in conceptualizing the way that the app is built – they know what can be done from a technical point of view, and they will often pitch their ideas to the publisher. But, ultimately, the initiative in these cases is being taken by the publisher, which is funding the development and paying the developers either a fixed fee or a share of the revenue (or, in some cases, a mixture of the two). Without the initiative from the publisher and its willingness to invest in experimental forms of this kind, these hybrid forms of publishing would not exist.
So is it worth it from the publisher’s point of view? From a strictly financial point of view, the experience of most publishers has been decidedly mixed. There have been some notable successes, like the one described above – and some apps have done even better than this, selling 100,000, 200,000 copies or more. But for every success of this kind, there are many apps where the sales have been disappointingly low. Sales in the hundreds or low thousands are not uncommon. In the light of low sales and downward pressure on prices, there were many within publishing houses who questioned the wisdom of developing apps and enhanced ebooks of this kind, especially when it was a matter of taking a pre-existing narrative text and adding digital supplements of various kinds. Evan Schnittman, then Sales Director at Bloomsbury, summed up the reservations of many when he said, at the London Book Fair Digital Conference in 2011, ‘The idea of innovating on the immersive narrative reading process is just a nonstarter.’6 Schnittman may well have been right about that when it comes to straight narrative text: in many cases, it’s not clear that there is much to be gained by taking a pre-existing text, adding audio-digital supplements of various kinds and seeking to turn it into something else in a digital medium. But there are other categories of book, such as cookbooks, travel books and children’s books, where there may be opportunities of a different kind for digital innovation. And there is no need to take a pre-existing narrative text as a starting point. Why not set aside our preconceptions about what a book is, start with a clean slate and see what happens?
Re-inventing the book as app
Touch Press was housed in a small, two-storey building in Warple Mews, a quiet cul-de-sac on an old industrial estate in west London. The factories are now silent and many of the buildings have been converted into office spaces for small businesses and start-ups of various kinds. Touch Press had two units in Warple Mews – they owned one and rented the other, and they’d knocked a hole through the wall so that the units interconnected. It was a compact space for thirty employees. Mostly open plan, there were rows of desks with programmers working on Macs, and at the far end of one room there was a meeting space with a large oval table and a generous skylight, closed off from the rest of the room by a glass screen and door. Touch Press earned a reputation as a high-end app developer – the Rolls-Royce of the app world. But they didn’t think of themselves as an app developer: they thought of themselves as a publisher, and they thought of what they made as books. ‘If you say “app developer” to someone, they think of a purely technical company that is brought in by a publisher to turn a book into an app, and we’re clearly not in that business’, explained Max Whitby, one of the founders of the company. He continued:
We’re trying to create something which is a thing in itself. I also think that a lot of what is associated with thinking of oneself as a book publisher is critical to the success of what we make. So you want an author with a voice, and we give them a medium in which to express themselves, you care about good typography and things being spelt correctly and being grammatical, and you curate the information – and that’s what a publisher does. And you’re a filter – you select, you decide, you’re in the swim of the culture and help to choose the things that will make a difference.
Like many start-ups, Touch Press emerged from a fortuitous convergence of circumstances. Max Whitby, a former television producer for the BBC, and Theo Gray, a software engineer and author with a background in chemistry who lives two hours south of Chicago, happened to share a hobbyist’s interest in the Periodic Table. They found themselves bidding for the same samples of elements on ebay and losing to one another, and decided it was time to meet, which they did in 2002. They struck up a friendship and, indeed, a collaboration, building a small business around their shared interest in the elements – ‘a kind of empire of the Periodic Table’. It just so happened that Theo was working at the time for a software company that was commissioned by Apple to supply some of the software for the iPad. Although the iPad was still in development, Theo and Max immediately saw an opportunity to do something new with the enormous amount of material they’d gathered on the Periodic Table. In the course of preparing for a book he wanted to publish on the elements, Theo had photographed each element on a turntable to get a set of 360-degree images. It suddenly dawned on him that he could use the software they were supplying for the iPad – a technical programme called Mathematica that Theo had helped to create – to combine these photos in a way that would enable you to ‘spin’ the object with a flick of your finger on the iPad. It’s a unique experience. It’s hard to imagine what it’s like until you actually do it, and the first time you flick your finger and make an object spin 360 degrees, it’s captivating. Flick it faster and it spins faster, touch it and it stops in its tracks. You would never have imagined that a flat screen could produce such a compelling and dynamic 3D effect.
Now they had a serious challenge: could they build an app of the elements in just sixty days, so it was ready to launch at the same time as the first iPad was released in April 2010? Using Mathematica, they would need to come up with an algorithm that would tell the program how to integrate and resize the photographs to produce the spin effect, how to position the rotating objects on the page and how to combine the objects with the text and labels. They also needed to persuade Apple that what they were producing was something new, not just a static piece of text on a screen. They knew that one of the questions that would be asked about the iPad was: how does this compare with the Kindle? If the iPad was thought of as an ebook reader, then it wouldn’t compare very favourably: it would have a battery life measured in hours rather than weeks, you couldn’t read in sunlight and it would cost a lot more. If your definition of ebooks is static pieces of text that you read on a screen, then the Kindle is going to be a better ebook reader than the iPad. So their pitch to Apple was to seize this opportunity to think differently about what an ebook is. ‘Suppose you change the conversation about what the future of ebooks is – that’s a conversation you can win’, they said. ‘Suppose you can convince people that, sure, the Kindle has a million books, but who cares – they’re a million old books. Look at this amazing thing – this is what ebooks are going to be. And there are half a dozen reasons why it can’t run on a Kindle – the screen is crap, the processor is nothing like what it needs to be, there’s not enough memory and so on. There’s lots of reasons why the future of ebooks cannot exist on a Kindle. Never mind the present, look at the shining future.’ Apple was convinced. The Elements was finished on time and the app was one of a couple of dozen apps that were installed on the small batch of embargoed iPads that were sent out to journalists a few days before the public launch of the iPad. The response from reviewers was euphoric. Stephen Fry tweeted ‘Best App of all … Everything is animated and gorgeous. Alone worth iPad.’
The publicity was exceptional and the app took off – they sold 3,600 copies on the first day, priced at $13.99 and £9.99. It went on to sell over a million copies and came out in fourteen different versions, including Japanese, French and German, generating over $3 million in net revenue. Theo had actually published a book called The Elements in September 2009 with Black Dog & Leventhal, a small New York trade house. It had been translated into several languages and had sold about 70,000 copies in all languages before the app came out. When the app was released, sales of the print book went through the roof. By 2012, more than 580,000 copies of the print edition had been sold in all languages. It was a stunning success, both as an app and as a book.
The success of The Elements was the basis on which Touch Press was founded. The company was incorporated in summer 2010, a few months after The Elements had been released, and they raised about half a million dollars, partly from two angel investors, to get the company off the ground. They saw themselves as pioneering a new kind of publishing: the book-as-app. As they saw it, there were three kinds of companies that
