, not electronic) have formed expectations about sharing text, and if you obstruct their ability to share — to touch — digital text, then your content is as good as non-existent. Or, in the least, it’s less likely to be engaged.3
I also believe that we will sell more digital and physical copies of "Art Space Tokyo" by having all of the content available online. The number of inbound links to the site should increase exponentially. read.artspacetokyo.com is one of the largest collections of publicly available text about the Tokyo art world online. Organic search traffic should increase accordingly, and by having upsells on every page, the conversion to paid users should follow suit. We'll report back with numbers in time.
Just because a collection of text is called a ‘book’ doesn’t mean it can’t act like a website. On read.artspacetokyo.com we purposely broke the strict linearity of the physical "Art Space Tokyo". The ambition is to extend the content indefinitely in more organic ways.
- read.artspacetokyo.com is optimized for mobile — a given these days but doubly important for a guidebook like "Art Space Tokyo".
- If you "Add to Your Home Screen" on an iPhone or iPad, you get a retina home icon and retina startup screen.
- By using a simple javascript library, we are able to keep you in that homescreen ‘app’ despite the use of hyperlinks to jump between pages.
- We continue the use of Fedra Sans and Display between print, pdf, .epub and .mobi files on the web thanks to Typotheque’s @font-face support.
If all of this is available for free, how do we make money?
Platforms and premium products
Our keystone premium product is the physical edition of the book. But we also feel that there is value in buying a ‘real’ digital edition of a book tied to an ecosystem (or DRM free for you to add it to an independent ecosystem).4
For example buying a Kindle book directly from Amazon means the text is hooked into all the goodness (note saving, sharing, community highlighting) of the Kindle platform. There is real value in that connection. Value worth paying for and value that carries the promise to become more useful over time.
Kindle & iBooks & PDF
"Art Space Tokyo" is available for purchase as an official Kindle, iBooks or Nook book. You can purchase it individually on each platform for $8.99. But if you prefer to use a different platform, then we offer an all inclusive digital package containing DRM free .mobi, .epub and .pdf files. That package is $14.99.
Physical + Digital
If you buy the physical edition, let us know and we’ll send you the digital bundle for free. And, of course, if you’ve purchased a physical copy in the past, we’ll happily send you the bundle, too. Just mail us: support@prepostbooks.com
Landing here
When we announced an ‘iPad edition,’ we made a very conscious decision not to say ‘iPad application.
Think back: In May 2010, the iPad had just been released. The landscape for publishing on the iPad was nonexistent and we had lots of reservations about books-as-apps as the correct model. It seemed overly complex, especially for a book originally conceived of as a printed object. So at the time we decided to focus on the physical part of the Kickstarter campaign — update, print, and redistribute the clothbound, hardcover edition.
It took a few months of full-time work but we shipped the books. They looked great. Our backers were happy. We then spent a month taking all the knowledge gained during the campaign and gave the community a full post-mortem: Kickstartup. Kickstarter even gave us a ‘Best in Show: Post-Mortem’ award which made us smile.
App what?
Fall of 2010 arrived and the more we looked into developing a custom app for "Art Space Tokyo", the less rational it seemed. Even ‘simple’ apps are hard. Really hard.5 And whether simple or complex, almost no one was doing it.
By this time, several major publishing houses had released magazine applications. Wired, Popular Science, and The New Yorker were among the first few. They were disappointing. The text was images. The file sizes huge. The download process for each issue was awkward. They weren’t friendly to screen readers. This certainly didn’t feel like the right direction for digital reading, never mind our humble "Art Space Tokyo".
To worsen matters, the navigation was confusing — each application a little different. The clarity of physical magazine usability — ‘just keep swiping’ — was lost in an effort to ‘innovate on’ and shoe-horn print workflows into a digital box. The apps just didn’t work.
In fact, the more we looked at these frankenstinian magazines, the more we realized that a PDF would be a better solution. A PDF would at least be made of ‘real text.’ It would be inherently searchable. It would compress well. Navigation would be consistent: Just. Keep. Swiping.6.
Simple PDFs
So we began to play with "Art Space Tokyo" as direct-from-InDesign PDFs formatted for portrait and landscape. They worked, sort of. The text was a little small, and they were a bit clunky, but you know what? They offered a better user experience than most of the standalone apps we had seen.
What out-of-the-box advantages do you get with PDFs?
If you drop the PDF in Dropbox, you get a completely cross platform, cross device, always synced digital book. Sure, it’s a bit of a hack, but it was still better than the standalone app solutions.
Of course, PDFs as a decent way to read on an iPad was hardly a find worth writing about, let alone releasing as the ‘iPad edition’ of "Art Space Tokyo". I wanted to dig deeper.
EPUB
The first time EPUB excited me was when I saw Waldo Jaquith’s work in late September, 2010.
I had largely written off iBooks. It was so horribly skeuomorphic — all fake pages and page curls, sophomoric typography and no hyphenation. I wanted nothing to do with it. But Waldo’s work for Virginia Quarterly Review piqued my otherwise lost interest. He had spent time producing what was by far the most promising iBooks publication I had yet seen.
There were proper page breaks and headers. Clearly defined typographic hierarchy. Strong photography. Sure, VQR was simple, and compared to the visual complexity of custom apps it was easily dismissed. But within his markup was the germ of something special. Furthermore, it was produced with little overhead and adhered to open standards: two qualities not present in any of the standalone magazine applications.
Simultaneously, rumblings of EPUB3 began to surface. While in attendance at the 2010 Books in Browsers conference, Bill McCoy held forth on the recently ratified status of upcoming EPUB3 standards.7 The digital book world and web design world were on a collision course. HTML/CSS/JS looked to be the core of EPUB3. This was geeky stuff of the best kind for digital content folks. Especially those of us who knew how to make websites.
eink
Soon after, in November 2010 I bought my first hardware Kindle. I was in love. Even today, the hardware eink Kindle is one of my favorite pieces of technology. It’s one of the most quiet tech objects I own.8 It gets out of the way when reading, has worldwide cellular connectivity, and the battery lasts nearly forever. It’s magic.
IMy attention was captured by these two pieces of technology: iBooks coupled with EPUB3, and the elegance of hardware Kindles coupled with the promise of their Kindle ecosystem.
Book platforms
Throughout 2011, iBooks incrementally improved its handling of complex layouts, custom fonts, and proper hyphenation. It would generally come to feel much more design-friendly than Kindle. On the other hand, Kindle would establish itself as a true reading platform with cross-device integration, a web presence, social reading hooks, and innovative lending and sharing capabilities.
IBy adhering to EPUB standards and building atop these preexisting, well defined platforms, you get a lot of great functionality for ‘free.’
- They’re true, self-contained reading platforms.
- As such, they’re built specifically for selling & consuming book-like content.
- They’re based on real text: no images-as-text nonsense.
- Interaction is standardized between all of their books. Readers don’t need to re-learn how to read. Up-down-left-right? Nope: Just. Keep. Swiping.
- The Kindle has hooks into social networks allowing readers to effortlessly share highlights and notes.
- Both iBooks and Kindle contribute to a psychological sense of building a "library" or reading space, as opposed to "adding just another app."9
- Nobumasa Takahashi’s illustrations look stunning on an iPad, iPhone and even eink Kindle.
- @font-face support: We licensed Typotheque’s gorgeous Fedra font family to carry the "Art Space Tokyo" "brand" between print and digital.
iBooks only
- All the recognition, trust, and simplicity that comes with buying from Amazon.
- Reader highlights and notes are added to Art Space Tokyo’s Kindle corpus of data …
- … resulting in community metrics like 'most-highlighted passages.
- If a user has public notes and highlights turned on, then their reading status and marginalia are broadcast to followers on kindle.amazon.com.
- The Kindle edition works across more devices — iOS and Android. Buy once, read everywhere.
- The highlights Kindle users share on Facebook and Twitter have unique landing pages. This creates and closes a share-view-buy loop presently lacking in iBooks' ecosystem.
Kindle only
What do you give up? Well, you give up extensive interactivity. Your publication must bend to the “page” model (as opposed to scrolling). You have less control over the visual language of your book (in the case of non-Fire Kindle devices, almost no control).
For some books, these disadvantages are showstoppers. And if you have a book that’s breaking the way stories are told, then by all means make an app.11 But "Art Space Tokyo" is a pretty “normal” book. It was written with a classic print ethos in mind. The structure is, if not explicitly linear, then well defined. And any “interactivity” can be augmented with links to external resources.12 In our case, the advantages of the iBooks and Kindle platforms outweighed the inherent disadvantages. And far far outweighed the disadvantages of designing, engineering, and maintaining a standalone application.
I believe this to be the case for many books out there. And so that’s why I’m so bullish that what we have done with "Art Space Tokyo" can act as a template for other publishers. And for the publishers already publishing in this manner, I hope this account affirms your choices in platforms.