The On The Road app sells for $16.99, compared to $10.88 for a paperback on Amazon and $9.99 for an electronic copy of an earlier “deluxe” edition. “The app itself has all the text of the book and then it’s got five times more material,” Morrison notes.
But the economics of book apps are still a matter of guesswork. “We’re in this experimental stage,” Morrison says. “We’ll see how this one does, figure out how much it costs us and, if we were going to do more, how many we would have to sell to make it worthwhile.” It will be a very long time before the last of the 1,500 titles on the Penguin Classic backlist get apped, he added. “At this point, they are very time-consuming, so we have to pick our shots.”
Quickly converted comics and children’s books are by far the most popular titles described as book apps by Apple. Among the minority aimed at adults, however, apps that are developed as original products – often by companies rooted entirely in the digital realm – outsell those with textual precursors. They include such titles as Warplanes: A History of Aerial Combat from game-maker Gameloft; and Solar System for iPad from Touch Press, which also developed The Waste Land app for Faber of London.
Other grown-up apps arriving this summer include Wreck This App from Penguin, a souped-up version of artist Keri Smith’s bestselling Wreck This Journal, which encouraged artists to seek inspiration through creative destruction. “Guided by more than 50 prompts and using a spectrum of drawing tools, you can tap ‘holes’ through the screen, ‘drip’ different inks, and then smear them all together, deface your least favourite picture of yourself, scribble furiously, colour outside of the lines!” the publisher promises.
It’s questionable whether the impending swarm of book apps will match the game-changing quality of the debutantes, however. “I think this will result in a few excellent digital books and a lot of glorified power points,” one person commented on the TED site, no doubt learning from the quality curve of once-exciting DVD “special features” and 3-D movies.
The bestselling Canadian book app David Suzuki: The Legacy, published by Vancouver’s Greystone Books, falls somewhere in the middle, comprising a reissued version of a conventional e-book first published last fall and video clips taken from a recent National Film Board documentary. What’s missing are the interactive features that make more expensively produced apps so appealing.
Even if high-quality apps do manage to change the way we read, though, it’s unclear how many current readers will respond. The mere fact that something is possible does not automatically make it desirable.
“I think the notion we can entice people into reading by having soundtracks or little animations is a category error,” British fantasy novelist Chine Miéville said in a recent interview. “I just don’t think that’s why people who want to read want to read. You’re not going to persuade them on that basis.”
That may explain why relatively simple, black-and-white e-readers remain so popular despite competition from glitzier tablets. Like books themselves – and manifestly unlike the Internet-inflected apps – they promise long periods of undisturbed immersion in fully realized other worlds. Rather than changing books by adding more stuff to them, they optimize books by stripping out everything but the essential shapes of black letters on a white background.
Book apps are already so different that the modifier does little to distinguish them from any of the other entertainments available for the iPad. They really aren’t books at all, which accounts for much of their appeal to a beleaguered trade contemplating the death of print.
