Book Summit 2011, held in Toronto on June 17, focused the attention of 200 or so industry professionals on digital publishing and extensions of books, particularly the potential and pitfalls of apps. Nicholas Callaway, who spent 30 years as a print publisher before transforming his company into an app studio, New York-based Callaway Digital Arts, told the audience, “We are at the dawn of an entire new era.”
Callaway’s company was one of about 15 app developers whose products were chosen as content to help launch Apple’s iPad. After the launch, he said he was eager to see what consumer reaction was. One family posted a YouTube video of their 18-month old daughter kissing the Miss Spider character in Callaway’s first app. Not only was that an expression of affection for the character, he said, the child was also using her lips instead of her finger to activate the animation. “This is a full body experience. That’s a huge key that this physical engagement is an enormously important aspect of what we can do in the app world,” he said. “What is so profound about what Apple has done with iPad is engaging through touch, being able to reach into a story to break that fourth wall and basically go through the looking glass and you’re inside the story and creating that kind of immersion in an interactive way.”
He acknowledged that creating apps that do this is not easy. “The app world of mobile and tablet is one in which to fulfill its true potential, you have to master all media. First of all, writing, linear, text-based writing, audio, narrative – and that gets into theatre and voice, music, sound design, still imagery of all kinds, whether it is drawn or photographed or computer generated, moving imagery –whether it is film-based, video, or animation…and design.”
Creators of apps – simple or complex, expensive or not – then face another problem: discoverability. Ron Hogan, project manager at Electric Publisher, the digital publishing arm of the U.S.-based multimedia literary journal Electric Literature, said “One of the biggest problems with ebook apps is for the iPad or iPhone, they are only available through the App Store and unless you know what you are looking for, it’s pretty much impossible to find anything. Books from all categories are dumped together into books. You’ve got Awesome Dragons next to The Army Survival Guide above a lot of Vietnamese-language titles, some Chinese-language titles.” Browsers looking for a book will likely be overwhelmed.
“Your solution is going to have to be, unless searchability in the App Store gets better, to integrate talking about your app in every stage of your book marketing,” Hogan said.
Callaway agreed. “To a great extent, you are dependent on discoverability on the App Store. That means you are dependent on love from Apple. We have gotten extraordinary attention from Apple and we continue to, but for most of the world it is really hard.”
His advice: “Don’t make crappy apps. Make pioneering apps from a story standpoint, from an animation standpoint, from an interactivity standpoint, from a design standpoint. That’s what we feel is our first mandate to get noticed, but then we hitch to it our relationship to Apple – traditional marketing through old media, digital marketing. We’re doing a lot through social marketing.”
This year’s Book Summit was the event’s 10th anniversary. It was organized by Cynthia Good, director of the creative book publishing program at Humber College in Toronto and Melissa Pitts, chair of the Book and Periodical Council in association with Authors at Harbourfront Centre.
