Categories
Book and Reading News

Useless Info Dept.: Barnes & Noble’s iPhone app beats Amazon’s in first week

What does the fact that Barnes & Noble’s iPhone app, introduced last week, has been downloaded more than the Amazon Kindle for iPhone app during its first week on the market?

Nothing. It merely demonstrates that free applications enjoy a novelty bump, getting a try by readers interested in reading on the iPhone. Even as a horse-race statistic it means little or nothing.

The cumulative downloads of the Kindle for iPhone app far exceed those of the BN.com app, but the real question is how much revenue is being generated through the apps. Jeff Bezos has said that Kindle users read approximately 1.7 times as many books a month than paper book customers. If BN.com’s app performs the same over time, driving incremental e-book sales, then we’ll have something meaningful to consider.

Categories
Author & Publisher Strategies

The app-ification of publishing

Publishers Weekly‘s Craig Morgan Teicher has a long feature, “The App Boom Hits Publishing,” which reads like an article from Digital Media, my old newsletter, in the early 1990s. There’s a kind of Lotus Eaters quality to it, as it requires you believe application-based e-books solve the e-publishing problem.

The article revolves around repurposing existing content, such as crosswords and foreign language phrase books, by making them interactive, which is an excellent and relatively simple strategy if you have the right kind of titles on the shelf. It goes so far as to conflate that kind of title with any title that might be digitized.

The article makes the case that any book can be turned into an application and associates the ePub format, an e-book format designed to provide open cross-platform readability, with applications that are proprietary and closed. It’s a mistake to think that applications, which rely on functional code to enclose a text, are open or that they will survive the relatively brief period of time when e-books have not been published in a standardized format that can be read in a variety of applications. It’s a bandage on a heavy wound, one that, if future e-book readers cannot access the books people buy today, will alienate readers from e-books because they will seem increasingly unreliable.

Yes, Apple’s App Store is a big deal and a lot of applications, including e-books, are selling there. But the model isn’t predicated on the application, rather it is thriving on the fact that all iPhone apps run on all iPhones. Portability from one phone to the next, so that buyers don’t find they cannot access their data after upgrading their iPhone, is the key to the app model’s success.

Texts wrapped in code become incompatible with all but the operating system and hardware that it was written to run on. Texts need to be portable, so that books remain useful. Amazon’s willingness to deliver a Kindle book over and over to new reader devices is the right way to assure readers they will be able to access a proprietary format, but it is also the cost of that proprietary format for the distributor.

If a publisher is going to publish “in an app” today and abandon the reader and customer support when they move on to the next application platform, they are risking losing each customer they are spending to win today.

Re-purposing is a stop-gap strategy.

Adding value means more than digitizing a book.

Putting your book into a proprietary format dilutes the value of the book to the reader, because it diminishes the utility of the text over the long term.

Enough said.