After I learned to read as a kid, I loved those ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ books. Make a choice, turn to a new page, the main character gets sucked into a black hole and dies, and then you’d flip back to start over and not make that choice again.
As the Apple-Tablet-as-Kindle-killer hype built up over the past month, I thought about something Jeff Bezos has often said in interviews about the Kindle: “You can’t ever outbook the book.” He would then refer to things the Kindle does better than books: search, lookup words, change fonts, etc. But as the iPad announcement neared and it seemed likely that Apple would provide its own bookstore and content, I thought about how Apple could outbook the book by tweaking the medium itself, with a device powerful enough to enable that. Choose Your Own Adventure on steroids.
You Can’t Read the iPad at the Beach
I love my Kindle. I like to read books a lot, and it lets me carry around 20 of them in a thin comfortable package designed for that one thing: reading books. It lasts for 2 weeks on a single charge with wireless turned off. No monthly wireless fee but I can download as many books as my credit card allows. The e-ink screen is easy to read anywhere, except in the dark, and I like reading it at the beach while ignoring my kids wandering close to the ocean. You can’t read a laptop in the sun, you won’t with the iPad either. The Kindle does ‘disappear’ when you’re in the midst of a good story. It is a great, practical reading device – a better purpose-built reading device than the iPad.
But it is not slick. It is not quick, bright, powerful. Leading up to today, there was no question the Tablet would do many things well, including e-books. I kept thinking Choose Your Own Adventure. With this device, I wouldn’t need to flip to a new page after I made a choice – I’d just touch one of two sentences on the screen, and the next page would be the storyline I’d just selected. But the Tablet could allow even richer deconstructions. On the page in my textbook that described how a bone moved in its socket, I could touch the word and a video would pop up displaying the motion. My kid’s book could help teach him how to read it, by sounding out letters and allowing him to pick the right word to finish a sentence. I could read a book that turned into a comic book into a music video into three poems into a photo gallery into a book again, throughout which the mixed media would heighten and add to the story. I could choose to turn the pages up or down in addition to left-to-right, or punch through the page into a painting and then stir that painting to life. This device could enable all that. That would be outbooking the book.
Some might say that the web can offer all of that now. I don’t think so. ‘Reading’ the web can suck. Every page requires a new connection, a new transfer. Too many spinners, buffering, ‘oops something went wrong.’ The beauty of getting a book on the Kindle is you click ‘download’ and plop, it’s there, local, perpetually available from start to end. I assumed that the Tablet would offer a similar experience but would bring multimedia snap, crackle and pop to e-books that an e-ink screen can’t.
This is why I was surprised when Apple announced today they’d be offering e-books on the iPad using the ePub open format, an open, official standard of the International Digital Publishing Forum. I don’t blame Apple for not going with their own e-book format (as Amazon did), they know how to prioritize, and this wasn’t high on the list of priorities. But I was disappointed, as I see the “e-book” as an area ripe for innovation, and I don’t think that will happen with books delivered in an open standard governed by an officiating body made up of multiple entities; Apple makes magic with its own ingredients. I have to believe that e-books sold in the iBook Store will be, well, boring old e-books, no matter how nice the color photos are or how pretty the page turns are.
The Unborn Apps
But Choose Your Own Adventures will be there, I’ll just get them from the App Store. When Forstall (he scares me, like he’s about to chomp my throat) talks about the upcoming gold rush for iPad app developers, he’s so right. The coolest thing about the iPad is the apps we haven’t seen yet. A portable device that powerful with those controls (accelerometer, space for multiple virtual buttons, multitouch, etc.) and that sized-screen is an incredible entertainment engine, and the most entertaining content will come in the form of iPad-specific apps. (I think the most exciting things demo’d today by far were the apps.) Content providers will offer apps that will be all-in-one-book-movie-album-games, and as a result how we consume and interact with stories will change for the better. You can’t read a book on your xbox or play a game on your Kindle, but you will do both in the same app on this device. This will be fun. I’m excited to get sucked into a black hole and die.
Yes!
