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Chatopic Book Series

  • Chris Anderson: Makers: The New Industrial Revolution

    Chris Anderson: Makers: The New Industrial Revolution

  • Clayton M. Christensen: How Will You Measure Your Life?

    Clayton M. Christensen: How Will You Measure Your Life?

  • Daniel Kahneman: Thinking, Fast and Slow

    Daniel Kahneman: Thinking, Fast and Slow

  • Phil Lapsley: Exploding the Phone: The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws who Hacked Ma Bell

    Phil Lapsley: Exploding the Phone: The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws who Hacked Ma Bell

  • Rachel Maddow: Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power

    Rachel Maddow: Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power

  • Daniel H. Pink: A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future

    Daniel H. Pink: A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future

  • Susan Cain: Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

    Susan Cain: Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

  • Patricia S. Churchland: Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us about Morality

    Patricia S. Churchland: Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us about Morality

  • Daniel Imhoff: Food Fight: The Citizen's Guide to the Next Food and Farm Bill

    Daniel Imhoff: Food Fight: The Citizen's Guide to the Next Food and Farm Bill

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Chatopic 2013 Book Series Announced

Scaled500

Since 2003, Chatopic (which I co-founded with Steve Lee) has been a place where you can: A) read a great book; B) beat the topic into the ground at a meetup with a good group of people, and then; C) grab grub afterwards.

Our topics have ranged from Organized Religion, Animal Rights and Marketing, to Futurism, Philosophy and Design. Each Chatopic series is comprised of 6-9 books, chosen by popular vote, and we meet every eight weeks or so. If this sounds interesting to you, give me a holler.

Here is our latest series of books:

  1. How Will You Measure Your Life - by Clayton M. Christensen (240 Pages)
  2. Thinking, Fast and Slow - by Daniel Kahneman (511 Pages)
  3. Makers: The New Industrial Revolution - by Chris Anderson (272 Pages)
  4. Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking - by Susan Cain (300 Pages)
  5. Drift: the Unmooring of American Military Power - by Rachael Maddow (288 Pages)
  6. Design Thinking + A Whole New Mind - by Daniel Pink (288 Pages)
  7. Food Fight: The Citizen's Guide to the Next Food and Farm Bill - by Daniel Imhoff (356 Pages)
  8. Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us about Morality - by Patricia Churchland (288 Pages)
  9. Exploding the Phone: The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws who Hacked Ma Bell - by Phil Lapsley (416 Pages)

You can access any of the books by clicking the items labeled as 'CHATOPIC 2013 BOOK SERIES' on the side panel at the left.

March 12, 2013 in Books, Streams and Nuggets | Permalink | 0 Comments | TrackBack (0)

(INTERVIEW) PBS MediaShift - Tools for creating + publishing ebooks

Spot-the-DotYou can read the full piece HERE, but this is the salient excerpt:

But these new tech tools are not just for self-publishers anymore. While you don't see Big Publishing innovating much around the new capabilities, smaller publishers are eager to be first in the space.

Remember the popup book? They were mostly for kids, but I remember some great artsy books that used the delightful and complex popup "technology."

Unicorn Labs, a developer of e-books and early learning apps, worked with popup book maker David A. Carter to create "Spot the Dot," delivered in iTunes.

Chief Product Officer Mark Sigal describes it as "an interactive picture book app comprised of 10 different playspaces for young minds, such as 'Sliding Windows,' 'Popcorn' and 'Spinning Coins.'

We worked with the author to rethink the medium of the popup book for the iPad, a domain where touch, tilt, drag and rich voice and sound are native to the 'canvas.'" Kirkus Book Reviews recognized "Spot the Dot" as one of the Best Kids' Books Apps of 2011.

Related:

  1. Rebooting the Book - One iPad at a time (O'Reilly)
  2. Anatomy of an ebook app (O'Reilly)

December 20, 2012 in Books, Streams and Nuggets | Permalink | 0 Comments | TrackBack (0)

Is Netflix for eBooks a Winning concept?

Netflix-for-ebooks

Mike Shatzkin has written an excellent post evaluating subscription models in the ebook space, concluding that they make sense more for ebook niches (i.e., specific segments) than as a general offering.

His main point is that in contrasting the success stories at Spotify and Netflix with the prospects for eBooks, one has to look at the concept of granularity; namely, the fact that there are far fewer total movies and songs produced each year (measured in the thousands) than books (measure in the hundreds of thousands).

Read the whole piece, as it covers the history of such business models in the book space, success stories, and how the evolution of online has changed the equation.

My core actionable takeaways from the piece are three-fold: 

  1. MEDIA MATTERS: The distinctions between different media types drives their consumption patterns, which in turn drives monetization paths. After all, it was an easy evolution to unbundle the song from the album because the unit of value still worked (arguably better) at the level of the song. Even watching a movie is only a two-hour commitment. Both of these exercises naturally occur in lean back mode. By contrast, reading requires an engaged user, and a book takes days-to-weeks to consume, constraining the types of users and use cases where subscription is compelling. 
  2. UNITS OF VALUE: With books, the challenge is to define the unit of value whereby the whole book can be 'systemically un-bundled' into smaller units, and then aggregated into a larger library so as to create the kind of deeper value that supports a subscription model. Reference books are logical places for these things, as are segments like education and business where there are new types of media/engagement units that can be cobbled together to create value (e.g., cliff notes, best practices 'recipes,' quizzes, etc).
  3. CATCH-22: The challenge for most publishers contemplating this path is that there is both a material cost to re-factor content AND an income risk that new ventures in this arena don't cost-justify. As such, it's a bit of a Catch-22 for these folks. Why? On the one hand, the clear trend is for publishers to get increasingly squeezed by Amazon (especially if/when there is no more B&N). On the other, the individual stakeholder at a publisher who goes out on a limb to make this type of investment has to fight internal friction to play it safe, and thus faces career risk if things go awry, doubly challenging in an industry where lateral moves are scarce.

Such truths favor upstarts over incumbents (or Amazon, of course), but this is one story whose book has not yet been written.

Related:

  1. The Five Keys to a Successful eBook Production: The Story of Spot the Dot
  2. Anatomy of an eBook App (O'Reilly Radar)
  3. Creating a Top 10 eBook with Corona (Ansca Website)
  4. Rebooting the Book: One iPad at a Time (O'Reilly Radar)
  5. Ruminations on last week's Book Expo America: What it means for the Book Biz

July 19, 2012 in Amazon, Books, Digital Media, Metrics, Pattern Recognition, Streams and Nuggets | Permalink | 0 Comments | TrackBack (0)

The Apple Education Event: Can you say Halo Effect?

Apple-Ed-Event

Only Apple could take on the educational textbook business, an industry seemingly frozen in the 1950’s, where three gorillas dominate 90% of the market, and credibly expect to win.

Then again, only Apple has the moxie and constitution to re-think the entire textbook value chain from device to development tool; from online marketplace to bricks-and-mortar, and into the classroom.

That Apple today simultaneously launched a new interactive book authoring tool, an updated online bookstore and a new platform for creating, instigating and managing online courses is…let’s face it…so very Apple-like.

This is what they do. Build great tools that only run on the Mac, that tie into a software platform that seamlessly integrates into their three flavors of ‘iDevices’ (i.e., iPod touch, iPhone and iPad), and that feeds into an iTunes + iCloud universe, which is the axis point for Music, Movies, TV shows, Books, Apps and Personal Media, not to mention 250M credit card-backed iTunes accounts.

I mean, this is the definition of a ‘Halo Effect,’ right? Every thing that the company does reinforces everything that the company does, and every new initiative builds upon this advantage, in the process creating new advantages in terms of brand, market penetration and, most importantly, mindshare.

It’s almost Microsoft-like (back in the days when the PC ruled the roost); namely, that there is an air of inevitability, that through the Apple approach, which is all about focus, rigor, integration, leverage, derivation and optimization, that when Apple decides to attack, they are destined to win. (To be clear, though, Apple winning does not mean that everyone else must lose.)

In fact, one great irony is how until recently, the conventional wisdom was that Apple couldn’t win with this type of vertically focused approach, and that Google’s aping of the Microsoft horizontal model was destined to prevail.

Why Apple’s Approach to Textbooks is Credible

In pointing their attention at the textbook, Apple does so with several tremendous advantages. One is the simple fact that education is a core part of the company’s DNA, Apple having built their initial education beachhead in the mid-1980s with the Apple IIGS in K-12, and later on, with the Mac in higher education.

In fact, beyond Apple’s strong Mac presence in education, there are now more than 1.5 million iPads used in schools, over 20,00 education and learning apps built for the iPad, and over 1000 universities using Apple’s free online lectures archive, iTunes U.

Two is the basic truth that the ethos of a lightweight device whose battery lasts all day, that is durable, richly interactive, loaded up with compelling content, highly customizable, and equally critical, which is coveted by the ultimate end-user of the device (the iPad was the number one coveted device by teens over the holidays), is iPad all the way.

After all, it’s not like there is some other device that is even remotely in the ballpark in terms of units sold, developer adoption or customer embrace.

Three is the fact that in targeting the textbook arena, Apple was cognizant of the ‘core jobs’ that they’d need to address to be successful; namely:

  1. Making it easy to create the textbooks themselves;
  2. Extending the concept of a textbook to be visually elegant and meaningfully interactive;
  3. Nailing the information management side by making textbooks readily searchable, and cross-linkable between the table of contents, the text body and the glossary terms;
  4. Enhancing the study side of the equation by making notation and highlighting very easy, and conversion of same into study cards in a single click.

So, in the big picture, how do I read what Apple is doing? Number one, they are changing the rules of the game for a company like Amazon, which has a credible hope of competing in this space, given the success of Kindle.

Thus, by providing an enhanced ebook experience, and the tools to create it (something I suggested that Apple would do back in 2009), Apple is laying down the gauntlet.

If Amazon wants to compete, they either need to up their game by building tools and forking more heavily away from Android, or they need to focus on being the best low-end and/or single-purpose solution.

They simply are not going to succeed going toe-to-toe with Apple in segments where being best-of-breed and scalable matters.

As to Google, given the fact that the Android Market still has a confused relationship with customer billing, that the platform still does not support in-app purchasing, and the company’s seeming inability to launch a credible alternative to iTunes, the Android-based tablet business remains best suited for folks who want to surf the web while on the potty.

Moreover, in turning iTunes U into a courseware platform, Apple is basically taking the end-to-end problem of online course logistics, and solving it by enabling instructors to create full-fledged courses that incorporate a syllabus, document assignments, and which build a new type of courseware ‘bundle’ that is a composite of iBooks, Apps, Audio, Videos, Documents and iTunes U lectures.

Plus, because it’s deeply integrated with the new iBooks, a professor can reference a specific page in an assignment, and by clicking on the reference, the app will take the user to the specific content section, be it a reading passage, a video, an interactive element, or even a custom note within a reading passage.

Finally, because the courseware ‘envelope’ is bounded by a new iTunes U app, teachers can post messages and update assignments, and students can mark the assignment as completed when done.

Personally, there’s more than a little irony that the same company the rebooted the music business by unbundling the single from the CD package is now looking to reboot the education business by bundling apps and media into courseware. 

Related Notes:

  • The fact that iTunes U, which was previously limited to college courses, is now going to support K-12, is a big win for underfunded school districts, not to mention, homeschoolers, a rapidly growing segment.
  • iTunes U could see major uptake outside of the US since the service will be available in 123 countries. Given that iTunes U will drive ownership of both iPads and the underlying content and apps that make up a course, this initiative could end up catalyzing a lot of international growth for Apple in the months ahead.
  • The new iBooks model further muddies the already fuzzy boundaries between iBooks and Book Apps. Book Apps are clearly more dynamic and functionally rich than iBooks, but they are also more expensive to produce, and equally vexing, whereas Apple has pushed to maintain higher price points on iBooks, with Book Apps, they have allowed the category to be subject to the same downward pricing pressures as ordinary apps.
  • By taking a leadership role in education, and coming off as deeply earnest about this being a core part of the company’s mission, Apple gets to counter attacks that they are a walled garden and a bully with the fact that in market after market, they are the hero of the consumer. I expect them to see continued brand uplift from this.
  • On the downside, serious questions have been raised by others about the EULA in iBooks Author, inasmuch as Apple is trying to handcuff the author’s ability to do what they want with the output of the tool, and potentially raising questions of who owns the 'output' that is generated by the tool, but crafted by the author. Needless to say, this is an aspect of Apple that, business logic notwithstanding, makes more than a few queasy.
  • It seems clear that many of these books will be 1 GB in size or larger, suggesting that the iPad of the not too distant future is going to need a lot more storage for education-oriented users.
  • What, no social? It’s hardly surprising that Apple opted not to incorporate social functions into the new iBooks, given their two left-feet in this domain, but it’s also a missed opportunity to enhance collaboration and shared learning efforts.

UPDATE: Fred Wilson is the best (i.e., I love the richness of his perspective, and how business and product strategies manifest in the real world), but it's hard to imagine him celebrating ANYTHING that Apple does, which makes his complete dismissal of Apple's efforts here unsurprising (see 'Textbook Cases').

Related:

  1. Holy Shit! Apple's Halo Effect
  2. Apple's Segmentation Strategy, and the Folly of Conventional Wisdom
  3. Rebooting the Book: One iPad at a Time
  4. Amazon's Prime Challenger to the iPad
  5. It’s Time to ‘Think Different’ - Conventional Wisdom is Dead (Apple’s Q1 Earnings Call)

January 20, 2012 in Amazon, Android, Apple, Books, Branding, Digital Media, Education, iOS, Post-PC, Streams and Nuggets | Permalink | 0 Comments | TrackBack (0)

Best Kids' Book Apps of 2011 - Spot the Dot makes the grade (Unicorn Labs produced)

Kirkus3

(via Kirkus Book Reviews)

Related:

  1. Unicorn Labs produced 'Spot the Dot' featured in NYT article: Finding Good Apps for Children With Autism
  2. The Five Keys to a Successful eBook Production: The Story of Spot the Dot
  3. Kirkus Reviews gives Spot the Dot a Kirkus Star as a Book of Remarkable Merit
  4. Jolly and Roger's Misguided Adventures is Ansca Mobile's App of the Month

December 19, 2011 in Books, iOS, Media, Streams and Nuggets | Permalink | 0 Comments | TrackBack (0)

Jolly and Roger's Misguided Adventures is Ansca Mobile's App of the Week

Jolly-Rogers-Misguided-Adventures1-300x244

The accolades are starting to come in on our latest creation, Jolly and Roger's Misguided Adventures: Quest for the Dragon Tear, an interactive children's ebook for iPad, which was produced by my company, Unicorn Labs, and co-created with Stephen Silver (Kim Possible, Danny Phantom) and Frank Rocco (Wow Wow Wubbzy, Kung Fu Panda: Legends of Awesomeness).

Corona-SDK-App-of-the-Week2'Jolly,' which is already a Top 50 ranked iPad Book App (in terms of sales) was just recognized as App of the Week by Ansca Mobile, makers of Corona SDK, which we develop our ebooks on top of.

Needless to say, we are thrilled, inasmuch as this is the third time we've been recognized by Ansca, including our Top 10 selling ebook hit, 'Rabbit and Turtle's Amazing Race.'

Btw, if you are interested in such things, here is the podcast that I did in tandem with this announcement.

UPDATE: ANSCA has now recognized our ebook as the App of the Month. Thanks, guys!

Corona-SDK-Game-of-the-Month

Related:

  1. Unicorn Labs produced 'Spot the Dot' featured in NYT article: Finding Good Apps for Children With Autism
  2. The Five Keys to a Successful eBook Production: The Story of Spot the Dot
  3. Kirkus Reviews gives Spot the Dot a Kirkus Star as a Book of Remarkable Merit

 

November 29, 2011 in Books, iOS | Permalink | 0 Comments | TrackBack (0)

Jolly and Roger's Misguided Adventures: Quest for the Dragon Tear (Children's interactive ebook for iPad)

Jolly-4Panel

Jolly and Roger's Misguided Adventures: Quest for the Dragon Tear is now LIVE in the App Store. 

This interactive children's ebook for iPad was produced by my company, Unicorn Labs, and co-created with Stephen Silver (Kim Possible, Danny Phantom) and Frank Rocco (Wow Wow Wubbzy, Kung Fu Panda: Legends of Awesomeness).

It's a wonderfully enjoyable story with beautiful, hand-drawn art, intensely great audio, and a treasure chest full of 70+ fun surprises.

Plus, it showcases the power of our ebook creation engine, Unicorn Engine for eBooks, which enables rapid development of highly interactive ebooks in a fraction of the time and cost of completely custom efforts.

In fact, via the Unicorn Engine, we have already earned both a coveted Kirkus Star on David A. Carter's 'Spot the Dot,' which we produced for Ruckus Media, and achieved a Top 10 revenue grossing eBook on 'Rabbit and Turtle's Amazing Race.' 

What is 'Jolly' about? It is a story about dueling pirates, a witch's curse, and a little boy who dreams of becoming a pirate. It is the first chapter in a continuing saga, a true original creation for a rapidly evolving medium.

The book is priced at $4.99, and there is a free Lite version that you can check out to "try before you buy," but to celebrate the launch, we are pricing 'Jolly' at 99 cents for one-week only.

To get a flavor of what Jolly and Roger's Misguided Adventures: Quest for the Dragon Tear is all about, check out this one minute video trailer.

Update: AppAdvice has a decent write-up of the book, and is giving away a few promo codes for a free download of the book. Check it out.

Update #2: ANSCA (makers of Corona) has honored the book by naming it their App of the Week. Also, here is the Podcast that I did in tandem with it being announced.

Update #3: Our book is picking up steam, and 'Jolly' is now the #44 Top Paid iPad Book App.

Related:

  1. The Five Keys to a Successful eBook Production: The Story of Spot the Dot
  2. Kirkus Reviews gives Spot the Dot a Kirkus Star as a Book of Remarkable Merit
  3. Rebooting the Book: One iPad at a Time
  4. Anatomy of an eBook App

November 23, 2011 in Apple, Books, Digital Media, iOS, Media, Streams and Nuggets | Permalink | 0 Comments | TrackBack (0)

Jolly & Roger's Misguided Adventures: An iPad eBook Adventure Like No Other

J-R-Title_Screen_01_Rev

Produced by Unicorn Labs (Spot the Dot, Rabbit and Turtle's Amazing Race, Unicorn Disco), and created by Stephen Silver (Kim Possible, Danny Phantom) and Frank Rocco (Fairly Odd Parents, Wow Wow Wubbzy), Jolly & Roger's Misguided Adventures is an interactive ebook that is built from the ground up for the iPad.

It features beautiful, hand-drawn art, classic keyframe animations, and a treasure chest full of surprises, including quirky touch interactions, and wondrous, ambient sounds.

Jolly & Roger's is the first chapter in a continuing saga - a story of dueling pirates, a curse, and the quest for redemption. It is also a story about youth and innocence, of a little boy, and his dream to become a pirate.

The book is in late production, and due to ship later this month.

What follows is a short video trailer on the book, and below that, a sneak peek into the world of Jolly & Roger.

eBook Video Trailer

"Sneak Peek" Video

Related Posts:

  1. Rebooting the Book: One iPad at a Time (O'Reilly Radar)
  2. The Five Keys to a Successful eBook Production: The Story of Spot the Dot
  3. Kirkus Reviews gives Spot the Dot a Kirkus Star as a Book of Remarkable Merit

August 04, 2011 in Books, Digital Media, Entertainment, iOS, Media | Permalink | 0 Comments | TrackBack (0)

Comic-Con, Convergence and the Rise of Integrated Media

Comic-Con

"Here’s my prediction: Almost every dotcom idea from 10 years ago that failed will succeed." - Marc Andreessen

When I got into tech back in 1994, convergence was was the holy grail.

It was borne of the idea that one day the then-immovable boundaries between the following industries would collapse, enabling a new kind of integrated value chain to emerge:

  • Television
  • Motion Pictures
  • Music
  • Consumer Electronics
  • Internet
  • Telephony
  • Print Media
  • Advertising
  • Videogames
  • Computing

The promise of this concept led Sony, the inventor of the Walkman, to acquire Columbia Pictures. It led regional phone service provider, Bell Atlantic, seeking to re-factor the communications and entertainment landscape, to pursue a merger with cable TV giant, TCI.

In fact, over the next decade, the 'promised land' of convergence drove a flurry of mergers and acquisitions, reaching its apex when Time Warner merged with AOL.

AOL-TW

That many of these deals failed disastrously (in the case of AOL Time Warner) or were never consummated (in the case of Bell Atlantic-TCI) is besides the point.

Poor execution aside, the pursuers of convergence were simply ahead of their time, a truth bounded by the way that:

  1. Apple has reshaped so many of these industries by vertically integrating them across media, mobile and tablet device form-factors from distribution channel to software platform, apps and media marketplace.
  2. Comcast has leveraged physical connectivity to so many homes (and a commensurate billing relationship) into owning NBCUniversal, extensive cable channel holdings and a growing telephony business.
  3. Amazon has emerged as Walmart, Cloud Computing platform and Kindle/tablet maker, rolled into one.

Put another way, as a VC friend of mine once said, "It's as lethal to be too early, as it is to be wrong."

It's this truth that gives folks like Marc Andreesseen the confidence to predict that many of the lamest ideas of the dotcom period will yet be vindicated (I think that he's right on this one), and it's this same truth that was on display at Comic-Con 2011 aka San Diego Comic-Con International.

A Snapshot of how 'Integrated' Media has Become

Comic-Con-Souvenir For me, the AHA moment in planning my Comic-Con experience was attempting to digest a priori an event guide that was almost 200 pages, and it was full of...actual events!

Consider, a four-day long event that literally envelops the city and county of San Diego, bringing in over 130,000 fans of comic books, horror, animation, manga, games and fantasy, making it the single largest convention in America.

If you want to see how integrated media has become (and can become), ponder an event that provides a unified sandbox for:

  1. Content Producers to showcase, screen and publicize their new Comic Books, Movie Releases, Cable TV shows, Videogames and Toys;
  2. Fans to meet cast members, industry luminaries and their favorite artists, and get their autographs; see their latest projects and hear them talk about them; and, oh yeah, dress up as their favorite characters;
  3. Vendors to sell Books, T-Shirts, Posters, Toys, Artwork, Comics and other industry paraphanelia;
  4. Artists to present their portoflios for review and potential hire by content producers.

CafeDiem Btw, if you're familiar with the integrated media unit known as a "home page takeover" on a web site, consider what Syfy channel did in taking over an actual, physical restaurant (Maryjane's Coffee Shop in Hard Rock Hotel), and rebranding it for the event as Syfy's CafeDiem, down to the signage, tabletops and menus.

One can only wonder if the boring, staid Oscars and Emmy Awards events were reinvisioned as a like-type festival for producers, fans, vendors and artists alike if, maybe, just maybe, the industry would foment a deeper bond between their audience and their slate of programs/movie releases, not to mention the publicity and promotion food chain.

The Moral of the Story

Apple logo blue When I think of the enormous success of Comic-Con (especially relative to the general lameness of the trade show industry in general), and I ponder the recent blowout earnings of both Amazon and Apple, I think about how often conventional wisdom gets things wrong specifically by creating false 'Either/OR' dichotomies.

In the tech business, for the longest time it was not only conventional wisdom, but it was the gospel and hardline religion, that you had to be horizontally organized, and focused on one thing, one discrete line of business, or you were destined to the scrap heap of history.

The truth of the matter is that a lot has to go right, both tactically and culturally, for convergence and integration to work.

But seeing how much of a win (for all types of users) such integrated platforms are across Post-PC (Apple), Commerce (Amazon) and Media (Comic-Con), I think that it's just a matter of time before the next wave - Convergence 2.0 - is born.

After all, where visionary leaders show the way, smart students will follow.

Related Posts:

  1. Ruminations on MacWorld 2011 and the Future of Trade Shows
  2. The Programmable Fan Site: A New Media/Ad Unit Model
  3. Apple's Segmentation Strategy (and the Folly of Conventional Wisdom)
  4. Thoughts on Book Expo America trade show: Rebooting the Book - Part Two

 

July 28, 2011 in Advertising, Amazon, Apple, Books, Digital Media, Entertainment, Games, Marketing, Media, Pattern Recognition, Post-PC, Television | Permalink | 0 Comments | TrackBack (0)

(BEAUTIFUL ART) Jolly & Roger's Misguided Adventures is our next ebook for iPad

J&R-sharp-crop

Jolly & Roger's Misguided Adventures is our next ebook for iPad. It's a really cool story about dueling pirates, a dark curse, and a little boy named Roger, who just wants to be a pirate. Here is some original art that captures the beauty of this book. (Ages 5 & up)

July 25, 2011 in Books, Entertainment, iOS | Permalink | 0 Comments | TrackBack (0)

Kirkus Reviews gives Spot the Dot a Kirkus Star as a Book of Remarkable Merit

Kirkus-Star-Spot-the-Dot

(via Kirkus Reviews)

Here's the review of 'Spot the Dot,' a play-based iPad eBook which was conceived by pop-up master David A. Carter ('One Red Dot' and 'Bugs in a Box' series), and produced by Unicorn Labs for Ruckus Media.

SPOT THE DOT (reviewed on July 1, 2011)

The Picasso of paper engineers (One Red Dot, 2005, etc.) displays a dab hand at concocting even more thoroughly interactive explorations of shape and color for touchscreens.

At a genial narrator’s invitation (followed by a hearty “Good Job!” after each successful poke), children spot and touch ten dots, each a different color, on as many screens. Said dots are concealed with increasing sophistication, from easy-peasy early ones placed on a checkered background or, Concentration style, under opaque covers. More difficult screens feature of movable “spotlight” illuminating shapes behind a black screen and tumbling arrays of circles, squares, stars and hearts of various size and hue. Spying the final, white, dot in a dazzling multi-screen maze of geometric forms will challenge the sharpest eyes, and should probably not be attempted by the easily irritated. The graphics are bright and simple, the pace is entirely controlled by the viewer, all of the dots will be in different places on subsequent visits to their respective pages, and all can also be hunted down in any order.

Clean of look, seamless in design: a delight even for the diapered crowd. (iPad game app. 1-6)


Pub Date: May 25th, 2011
Publisher: Ruckus Mobile Media

Related Posts

  1. Rebooting the Book: One iPad at a Time
  2. Anatomy of an eBook App
  3. The Five Keys to a Successful eBook Production: The Story of Spot the Dot

June 03, 2011 in Books, Digital Media, Streams and Nuggets | Permalink | 0 Comments | TrackBack (0)

Rebooting the Book, Part Two – Ruminations on Book Expo America

Deja-vu

Back in Fall 2009, with anticipation running high that Apple would release a tablet computing device (they did; the iPad, in case you haven’t heard), I wrote a piece called ‘Rebooting the Book.’

In it, I theorized that the book business, and the book medium itself, was poised to undergo a massive transformation every bit as significant as when the ‘talkie’ usurped the silent film in the 1920’s.

The moral of the story from the film industry’s revolution was that such a cataclysmic event in the book industry would not only change the economics of the book business and the way books are made, but the very concept of what books are.

Since then, Borders, the second largest book store chain, has gone into bankruptcy, Barnes & Noble has put its entire business up for sale (its Nook eReader is widely perceived to be its greatest asset), Amazon has announced that they are now selling more digital eBooks via Kindle than hardcover and paperback print books – combined – and Apple’s iPad has become a runaway success, with books being the second most popular paid app category after games on the device (according to Nielsen).

Such is my backdrop for trying to making sense of Book Expo America, North America’s largest gathering of book trade professionals, which I attended last week in New York. What follows are the key takeaways:

  1. Death of the Book Store: It was jarring how completely unprepared the book publishing folks seemed to be for the end of the ‘bricks and mortar’ book store. For example, the rumors that I hear are that Liberty Media, the company negotiating to buy Barnes & Noble, is doing it to get the Nook, and will shut down the bricks and mortar retail stores. If true, this presents a serious conundrum for publishers since, unlike manufacturers of other types of products, publishers today are at the total mercy of book stores for book marketing and book discovery. Yet, when I asked different execs at the show what their strategy would be if/when there are no bookstores, the response was akin to a deer in headlights. The silence was deafening. Barring a serious course correction, this suggests that they will be at the mercy of either Apple or Amazon in the long run, which is unfortunate.
  2. There is no governing industry eBooks Philosophy: As the graphic below underscores, the term eBook can mean anything from a static, HTML-like Kindle book to something App-like that is animated, interactive, audio enhanced and which can respond to touch, tilt and shake. Unsurprisingly, there is no industry consensus on when, how and under what circumstances to deploy the various types of eBooks. Nor is there much consensus whether eBook creation is necessarily a core competency to be developed in-house or something to be outsourced. Part of this is stage of market, part of this is cost relative to return expectations and part of this is simply the DNA of the industry. 
  3. Cost Sensitivity + Leverage: The two core takeaways I heard repeatedly were: A) show me how to take the cost per book down to a level where ROI (return on investment) is a no-brainer; AND B) show me a model where I can leverage technology to churn out a series of books rapidly as opposed to one book at a time, spread out over multiple months per book. In other words, this is an industry looking for about scale, leverage and return on investment.
  4. Amazon is the Boogie Man: Not only did Amazon tout a new publishing solution at the show, but they recruited a big-name from the publishing world to go direct to authors and cut out publishers. Needless to say, this stirs incredible fear, uncertainty and doubt with publishers, who are deeply afraid of Amazon.  Later this year, when Amazon comes out with their much-rumored Android Kindle tablet this will only accelerate.
  5. Publishing rights complicate greatly: The thing to remember is that each book has a contract with the author that defines what rights the publisher has to re-purpose the content. Mobile apps are a new category so it is very common for the publisher not to have rights to make an app, or if they do, then to be constrained by the level of interactivity before it is considered a movie or multimedia, which they may not have rights to. As such, the move to deeply interactive eBooks will be gated by such constraints.
  6. EPUB 3: This is the new standard that is coming that will supposedly make books interactive. Also, it is based on HTML 5. In theory, such a standard could unify eBook standards and break down proprietary barriers. In practice, my experience is that these things take longer than predicted to take hold, and are often as much a blessing as a curse for proprietary approaches.

EBook-Continuum

UPDATE: It looks like the other shoe has dropped, and Borders is now officially liquidating. The 400 remaining stores are closing, and 11,000 jobs are going away. WSJ has got a decent write up on this, as does paidContent. Any way that you slice it, there is no "lateral move" for the vast majority of people in middle-to-upper management at Borders, and with one of the two major remaining US book chains now gone, it also stands to reason that many of the folks that serviced these relationships on the publisher side of the fence risk being similarly affected. As to how this will affect authors, I guess the question is, "Is it easier or harder for new bands and new CDs to be discovered now that there aren't record stores anymore?" That's a somewhat comparable analog to books. And in the music industry, at least there is the blocking/tackling aspect of bands touring and playing gigs to build their audience and support themselves. Publishers and authors don't have this venue as readily, since book stores were a primary endpoint for book signings and book tours. Now, the short-term trend worth watching is whether this helps independent book stores to carve out profitable niches. I sure hope so.

Related Posts

  1. Rebooting the Book: One iPad at a Time
  2. Anatomy of an eBook App
  3. The Five Keys to a Successful eBook Production: The Story of Spot the Dot

June 03, 2011 in Books, Digital Media, Streams and Nuggets | Permalink | 0 Comments | TrackBack (0)

The Five Keys to a Successful eBook Production: The Story of Spot the Dot

Unknown2 One of my favorite axioms is, “If you want to see how it ends, look at how it begins.”

I think of this truth in trying to assess the recently launched ‘Spot the Dot,’ a visually mesmerizing, play-based children’s eBook that we produced in tandem with New York Times best-selling children’s author David A. Carter for Ruckus Media. 

For those who don’t know, Carter is a recognized master of the pop-up book, with over 6.5 million print books sold to date (fans of his ‘One Red Dot’ and ‘Bugs in a Box’ series are legion). 

But, this was the first time he’d be adapting his creative wizardry to the iPad, so there was always risk that in transitioning from a paper-based medium to a digital one something would get lost in translation.

Images-32

Spot-the-Dot-for-iPad-on-the-iTunes-App-Store Plus, ultimately this was a project being produced FOR someone else – Ruckus Media, in this case – so there was always the risk of conflicting agendas, miscommunication and a less than a sum of the parts end-product.

So how did it go? I am obviously biased, but I am super-happy with the results, which The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) frames as: 

Tuaw-logo-whitebackground "Spot the Dot is a fun mix of memory, visual discrimination and puzzles that will keep toddlers engaged. Most importantly, the game encourages adults to sit with the young player(s) and offer another level of engagement." 

You can decide for yourself by following the links to reviews of Spot the Dot at the bottom of this piece, or by downloading the FREE ‘lite’ version of the app, but my goal with the rest of this article is to share some “pattern recognition” of the five things that we did right in making Spot the Dot.

I see these items as cornerstones in helping us to successfully translate David A. Carter’s complex paper sculptures into interactive experiences for the touch screen – including ten discrete playspace experiences, such as “spotlight,” “popcorn,” “fractions” and “asteroids.”

The Five Keys to a Successful eBook Production

  1. Clearly Articulated Storyboard: I give a lot of credit to Executive Producer Marc Cheshire for creating a storyboard structure that was both visual and specific, down to the level of desired voice-over sequences. The benefit of having a tangible document when decision paths were unclear, or we were at loggerheads about implementation details, was key to getting everyone synced up.
  2. Documenting of Process and Progress via Basecamp: When you have three companies working across five different geographic locations, there are endless opportunities for key details to disappear into the ether. Similarly, there is the perpetual risk of losing hours or days chasing down a resource, such as an image or audio file, that was previously provided. Like any project management methodology, Basecamp is not perfect, but it was the junction point and corporate memory mechanism for a whole lot of composition that would likely have otherwise not been synergized.
  3. Frequent (Weekly) Builds to keep things Tactile: There is no substitute for See-Touch-Feel. You can discuss implementation details, workflows and user experience until you are blue in the face, but when every sees it and experiences it firsthand on their own device, it’s a lot easier to separate the wheat (and the heat) from the chaff. Similarly, we timed weekly builds to a weekly thirty-minute “alignment” call, and the combination was very purposeful.
  4. Sound is Core to the eBook Experience: A revelation fairly early in the project is the power that really good sound can bring to an eBook. Think voice-over, ambient sounds and audio effects. Just as Spielberg and Lucas harness great sound in breathing an extra dimension into their productions (think: 'Jaws,' 'Star Wars' and 'Indiana Jones'), so did we, and so should you.
  5. Leverage of a Proven App Foundation: Everyone has their favorite programming methodologies and toolsets for development, so let me acknowledge fully that I am biased and that your mileage may vary. That stated, we leveraged Ansca’s Corona framework and our own eBook engine, Unicorn Engine for eBooks, for rapid application development.  What did that gain us? Number one, it allowed us to build ten mini-applications (i.e., the playspaces) into one master eBook app in about 90 days, probably half the time it would have taken us if we had to hand code. Two, it enabled the client to spend their “custom currency” on differentiating features instead of table stakes. Three, it gave us a straight path to come out with iPhone and Android versions of Spot the Dot, owing to the multi-device, multi-OS nature of these technologies. 

You may be thinking that very little of this is earth-shattering, and that’s the point.

Through a combination of good process, clear communication, systems-based leverage and keeping things hands-on, the path to building a compelling eBook experience is defined by what you establish at the start of the project as much as what you do throughout the project's lifecycle.

Check out this short video, which is David A. Carter’s assessment of the make process.

Spot the Dot Reviews

  1. How a Children's iPad App is Made: Spot the Dot by Ruckus (WIRED)
  2. Spot the Dot for iPad is a Fun, Simple Children's Game (TUAW)
  3. Kirkus Star recipient, Spot the Dot (Kirkus Reviews) 
  4. Spot the Dot Review (Teachers with Apps)
  5. Spot The Dot - Latest Fun Educational App for Toddler and Pre-schoolers (FEA)
  6. The Educational Components of Spot the Dot (applicable2u)
  7. Spot the Dot — iPad App Review (Pad Gadget)
  8. 10 Apps You and Your Kids Will Love (The Twin Coach)

Related Posts

  1. Anatomy of an eBook App (O'Reilly Radar)
  2. Creating a Top 10 eBook with Corona (Ansca Website)
  3. Rebooting the Book: One iPad at a Time (O'Reilly Radar)
  4. Ruminations on last week's Book Expo America: What it means for the Book Biz (The Network Garden)

June 02, 2011 in Books, Coaching, Digital Media, Streams and Nuggets | Permalink | 0 Comments | TrackBack (0)

Our new eBook for iPad is LIVE in App Store: BOY! A Wolf’s Tale HD – See, Touch & Learn Interactive

At my company, Unicorn Labs, we are blessed to have a GREAT team of writers, illustrators, programmers, producers and audio specialists. And we squeezed every last drop of their creativity, inspiration and resilience to build an eBook that's a worthy follow-on to our first effort, 'Rabbit and Turtle's Amazing Race' (a perennial Top 20 iPad Book).

'BOY! A Wolf’s Tale' (BAWT) is a re-envisioning of the classic "Cry Wolf" tale, rendered as an amusement park ride and wrapped in an eBook. 

"BOY!" - Once you hear it, you'll know. Beautifully told, as a rhyming story. 

It's quirky, irreverent brain candy for your kids; a book that is specifically designed to be touched, played with and engaged at multiple levels.

Made for the entire family, BAWT is an original for a new medium, a re-envisioning of a timeless story about personal responsibility, consequences and redemption.

Check it out. You won't be disappointed. It's live in the iTunes App Store(HERE).

Features: 

  • "Read it to me" mode: The book is read to you by the narrator 
  • "I want to read it" mode: No narration, moderate ambient sounds
  • Hand-drawn artwork that is specifically mastered for the iPad 
  • Touch the text box on any page to dismiss it from view. Touch again to restore 
  • Numerous hidden touch-activated surprises, animations and sounds 
  • An Easter Egg that you won't soon forget

Join our Facebook Community: http://on.fb.me/9KWNgy

Related:

  1. How To Create An iPad E-Book App (GUEST COLUMN @ Forbes)
  2. Rebooting the Book: One iPad at a Time (GUEST COLUMN @ O'Reilly Radar)
  3. We Are Live! Rabbit and Turtle's Amazing Race HD: See, Touch & Learn

 

December 08, 2010 in Books, Digital Media, Streams and Nuggets | Permalink | 0 Comments | TrackBack (0)

Rabbit and Turtle's Amazing Race HD (Lite Version) hits #11 in Top Free iPad Books

Rabbit-Turtle-lite-11

via iTunes

October 03, 2010 in Books, Digital Media, Streams and Nuggets | Permalink | 0 Comments | TrackBack (0)

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