Touch Press were not alone in doing this. There were, and are, many other players in this space, ranging from one or two individuals working from home to much larger organizations, including the large publishing corporations, who have been actively experimenting with apps. But Touch Press stood out as one of the most accomplished of them all. They established a position as a leader in the market of what one could call ‘the premium app’ – that is, the app that was developed as a high-end product, beautifully crafted, making full use of the high resolution and functionality of the iPad. Their apps were regularly selected as App of the Week and Editor’s Choice in the App Store, and they were given rapturous reviews in the press. The Sunday Times devoted the front page of its Culture Section to The Waste Land,8 and The Orchestra was described in the Guardian as ‘an instant classic … one of the most impressive bits of app-ology I’ve ever seen.’9 Few app developers have enjoyed such consistently laudatory critical acclaim.
There can be little doubt that Touch Press was producing apps of the highest quality, but had they built a creative organization that was sustainable in the medium to long term? That was a question that preoccupied everyone at Touch Press too: they wanted to know more than anyone whether they had a viable business because their livelihoods depended on it. Some of their apps had been not just critical successes but commercial successes too – The Elements, of course, but also Solar System, The Waste Land, The Orchestra and others. They had earned back their costs and become profitable titles. But for every successful app of this kind, there were others that flopped – sometimes dismally so, selling 1,000 copies or less. Given the time and expense that goes into developing a premium app of this kind, that is a serious loss for a small business. To make this work, you need to be able to count on a regular flow of successful apps. You can take risks on some projects, but you have to be able to count on others to deliver high enough sales to cover their costs and be sufficiently profitable to keep the business going. Could it be done?
In 2012, Touch Press had reached a point where they needed to answer this question – not least because their investment capital was drying up and they needed to know if they had a viable business. Apart from the initial half a million dollars they had raised in 2010 to get the company off the ground, they had secured another £2 million of investment capital which had kept them going and enabled them to build the business, but by late 2012 their funds were running low. They were fortunate that, at just this time, a terrific opportunity came their way that would enable them to test their business model: some senior figures at Disney had seen The Waste Land and been impressed by it, and they approached Touch Press to see if they would be interested in partnering with them to do an app on the history of animation. It was a great project in itself: what could be more amenable to the medium of the app than a richly illustrated account of the history of animation? And who could be a better partner in a project of this kind than Disney, with their pivotal role in the history of animation and their incomparably rich archive of iconic characters and copyrighted material dating back to the 1920s? If you were setting out to find a partner for a book-as-app on the history of animation, Disney would be top of your list – and now they were saving you the trouble since they were knocking at your door. Moreover, with Disney’s powerful marketing machine behind you, this app would have everything going for it. If you couldn’t make this app work in financial terms, then what would your chances be with others?
Touch Press worked out a deal with Walt Disney Animation Studios in autumn 2012 and began working on the app in earnest in December, though much of the preparatory work had been done before then. A substantial part of Touch Press’s staff was assigned to this app – about ten people in total from the Press’s side, plus those on Disney’s side who also contributed to the project – and it required a good eight months of intensive work. The budget was substantial – around £400,000. Theo took on the role of author, and he wrote the text as the app was being developed. The app recounts the history of animation at Disney in a way that is thematically structured, with chapters or sections covering plot, character, the art of animation, visual effects, sound, etc. The text is interwoven throughout with a rich array of visual material that comes to life at the touch of a finger – the interweaving of text and image is so integral to the design that when you touch on a character to bring it to life, the text itself breaks up and reforms on the page to make way for the character, which now assumes centre stage. There are clips from Disney cartoons, starting with ‘Steamboat Willie’, the first Mickey Mouse cartoon that was released in 1928, and from all of the great Disney animated films – Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Bambi, The Lion King, Winnie the Pooh, Frozen, etc. Interactive tools are used to explain the principles of animation and enable younger users to have a go at producing simple animation effects, like adding and removing layers and creating movements. The app was released on 8 August 2013 at $13.99 and was immediately selected by Apple as Editor’s Choice, which ensured that it was featured on the front page of the App Store.
The release of the app was timed to coincide with the D23 Expo, the biennial exposition of the official Disney fan club which took place in Anaheim, California, on 9–11 August. This helped to give the app visibility in the community of Disney fans and contributed to a steep spike of sales during the first couple of weeks after its release. Sales then followed the normal pattern of app sales, falling off quite quickly and ticking over at modest levels – until, that is, Disney Animated was selected by Apple as iPad App of the Year for 2013. When this was announced on 16 December, it was followed by another steep spike in sales that lasted until the end of December, during which they sold another 20,000 or so. In January, Disney Animated won yet another accolade: it was named Best App in the Academic/Reference category of the 2014 Digital Book Awards, prizes that are handed out annually as part of the Digital Book World conference. It also won a Children’s BAFTA in the Interactive: Adapted category, and the Best Adult Digital Book in the Bookseller’s FutureBook Innovation Awards. In terms of critical recognition and awards, Disney Animated could hardly have achieved more: this is about as close as you can get to a clean sweep in the world of the book-as-app.
And yet, despite all this, Disney Animated was not an unqualified success in commercial terms. Given the costs involved in developing the app, the number of staff that was involved over a period of more than eight months, the extra effort and expense that was put into marketing, and the distribution of revenues between the partners, Touch Press needed to sell 100,000 copies to recoup their costs, and needed to sell considerably more than this – 300,000, maybe even 500,000 – to make a real financial contribution to the company. The app did well, but not as well as it needed to do to demonstrate that the business of developing premium apps of this kind is viable and sustainable in the medium to long term. ‘Disney Animated was a critical litmus test for us because it was a beautifully produced app into which we poured our soul, people worked nights and weekends and we couldn’t have made it better. It’s also on a popular subject that has deep roots in popular culture – the history of animated film is a subject that should interest lots of people. And, by God, it had Disney behind it – a bigger marketing machine it would be hard to find. And yet it ended up selling 70,000 units in the first five or six months. What this tells us is that our business model doesn’t work’, reflected Max. ‘We built this company and secured investment on the assumption that we could repeat The Elements. You make a beautiful title, very difficult to make, you sell large numbers and that’s a profitable, exciting business. You rinse and repeat, you scale up and you have a company that’s worth a lot. No.’ The sense of disappointment, conveyed by the hard reality of the ‘No’, was palpable. Max and his colleagues had spent four years embarked on an ambitious project committed to the invention of a new kind of digital book, building a team of around thirty talented staff who were able to exploit to the full the new media of the app and the iPad, and now they were faced with the stark realization that it could all be in vain. Nice idea, but it just doesn’t work.
Why not? ‘It’s partly because the ground has been moving under our feet as we’ve been working’, explained Max. ‘When The Elements came out, it was one of the very few games in town. And if you really wanted to see what your iPad could do, that’s what you got. Now there are over a million apps in the App Store and most of them are free.’ The number of apps was increasing and the average price was getting lower
