media companies with expertise in video and TV, and video game companies. Each had something important to contribute but they understood only part of what was essential for this new medium to work. Traditional book companies understood the importance of storytelling and of authors, but they lacked the expertise in video and the technical skills to develop the book-as-app – hence they generally had to outsource this development to specialist firms. Film and television companies understood talent, storytelling and visual media, but they too lacked the software skills to develop good apps. Game companies, on the other hand, have the technical skills to produce good interactive video game experience, but they don’t understand storytelling and the value of authors. So that’s what Touch Press set out to do: bring together these three sets of skills in a way that none of the other kinds of companies had managed to do.
A key part of this was to see that the software engineer must be on the same level as the other parties involved in developing the app: ‘You don’t bring an engineer in once you’ve decided what you’re going to do: the engineer is part of the process of deciding what you do.’ The senior management team included an engineer, John Cromie, who joined the team in 2010 to help build The Elements in sixty days and became the CTO; John managed the technical team and was part of all the key decisions about which new projects to take on. Once the management team had decided to embark on a new project, the planning and development of the book-as-app took place in development meetings at which the CTO and some of the programmers were present. There was a large screen on the wall and the engineers around the table plugged in their laptops so they could manipulate images and text on the screen as they talked about what to do. Sample pages were displayed, options were explored, technical limitations were discussed, costs were considered, decisions about what can and cannot be done were taken. This was a creative process in which the technical input of software engineers was factored in as the book was being written, shaping the way that the text was developed and how it was combined with the visual and audio elements of the app.
While Touch Press was strong on technical skills and audio-visual expertise (given Max’s background in television), they were less experienced on the publishing side. None of the principals had a background in book publishing, and, while Theo was a successful author, his knowledge of the publishing process was based on his arm’s-length dealings with a small New York trade house. The publishing perspective was the weakest part of their skill set. Moreover, apart from The Elements, they lacked the kind of intellectual property that an established publisher would have, and lacked the experience of dealing with authors and agents. So it is not surprising that they soon found themselves collaborating with publishers and other creative organizations as a way of developing new projects. Sometimes, publishers came to them; in other cases, Touch Press came up with ideas and sought out organizations with which they could partner. ‘Almost every project we’ve done since The Elements has been in partnership with a carefully selected owner of IP, owner of expertise, often owner of brands with a marketing department’, observed Max; ‘we see partnerships as a 21st-century way of publishing.’ Their partners included traditional publishers, such as Faber, HarperCollins, Egmont, Barefoot Books and the University of Chicago Press; TV production companies, such as Wide-Eyed Entertainment, the team behind the BBC’s Walking with Dinosaurs TV series; classical music organizations, including the Philharmonia – the London-based orchestra – and Deutsche Grammophon; and large media corporations, notably the Walt Disney Animation Studios. In each case, a profit share was worked out that involved dividing the net revenue (after Apple’s 30% commission and sales tax are deducted) between Touch Press as the app developer, the publisher or other partner who typically controlled the IP, the author, and the party (or parties) that invested the capital to produce the app. So, for example, a typical split might be: 50% of net receipts to Touch Press, the partner and the author, and 50% to the investors; and, between Touch Press, the partner and the author, it might be 50% to Touch Press and 50% to the partner and author; or 50% to Touch Press, 30% to the partner and 20% to the author. If Touch Press or the partner put in all or some of the investment capital, then their percentage of the net receipts would be increased proportionately.
Among the publishers, Touch Press’s partnership with Faber proved to be particularly fruitful, leading to a series of books-as-apps that attracted a great deal of attention, starting with Solar System, released in December 2010, followed by T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, released in June 2011, and Shakespeare’s Sonnets, released in June 2012. The Waste Land took Eliot’s iconic poem – the crown jewel of Faber’s list – and brought it to life in ways that are simply not possible in the medium of print, allowing the reader to read it but also to hear the poem being read (in no less than seven readings, two by Eliot himself) and to watch it being read in a remarkable, captivating performance by Fiona Shaw that was filmed specifically for the app. The extensive apparatus of notes that weighed down the printed version of the poem are conveniently relegated to a side panel that can be turned on or off with a simple touch of the screen, while the reader can listen to and watch various individuals, from poets to pop singers, talk about The Waste Land and what it meant to them. The result is that a poem that had existed for ninety years as print on paper was now recast in a new medium, enabling the reader to experience the poem in a unique and unprecedented way, combining the reading of text with listening to and watching the poem being read and discussed. The app was a surprising success: it went to the number one position among worldwide bestselling book apps, and sold around 20,000 units in the first year. It was also a critical success and the reviews were glowing. ‘When I began to use the Waste Land app’, extolled one professor of literature, ‘I immediately understood why so many people were buying it. While it presented the same poem, it presented it in a very different light … . The Waste Land app’s marvelous feat, as I have come to understand it, is to have rescued a vibrant and dynamic poem from a print medium that had entombed and shrouded it, for nearly a century.’7
While The Waste Land involved recasting in a digital medium a poem that had previously existed in print, many of the apps produced by Touch Press are digital creations sui generis – that is, they had no previous existence in print but were created specifically for the iPad. Their music apps are good examples of this. The Orchestra, produced in collaboration with the London-based Philharmonia Orchestra and The Music Sales Group, was released in December 2012; it was followed by Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, released in May 2013; The Liszt Sonata in B Minor with Stephen Hough, released in July 2013; and Vivaldi’s Four Seasons with Max Richter, released in May 2014. The first of these apps, The Orchestra, enables you to watch and listen to eight orchestral pieces, composed over a period of 250 years, from Haydn’s Symphony No. 6 and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 to Salonen’s Violin Concerto. The music is reproduced in high fidelity, and the video of the orchestra offers close-up images of individual musicians playing their instruments. You can also choose to watch a ‘beat map’ that represents each musician in the orchestra with a coloured dot that flashes when they are playing, so that you can see how the music correlates with the activity of different sections and instruments. A full or curated score – again, you can choose which you want to see – scrolls across the lower half of the screen as you listen to the music and watch the video or the beat map. The app also provides an encyclopedic guide to the sections and instruments of the orchestra; touch on any one of them and you’re given an account of how the instrument works, narrated by the musician himself or herself, who speaks to you directly and shows you what the instrument can do; touch the instrument and it enlarges and leaps into the foreground, flick it with your finger and it spins 360 degrees, just like the objects in The Elements. Touch the conductor, Esa-Pekka Salonen, and he’ll give you a personal account of the art of conducting. There is text too, including a short, illustrated history of the orchestra and a guide to listening to orchestral music and reading a score, written by LA Times music critic Mark Swed. The Orchestra and its successor apps, with their fluent blending together of music, voice, video, image and text, are works that could only exist in the kind of digital medium offered by an app.
It would be difficult to deny that the apps produced by Touch Press were a creative success. They exploited the new medium of the app to its full, using it to breathe a new kind of life into texts that had previously existed only on the printed page and to create entirely new works in which text is woven together with audio-visual
