On his blog at Forbes, Jeff Bercovici brings up another reason that magazine tablet apps may not be as good an idea as they would seem. According to digital design firm founder David Link, they can be as costly to publishers as putting them out in paper, if not more so. The reason for this is that the apps’ hefty size also incurs hefty bandwidth charges. Unlike e-books, magazines tend to need a lot of pictures and graphic design elements. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but a picture that was the same file size as...

Sammy Perlmutter at The Huffington Post has an interesting piece looking at the innovation of Lynd Ward’s wordless graphic novels, which are being reissued in a 1,600 page boxed book set. (If ever there was a case for e-books, that would be it!) Perlmutter talks about the device of narrative told entirely in pictures with no words, and suggests that makers of e-books could learn from it. He explains that the illustrative nature of the story gives it a kind of universality that surpasses native language, and also draws the reader deeper into the narrative. The reader has to...

On Publishing Perspectives, I’ve noticed an editorial by Deborah Willis that reads almost like a response to our recent post by C. A. Bridges on print vs. paper books (though of course they were written completely independently of each other). Bridges admits that a number of things can be done with the physical artifacts that are paper books that can’t be done with e-books, as a reader he finds he prefers the electronic version. Deborah Willis, on the other hand, is concerned about the essential nature of printed books becoming diluted or vanishing as a result of migration...

The Literary Platform has a piece by Andy Campbell of One to One Productions, the company behind multimedia fiction journal Dreaming Methods, looking back at the project’s ten-year history. Although it is fiction meant to be experienced on a screen, Dreaming Methods is does not have too much in common with “e-books”. Call it a distant cousin, born of the same march of technology but taking a much different path. Campbell writes that Dreaming Methods was created out of experimentation to find a better way of viewing fiction through a computer screen than just reading text off...

The Guardian has an interview with Penguin chief executive John Makinson, who also runs a small independent bookstore with his brother. Makinson is a newly converted iPad reader, carrying an iPad loaded with a number of books on a trip to India. He has a number of things to say about the iPad, and about e-books in general. "It does redefine what we do as publishers and I feel, compared with most of my counterparts, more optimistic about what this means for us," [Makinson] says. "Of course there are issues around copyright protection and there...

Tim Carmody at Snarkmarket points to a fascinating article at Triple Canopy on the pre-history of digital media, and the future of the book. It is an interview with Bob Stein, computer pioneer and the director of the Institute for the Future of the Book. It covers a number of topics including his unsuccessful early effort to put the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica on a laserdisc (it turned out to be unreadable), how laserdiscs first got commentary tracks, and, well, the future of the book. I find the magazine-in-a-browser format a little annoying, but the content is fascinating...

Nick Wingfield, filling in for Walt Mossberg at the Wall Street Journal, has an article looking at several children’s book apps for the iPad, including the multimedia Alice for the iPad, Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax, and others. While Wingfield is not a fan of reading ordinary e-books on the iPad, he admits to being intrigued by the idea of interactive multimedia “book” apps. I focused on kids' books because they're among the first to cleverly exploit the iPad's capabilities and their rich illustrations can look great on the iPad's color screen. It also...

TechCrunch has a piece about an app-zine billing itself as “the first iPad-only magazine.” Sideways, $3.99 in the app store, is a magazine created for the iPad, about the iPad. While the feature stories in the current issue don’t interest me enough to want to pay $4 for it, the magazine seems to be getting some good reviews, both by TechCrunch and on the app store page. Writes app reviewer “stephthepanda”: Sideways has it right. Think about the capabilities of the iPad first, THEN focus on the content. These articles really pop because of...

Because kids are adept at adopting new technology before they’re even old enough to talk, does that mean the next generation is going to grow up using that kind of technology in different ways than we do today? It’s a good question, and it’s one that I’ve seen a number of articles addressing. Most recently, this piece from Advertising Age talks about how the writer Mike Henry’s 18-month-old son is already actually using the iPhone and iPad. Not just hitting buttons at random, but actually choosing the specific apps he wants to play with. ...

On Publishing Perspectives today, Irish publisher (and TeleRead “Things Publishers Fear” contributor) Eoin Purcell opines that e-books are a “cul-de-sac.” But on reading further, his point of view is the exact opposite of most e-book skeptics. Rather than seeing a future primarily in print, Purcell thinks that e-books do not go far enough. Purcell sees a danger in getting so wrapped up in e-books as e-books that publishers and writers forget to concentrate on other new media formats. Rather than expend their energy focusing on one format that may be fleeting, publishers need to...

Kirk Hiner at our sister blog AppleTell looks at an iPad magazine demo from Viv Mag, which appears to be a women’s magazine. It features a video of an interactive magazine article (pertaining to sex, so probably not work safe) which is basically a multimedia presentation with animated section transitions, much like an interactive CD-ROM game such as Myst. As Hiner notes, I’d pay to see that movie, but would I want to watch all of that just to get to a magazine article? I can’t imagine we’d have to, as this looks like...

On TechFlash, Eric Engleman comments on an Associated Press story about a new “enriched” edition of David Baldacci’s latest novel, Deliver Us From Evil, that Hachette is putting together. It will cost $15.99, $1 more than the $14.99 starting price of the regular edition (which will fall to $12.99 if the book becomes a bestseller). The “enriched” edition will include deleted passages, research photos, an audio interview, and video of Baldacci. It is not clear what format this book will be in, but since Hachette is working with Apple, it will probably be an appbook. “Hachette is ‘unsure’...