Editor’s Note: the comment below, by iOS developer Rachel Blackman, was posted in response to Joanna’s article in which she expressed her frustration about purchasing an iPhone app and then being charged again for the app on the iPad. I thought it important enough to reprint as a main article as we don’t often get a chance to hear directly from people in the industry. PB
As an iOS developer for my day job and an avid reader in whatever moments I can steal with a book, I can sort of see this one both ways.
The truth of things is that people want a version 2.0 of an app with new bells and whistles. They want a new version for the iPad that does things more than just being ‘the iPhone version on a bigger screen,’ and so on.
But if you spend a year writing a new 2.0 version of something from the ground up, you probably still need to have your rent paid. On desktop apps, you can charge upgrade fees to cover the cost of continued development… but the App Store doesn’t allow that. You either have to branch the app, or just give it for free to anyone who’s ever bought any version of it once, no matter how long ago.
Putting it in desktop terms, let’s say that it’s 1998, and you just bought Adobe Photoshop 5.0. It’s a decent program, right? Now in 2000, Adobe comes out with Photoshop 6… but you bought Photoshop 5 two years earlier, so you should darn well get version 6 free! Okay, then in 2002 they come out with Photoshop 7… and by golly, you’re entitled to that one! 2003, Photoshop CS. 2005, CS2. 2007, CS3. And so on.
It’s a nice picture, in theory. Lord knows those of us who do photography wouldn’t mind not having to spend money on Photoshop upgrades every two years. But on the other hand, Adobe probably would’ve found little revenue in Photoshop by the time they’ve been giving away free copies to people for 12 years.
The ‘I’m going to introduce a separate iPad app’ approach is a way for some developers to recapture money after spending developer time and resources writing a new version, designing for a new usage model and so on. Now, I tend to like the universal approach because it’s simpler on my app library (do I really need two versions of everything in iTunes?) and more popular with users, but I also understand as a developer why not everyone’s going to take that path.
So I can concede that apps… well, sometimes someone’s going to sell an iPad version as a separate product. And even if it can be annoying for users, developers are going to have to try to recoup their costs… be it by ads in products, or selling a new version as a separate product.
But now we come to books, and this gets murkier.
As a reader, I get annoyed if I buy an eBook and can’t read it conveniently on multiple things. If I buy a Kindle book from Amazon, I want to be able to read it on my Kindle, but also my iPad and iPhone in a pinch, or my Android phone, or my desktop computer, etc.
I would never make the same assumption about an app; I wouldn’t expect to pay once for, say, 1Password for Mac back at version 2.0, and get the 3.0 Mac, 1.0 Windows, plus iPhone/iPad and Android versions all for free a year later. But eBooks? If suddenly Amazon went, ‘okay, this book can now ONLY be read on Kindle, not any of the other devices we make our app for,’ I would probably be breathing fire and storming the gates.
Now, if I think about it as physical books I find myself leaning more towards the app side of things. If I bought the hardcover of a book when it came out, that doesn’t mean I also get the paperback for free when it comes out several months later. They may have the same /content/, but they’re different /presentations/, and that’s what I’m actually paying for in the end.
Another example would be movies. If I bought a DVD of ‘Avatar’ and then later get a Blu-Ray player, I don’t magically get the Blu-Ray for free because I own the DVD. The content is the same — the movie — but the presentation is different.
With an eBook, I see myself as not buying the /presentation/, but rather the /content/. In fact some people actually consider this a significant flaw with eBooks, as presentation goes out the window when typesetting, font choice and all the other details of layout are left up to the eReader software.
But book ‘apps’ feel like neither fish nor fowl. Conceptually, you feel like you’re buying the content since you’re buying a digital thing you can copy around and all. That’s just like an eBook, right? But in actuality what you’re buying is the presentation, just as if you were buying a physical print copy.
After all, what differentiates a book app from an eBook is all the added features. Animated table of contents! Built-in kitchen timer! Voice-activated search! Pictures you can smell! And most of those have to be handled differently for a tiny smartphone screen and a large tablet screen.
So even though it feels like buying a book app on the iPad should be a purchase of content, all those bullet-pointed features suggest you’re actually buying the presentation.
This seems to lead to a mental disconnect that can be rather jarring to readers/users, as you’ve found.
Now, I don’t care for book apps as a reader, because generally if I’m reading digitally I don’t care as much about the presentation; I want to buy the content to use it where I please. But I also recognize that book apps /are/ selling the presentation.
And just like paperbacks and hardbacks are sold separately, an app set up for presentation on the little iPhone screen and one for the big iPad screen may well be sold separately, too. Especially since they may well have to cover the cost of additional development.
“With an eBook, I see myself as not buying the /presentation/, but rather the /content/. In fact some people actually consider this a significant flaw with eBooks, as presentation goes out the window when typesetting, font choice and all the other details of layout are left up to the eReader software.”
Truer words were never said. And as to ebooks’ “flaws,” I don’t see loss of publisher’s typesetting, fonts, etc as a loss at all, when you’re using a reading device that allows you to set your own fonts and layout settings as you like.
And that’s another reason why I wouldn’t be interested in book apps… I just want the book, able to be read on any device I choose, not all the extras.
Book Apps look to me to be essentially a strategy being explored in an effort to get around claimed pirating. As such they solve one (dubious) problem but raise too many other problems to make them a viable alternative to eBooks.
I would like to point out the fact that when people talk about eBook Apps and I guess we are talking the Apple iPad here since Android is still waiting for the right equipment there are two extremely different types.
One is the old eBook that we all know from Kindle or iBooks etc that is simply static text presented with a certain font layout and page formatting usually ePub or PDF oe something along those lines.
The other is like those eBook Apps produced by Oceanhouse Media
http://www.oceanhousemedia.com/products/drseuss/
Or Atomic Antelope’s Alice In Wonderland
http://www.atomicantelope.com/
These are meant for kids and have a voice that can read you the text of the eBook and the pictures sometimes move and well it goes beyond what we currently consider an eBook because it is more than static text presented on a screen.
If you are talking about the first type of eBook churned out from some Adobe software package being presented as nothing more than words on a page then these apps are a rip off in my estimation and you are better off buying them on Kindle or Kobo or Nook because yes you can then move them to other devices etc.
If you are talking the second type of eBook that interacts with you and can read to you and has moving pictures and is no way created by someone simply pushing a button in some software and regurgitating a static text file then maybe we need a new category to call it other than eBook.
Because that second category does deserve consideration as an app whose presentation is specific to the device it is running on with needing color and sound and touch capability and processing speeds and so on and would no more be found on a low power low tech eInk device than the man in the moon.
Teddypig — I tend to think of the second category of book-app almost as more ‘games’ than ‘books.’ Things like Atomic Antelope’s version of “Alice in Wonderland,” or Monster Costume’s “Bartleby’s Book of Buttons” may have bookish content, but they’re interactive in a way that kids twig to just like toys or games.
That said, I think the point about buying presentation rather than content still stands. When you pick up Atomic Antelope’s Alice, you’re not buying “Alice in Wonderland,” per se; that’s the content, and you could get that as an eBook easily enough. Instead, you’re buying all the nifty interactions, the animations and sounds that make it a unique experience. That’s presentation.
I suppose another way to put it would be…
If the ‘book app’ provides sufficiently unique and interesting presentation to have value beyond the content, then what you’re really buying is actually an app: a game, a searchable recipe reference, whatever. And with an app, there is development to be done whenever you move it from platform to platform; developers may charge a second time for an app to account for that. Buying Atomic Antelope’s Alice on iPad does not mean you get it for free if they make an iPhone version, much less if it comes out on Android someday.
But if the book app does not distinguish itself enough from the actual book (or a plain old eBook), then people are going to feel more like they’re being ripped off if they get charged for it a second time to use the book somewhere else. Unfortunately, many books that fall into this second category /act/ like they’re in the first category, which seems to be the source of Joanna’s frustration in her original post.
“I tend to think of the second category of book-app almost as more ‘games’ than ‘books.’ Things like Atomic Antelope’s version of “Alice in Wonderland,” or Monster Costume’s “Bartleby’s Book of Buttons” may have bookish content, but they’re interactive in a way that kids twig to just like toys or games.”
I like to see them as extending what an eBook is and probably showing what the eBook will become. And I am dang sure the mainstream publishers HATE what these apps represent.
I honestly do not think static text files is what is eventually going to sell in the near future people always want more and different these types of apps prove eBooks can be more and different than standard printed books.
Which means yes the Kindle will eventually have to compete with an iPad to remain in the game.