March 22, 2010

NEXT POST
How Will the iPad Affect Content and App Pricing? Wade Roush recently asked three question about the iPad, one of which inspired this post. That question was, "How much will iPad-only apps cost?" It got me thinking about the different user experience between the iPhone and iPad as well as how not only apps can (and will) be priced differently, but content as well. We've grown accustomed to paying only a dollar or two, if anything at all, for most iPhone apps. I don't expect that will change much going forward, but I do anticipate more successful higher-priced apps for the iPad. As Wade points out, Apple will lead the way with their $9.99 iWork apps. Although you could argue any one of the iWork apps is much more powerful than the typical iPhone app, I think the additional display surface on an iPad (vs. an iPhone) will lead to opportunities for richer applications and content content. Publishers currently spend a lot of time trying to figure out the best user experience on the smaller screen. Reference material in particular is tricky because you want to pack as much into one screen as possible. Not only is that less of an issue with the iPad, the larger display lends itself to some clever things publishers will be able to do to enhance that smaller-screen content. Does anyone remember VH1's "Pop-Up Video" series from several years ago? They took old videos and added value to them by popping up bubbles of behind-the-scenes info. No matter how many times you saw the original video, you learned something new when you watched the enhanced pop-up video version. Interesting factoids as well as silly trivia were added to the original videos and they were fun to watch. Now imagine the same thing added to the small-screen version of a tutorial or reference work. (Btw, I'm pretty sure Pete Meyers described something like this in his recent TOC session.) If the original format worked well on the iPhone's screen, why not make it even more powerful by adding richer functionality on the bigger screen? This pop-up option is just one way to add value and I'm sure others will come up with even more compelling enhancements. Ultimately though, you'll be able to offer one product for the iPhone and something that builds on that same framework of content for the iPad. Done properly, and if enough value is added, it's easy to see where the latter could be higher-priced than the former.
PREVIOUS POST
Rethinking "Rich Content" The inspiration for this post came from my most recent (and probably final) Kindle book edition purchase. The book is called Kiss It Good-bye and it's the story of the 1960 Pittsburgh Pirates. How could a Kindle edition book about a baseball season 50 years ago have anything to do with rich content? Let me start by saying what I mean by "rich content." Many in the publishing industry are trying to figure out how to integrate video with text. A book or article featuring step-by-step or how-to content might benefit from the addition of video, for example. In fact, video tends to get most of the attention when anyone talks about rich content. Most people either yawn or note that they'd prefer to not have to navigate around a bunch of video inserted into whatever book they're reading. Good point. When I bought Kiss It Good-bye I started thinking about ways it could offer rich content without being intrusive. Although none of what I'm about to say could be supported on today's Kindle platform, it all started there... If you own a Kindle you're familiar with the built-in dictionary. You scroll to the line with the word you want to look up, click a couple of times and the definition appears. Pretty simple. Now apply a similar approach on the iPad. You find a word you want to look up, touch it on the screen and a menu appears, hovering over the book page. This menu not only has an option to look up the word you've selected, but other options as well. For example, let's say I highlighted "Pittsburgh Pirates." The menu options might include look-up's to the team's entry in the Wikipedia or the Pirates official website. That's just the beginning though. Now let's say you get to a chapter where the author discusses the events of "Game 7 from the 1960 World Series". Selecting that string shows a menu with a variety of options including the game's box score. That chapter will undoubtedly talk about the game's hero, Bill Mazeroski. Touch his name and the resulting menu would include links to Mazeroski's career stats as well as a video of his exciting, series-winning home run. In short, the book would be filled with all sorts of hooks to other content but none of it would interrupt the reading process. No underlined words indicating links. Nothing extra shows up till you touch a word or phrase on your screen, but it's all there waiting for you to discover it. Up to now I've talked about integrating links to content from websites, but there's no reason you couldn't also build it out with related content from other books, magazines, newspapers, etc. This builds upon the "network effect" Bob Pritchett talked about at our recent TOC conference (and I blogged about here). Now the hard part: How do you build in all these connections? If it's a manual process it simply won't scale. I believe some level of automation is required for this to be successful. One option is to put the book through something similar to the indexing process, but in this case, every word/phrase in it is run though a tool that pulls back all the top relevant links from the web, other books, etc. Handwork is required to ensure the best links make the final cut, but over time you're building a database of reusable links. So every time you refer to the same team, player, etc., you wouldn't be starting from scratch. Web links change over time though, of course, so verification would still be a required step. The key is to make all this content accessible but not intrusive. Maybe it requires a new authoring tool. Or perhaps it's something that could be built into a publishing company's existing toolchain for editorial and production. Either way, it's something I believe could turn static books into richer content products, without interrupting the natural flow of the original work. With its full-color touch screen and 3G/wifi connectivity, the iPad is the perfect device for this, btw. Do you see a opportunity for a product like this?

Joe Wikert

I'm Chief Operating Officer at OSV (www.osv.com)

The Typepad Team

Recent Comments