iTunes store and Cover Flow: A colorful graphic edge for Apple in e-book-selling? And a path to a turbo-charged LibraryThing-type service?

By David Rothman

Here’s the question of the day for Apple fans itching to see the company break into e-books. To what extent can the colorful iTunes Store help Apple catch up with Amazon, Sony, eReader and the rest? Steve Jobs is breaking into online movies; can books be far behind despite his statement that people don’t read anymore? TeleBlog readers are well aware of Jobs’ fondness for misleading rivals. Now let’s hypothesize that e-books are on his mind and consider two of the plusses of the iTunes store:

1. The store and related software already dominate online music—-people might simply think of books as one more kind of item to pick up there or include in searches of, say, movies.

2. Apple is associated with ease of use, sometimes correctly, sometimes not.

But there is a third factor—Apple’s flashy, graphical approach in iTunes. Apple could display books to their full advantage and to help users organize their personal libraries in a highly visual manner and even show off their e-books to their friends.

Cover Flow, an existing Apple product shown in the  first screen shot, “displays all the album art in your music collection in one easy-to-navigate interface that mimics a CD collection or jukebox selection. Move between covers using the forward and back arrows or use the slider to browse faster. When you find what you want, click the artwork to start playing the album…Even podcasts and audiobooks from the iTunes Store have accompanying artwork that Cover Flow displays. Think of it as your very own virtual bookshelf.” 

Stark contrast with drab views on E Ink machines

Compare the colorful Cover Flow screen shot with the drab, gray-and-black view on the Sony Reader, shown in the second shot, or the Amazon Kindle. While Sony and Amazon can jazz up their Web presence with color and fancier graphics, the view at the machine level will if nothing else suffer the limitations of E Ink. Mike Cane, who dug up these two starkly contrasting shots, has zeroed in on the potential of Cover Flow, and I think he’s dead on. Most book-buyers may be in it for the text, but as any good publisher of E or P will tell you, a colorful cover can spell the difference between a successful book and a dud.

“The real way to prevent eBook piracy is for publishers to rethink their approach, taking their cue from the way consumers now download music,” David Crow has written in an article Mike cites from The Business. “E-book stores will need to recreate the experience of browsing in a book shop by developing visually stunning websites where customers can appreciate cover art, browse virtual shelves and flick through 3D copies.”

Colorful, shared user libraries

Now let’s go a step further. Mix colorful, enticing graphics with the urge with the urge of people to show off their personal libraries, and some interesting possibilities arise. Imagine Apple letting people blend their visual libraries and comment on well-tagged books within them—either among their friends or among Apple customers at large, something a bit like LibraryThing‘s less flashy service. The results could be displayed in several venues: the Web, iTunes software for desktops, and equivalents for handheld computers and phones and other portable devices. Text might even be blended with multimedia someday in a display using technology equivalent to Microsoft’s Photosynth spruced up with Seadragon. The results could go far, far beyond Amazon’s interface, which, although offering annotation capabilities to customers, does not do this with the same aplomb and features that Apple probably could offer. In the end it’s design and usability that count, and those are two areas where Apple generally shines, even compared to Sony.

KISS for people wanting this, please

The key is to use an onion-style layered approach and keep the graphics simple for those who are just browsing through the store or other users’ libraries—in fact, even provide just text for those preferring it. Also be generous in letting friends see each other’s first chapters and maybe even sample entire books for limited periods of time (reminder: no, I’m not the biggest fan of DRM) or even share them forever if the right business arrangements are in place. In my ideal world, of course, this wouldn’t be limited to one store, and I’d love to see the sharing happen universally through the right Web standards; but for the sake of the simplicity of Apple, I’ll keep the focus here on Jobs and friends.

No, the store presentation by itself can’t give Apple an advantage, considering the the importance of hardware, software and a big enough selection of books, but just as with the covers of individual titles, it could make a dramatic difference between success and failure. People who think that Amazon has sewn up the e-book market might want to keep in mind all the possibilities for Apple, especially if it can strike an alliance with Lightning Source, as some have suggested, or another company already rich in e-book titles.

The Second Life Angle: Yes, SL offers sophisticated graphics with 3D “delve-in” capabilities, but why should Apple mess with this platform when it already has its own, iTunes?