By Jeremy Greenfield, Editorial Director, Digital Book World, @JDGsaid

As tablet sales surge and put downward pressure on dedicated e-reader ownership growth, publishers are pessimistic that tablets will provide readers with an enticing reading platform.

According to a recent Digital Book World survey, conducted by Forrester Research, 31% of publishers think iPads and other tablets computers are the ideal e-book reading platform, down from 46% a year ago. Only 30% of publishers think reading tablets like the Nook Color and Kindle Fire are an ideal reading platform. This question was not asked in the previous year’s survey.

In late 2011, book publishers representing 74% of U.S. publishing revenues were surveyed on a wide range of topics concerning digital books. The same survey was conducted in 2010.

“The devices [tablet computers] are capable of so many more distracting things,” said James L. McQuivey, Ph.D., vice president and principal analyst at Forrester, who conducted the survey. “If you have an iPad and 15 minutes to kill, are you going to do something more cognitively difficult like reading, or something brain-dead simple like going on Facebook or watching a YouTube video?”

Still, crossover devices like the Kindle Fire – not quite a full-sized tablet like the iPad, but with functionality far beyond that of an e-ink reader – may be a boon to publishers. Kindle Fire owners read e-books on the device more than any other activity. A recent survey of 216 Kindle Fire owners by RBC Financial Group found that 71% list reading e-books as one of the two activities they do the most on the device. “Brose the Web” came in distant second at 39%.

These data about crossover devices contrast greatly with data about the iPad – only 53% of iPad users read books at all on the device, according to a September 2011 survey by Forrester.

Publishers should continue to monitor the space closely. Tablet and e-reader ownership doubled in the U.S. over the holiday period, according to new research from the Pew Internet Project, a Pew Center project dedicated to providing research on how the Internet affects life in America. Nearly one fifth of all Americans now own a tablet computer or an e-reader, according to Pew.

Despite all of the positive energy around device ownership growth and device usage, publishers may have been shocked to find out that e-book purchasing growth may be slowing. According to data presented by the Book Industry Study Group and Bowker at the Digital Book World Conference last week, there was only 17% growth in the number of print-book buyers who also purchased an e-book; this was markedly less than the 25% to 30% growth people had reportedly hoped for.

But if people who buy devices still read books – in some cases, this is much of what they do – and device ownership is growing quickly, posited publishing consultant Don Linn, then why is e-book sales growth sagging?

The question has publishers confused. How should they proceed in a device market that is getting more complex?

“They’re just not sure what to make of it yet and they’re not committed business-wise,” said Forrester’s McQuivey. “That’s an issue for 2012: What do you do as a business when you’re not sure how it’s going to net out between these three categories of devices?”

Write to Jeremy Greenfield

By Jeremy Greenfield, Editorial Director, Digital Book World, @JDGsaid

If content is king of the digital book world, then technology may be the divine right to rule.

Publishers, booksellers and authors who have made smart technology investments over the past several years have reaped the rewards. Erotic romance publisher Ellora’s Cave made early technology staffing investments that paid off. Amazon, for one, has captured huge market-share through making it easy for readers to access books through technology. And self-published authors have leveraged book production platforms and new-media sales and marketing channels (read: Twitter and Facebook) to sell books directly to readers.

Enter a whole host of technology vendors that never existed before: E-book production and distribution houses, meta data consultants, social media experts, and so on. With clients from big-six publishers to NBC to Google, Vook is prominent among them. Vook is a cloud-based e-publishing platform that offers those that want to publish their own books the technology to edit, format, publish and distribute e-books.

To get a sense of what’s going on in publishing platform technology, we sat down with Vook vice president of business development Matt Cavnar. The timing was prescient considering Apple’s announcement yesterday of its new self-publishing tool. How does a company like Vook stay competitive in the face of new daily developments in publishing technology?

Cavnar is a founding employee at Vook and as VP of business development, he finds new clients, new intellectual property and helps determine the product and business roadmaps for the firm. We spoke with him about Apple, the publishing company of the future and why people will read more – as soon as they get more comfortable with new technologies.

Related: Apple iBooks Author Tool Sets Stage for Showdown With Amazon

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Learn more about new publishing technology and the future of e-books at the Digital Book World Conference + Expo in New York City from January 23 to 25.

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Jeremy Greenfield: What a week in publishing. With the Apple announcement and the DBW conference coming up (admittedly, it’s our conference, but it is gathering much of the community together; apologies for the shameless plug). Good time to talk. So, what did you think of the Apple announcement?

Matt Cavnar: First of all, congratulations to Apple. They’ve been a great partner for us. Everybody would agree that textbooks are better off digital and this is going to speed that. It’s also really good because this is really a plug for e-books. This is not an app announcement, this is about e-books.

JG: As in, creating something fancy with bells, whistles, etc. as an e-book rather than a native app?

MC: Yes. Apple is putting weight behind the idea that e-books are the file format of the future.

JG: What else?

MC: We like the tools. We see some similarities in design in the Apple tool [and our tool] and that’s great to see. Great design minds think alike. Apple creates beautiful things.

The next part is the complication and the fact is that they’re introducing another proprietary file format [.ibooks]. Vook reaches the other 99% of the market. That [.ibooks] can only be delivered through one store front, one device. But when people release books, they want them to go everywhere. Using our tool, you can go cross-platform.

JG: Back to Vook. What’s the status over there? Revenue? Employees? Hiring?

MC: We’re keeping the number of employees under the radar, but it’s over 20.

We’re not sharing revenue right now.

We’re recruiting like mad. I’m recruiting for five rolls: Everything from engineering to marketing to customer support.

JG: You are backed by several investors, including venture capital firm Vantage Point and have received about $5.25 million in funding. Usually venture capitalists expect a big return for their investments. Book publishing is a famously low-growth industry. How do you expect to return on the investment? And when?

MC: This company is all about creating something that works. If you’re focused on a goal line, you’re going to run until your body collapses. What we’re focused on is creating a company that provides substantial value.

Digital publishing is not just book publishers. It’s the rapidly evolving world of digital content. Our tool can be the [Adobe] Dreamweaver of that experience. [Dreamweaver is a highly popular HTML creation tool.]

What we’re looking at is going beyond publishing companies. We’re looking to go to media companies that have an audience and tell them that they can create digital books and deliver them to that audience.

That’s why we think the future of Vook is unlimited, because we have a huge market of companies we can go out to. It’s not just publishing companies but the whole world of content.

JG: Is Vook the publishing company of the future? A technology tool that content creators can leverage?

MC: Vook is the publishing platform of the future. If you have a powerful enough platform, it can serve the needs of the original creator as well as an enterprise level organization.

We’re going to remove the pain and complications around the actual creation of the e-book because it’s actually incredibly vexed. Even some of the major publishers are having problems with digital conversion, so it’s a serious pain point.

It’s also about making a better looking e-book. It’s interesting, the designer’s role has become a hand-coders role. You have to hand-code them to make them look nice. That’s hard for a medium-sized publisher that wants to put out 400 titles but wants them to have a unique look. That’s why we have a styling tool. E-books don’t have to look like everything else out on the marketplace. You can make something that’s uniquely yours.

JG: Speaking of publishing companies, there has been debate lately about the relevance of publishing companies.

MC: Publishing companies are relevant because the creative capital they have is outstanding. They have gathered within their walls the smartest people when it comes to this kind of content. They are both the curators and producers. Curators say that you should read this; curator-producers say that you should read this and we made it for you so you can read it. And that’s very valuable.

The alternative is that you have the content creator saying “I think this is a good idea” and providing it directly, which is great, but then the landscape becomes more fractured.

People need editors. They need production, they need marketing teams. Publishers can solve the tricky marketing problems.

I’m really interested in the fact that so many young tech companies find ways to take existing intellectual property and chop it up or re-imagine it or put it on devices. None of the young technology companies are in the content creation business.

JG: One production issue that publishers have to think about right now is how they are going to prepare for more e-readers supporting EPUB 3. What should they do?

MC: They should be building sample EPUB 3 books. They should have someone on their team build it and test it. And then figure out how to implement a new workflow.

One of the interesting things about EPUB 3 is that it’s a richer experience and you can create richer things, but how do you integrate it into your workflow? Something we’re looking at doing is building a template of EPUB 3 enhancements and applying it to a range of content. You can’t test with just one thing because it’s too likely that you’ll hit an outlier. If you do 20 to 30 books, you have a basis to test how effective these enhancements are and you give the consumer an experience they can adapt to.

JG: Will people adapt to it? Will people read more or fewer books in the future?

In my own life, in my family, I have seen the amount of book consumption explode. My father walks around his kitchen now with his iPhone in front of his face reading books. He read more books in 2011 than in the decade before that.

Once people get over the hang-ups they might have reading digitally, they will purchase a lot more books. They will immediately pick up the next book in a series. They will read easier.

Publishers might not be optimistic, but I am enthusiastic because I see people that weren’t readers are reading all the time because digital makes it so easy.

JG: What are you reading and on what platform?

MC: I am reading The Map and the Territory by Michel Houellebecq [Knopf]. It’s very funny, very humane and I’m reading it on my Kindle app for iPad.

Write to Jeremy Greenfield

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Learn more about new publishing technology and the future of e-books at the Digital Book World Conference + Expo in New York City from January 23 to 25.

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By Jeremy Greenfield, Editorial Director, Digital Book World, @JDGsaid

With the launch of iBooks Author, a new e-book creation and self-publishing tool, Apple is challenging e-book sales market-leader Amazon at its own game.

Buried in the fine print of the licensing agreement for users of iBooks Author is a clause that stipulates that books produced using the free software can only be sold on iBooks, essentially creating a walled garden similar to what Amazon offers Kindle owners with its KDP Select program.

“These e-book distributors are setting themselves up as barbed-wire gardens now,” said Matt Cavnar, head of acquisitions at New York-based Vook, a cloud-based e-publishing platform that offers many of the same book production tools as iBooks Author. “You can’t get in or out when you create something there.”

Authors who participate in the KDP Select can sell their books only through Amazon for an “exclusivity” period and in return are able to participate in the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library, which is another source of revenue and marketing. Amazon says that KDP Select authors are growing their sales faster than other Kindle Direct Publishing authors.

While Amazon entices authors by giving them access to its powerful sales and marketing machine, Apple may hope to attract content creators by giving them a tool that even someone with a simple understanding of layouts can use to create complicated, feature-rich books. Apple did not respond to requests for comment before press time.

“For Apple, it’s another service to drive hardware sales. For Amazon, it’s to drive commerce – books or memberships,” said Tony van Veen, CEO of AVL Digital Group, parent company of BookBaby, a Portland, Oreg.-based independent e-book formatting and distribution firm. (Disclosure: Van Veen is speaking on a panel moderated by the author at next week’s Digital Book World conference in New York.)

The question for Apple is why would a content creator choose to use iBooks Author over any other tool if they are forced to sell their wares only through iBooks?

“You have to create on an Apple machine. You have to sell only via Apple’s iBookstore. You can only sell these e-books to iOS readers because Apple hasn’t bothered to create apps that would facilitate reading on Android/PC/Web or anything other than iOS devices. Why would I bother with this if I was a self publishing author who can access [the] iBooks store through other channels?” said Eoin Purcell, an Ireland-based book publishing analyst.

What Apple is attempting to do with free software and limited distribution is bound to fail, said Bill McCoy, executive director of the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), a global trade and standards organization for the promotion of electronic publishing. The IDPF developed the EPUB 3 e-book file format that iBooks Author seems to adhere to when it creates an e-book file.

“To limit the distribution of an EPUB file to only Apple’s channel would be the equivalent of Google saying that you can only use the HTML created with Google Docs on the [Google] Chrome browser,” said McCoy.

Only time will tell if Apple is successful at attracting authors who are willing to trade distribution freedom for an easy-to-use e-book creation tool. What is becoming clearer, however, is that authors are to booksellers today as app developers were to mobile software platforms several years ago.

Soon, consumers may have to decide whether they want to house their libraries in a cloud with J.A. Konrath, a popular KDP Select author, and Amazon’s lending library or if they want to have access to flashy content created on Apple’s new tool.

Write to Jeremy Greenfield

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Don’t miss out on the buzz about the new Apple iBooks store and Author tools at the Digital Book World Conference + Expo in New York City from January 23 to 25.

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By Jeremy Greenfield, Editorial Director, Digital Book World, @JDGsaid

Apple unveiled iBooks 2, the next iteration of its iBooks software. It also launched iBooks Author, a new e-book and enhanced e-book creation tool. Both are available in the Apple App Store for free today, the company said at an announcement this morning at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.

The new software will revolutionize both the textbook industry and e-book creation. There is a new section in the iBooks store for textbooks and the Author app is geared toward textbook creation with built-in templates for math and science books, but it can be used for the creation of any book.

Related: Apple iBooks Author Tool Sets Stage for Showdown With Amazon

For more advanced content creators who are fluent in JavaScript and HTML, iBooks Authors allows for the creation of custom widgets in e-books. (Apple has not yet responded to requests for comment on what kinds of files iBooks Author creates, whether EPUB 3 or some other format.)

The iBooks Author software “opens the door to self-published illustrated [e-books],” according to Publisher’s Lunch. In early trading, Apple shares were up $0.36 to $429.47.

In a stunning display of e-book creation acrobatics, Apple executives dragged images and video into an e-book page and text wrapped seamlessly around it. The company also demonstrated completed textbooks, showing off interactive features, including: Images that come alive with explanations when tapped; fluid layouts that shift smoothly from portrait to landscape view; and index and glossary functions that are integrated directly into each page.

Textbooks will be available for $14.99 or less in the iBooks store and several publishers, including Pearson, McGraw-Hill and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt have already produced several of these new, interactive textbooks, which are available for sale today.

All notes and highlighted text in the new e-textbooks are instantly turned into flashcards for later study and students who buy the textbooks own them forever and can re-download them any time from the cloud.

After weeks of speculation, Apple finally revealed its secret textbook project, reportedly codenamed “Bliss.”

Early in the presentation, Apple executives decried print textbooks as lacking portability, search-ability and interactivity, problems that e-textbooks on an iPad would solve.

Apple also released the next iteration of its iTunes U app, which now will allow professors to create syllabi, post messages to students and run many professorial functions remotely. Students will be able to review all course materials, including text and video, and listen to lectures. The iBooks software will be fully integrated with iTunes U. Six universities, including Duke and Yale, are already using the software.

From an Apple statement on iTunes U:

The all-new iTunes U app lets teachers create and manage courses including essential components such as lectures, assignments, books, quizzes and syllabuses and offer them to millions of iOS users around the world. The iTunes U app gives iOS users access to the world’s largest catalog of free educational content from top universities including Cambridge, Duke, Harvard, Oxford and Stanford, and starting today any K-12 school district can offer full courses through the iTunes U app. iTunes U has already become an incredibly popular learning tool for students with over 700 million downloads.

From an Apple statement on iBooks 2 and iBooks Author:

iBooks textbooks offer iPad users gorgeous, fullscreen textbooks with interactive animations, diagrams, photos, videos, unrivaled navigation and much more. iBooks textbooks can be kept up to date, don’t weigh down a backpack and never have to be returned. Leading education services companies including Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, McGraw-Hill and Pearson will deliver educational titles on the iBookstore℠ with most priced at $14.99 or less, and with the new iBooks Author, a free authoring tool available today, anyone with a Mac® can create stunning iBooks textbooks.

Sign up for today’s webcast to hear about the best practices for enhanced e-books and more about today’s big announcement from Apple.

Write to Jeremy Greenfield

Related: Apple iBooks Author Tool Sets Stage for Showdown With Amazon

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Don’t miss out on the buzz about the new Apple iBooks store and Author tools at the Digital Book World Conference + Expo in New York City from January 23 to 25.

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By Jeremy Greenfield, Editorial Director, Digital Book World, @JDGsaid

The future of e-books is now.

The approval of a new coding language for e-books, developed by the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), a global trade and standards organization for the promotion of electronic publishing, means that soon it will be a relatively simple matter for e-books to contain video, audio, dynamic content and all sorts of interactive features.

The catch? Many of the features of EPUB 3, as it’s called, can’t currently be rendered by most e-reading software. Meaning, if a book publisher created a new e-book using EPUB 3 to embed a Google map or a Twitter feed, the book wouldn’t work properly on most e-readers.

But that’s all about to change.

“2012 will be the year when retailers adopt EPUB 3,” said Bill McCoy, executive director of the IDPF.

For instance, Ingram Content Group, the country’s largest distributor of digital and physical books, said that its e-textbook reader, VitalSource Bookshelf, which is available as an application for the iPad, iPhone, Mac Windows, browsers, iOS clients, and Android in the near term, will begin to support EPUB 3 in April.

“VitalSource works with 200 education publishers, most of which are gearing up for EPUB 3,” said Rick Johnson, chief technology officer for VitalSource.

As more e-reader software supports more of EPUB 3, publishers need to prepare for changes in creative capabilities, workflow, hiring and, maybe most important of all, their relationship with booksellers.

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Hear more about EPUB 3 and what publishers should do about it at the Digital Book World Conference + Expo in New York City from January 23 to 25.

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The Coming Battle With Retailers

First the tech jargon, then the plain speak: EPUB 3 is built on HTML 5, which means that publishers can build JavaScript into their books.

This is significant, because JavaScript can theoretically be used to track e-book reader behavior, information publishers have coveted since the dawn of the Kindle age – and that retailers have refused to share.

“Retailers, like Amazon, are known for not disclosing certain information,” said McCoy. “Publishers would love to know that information.”

With EPUB 3, publishers should be able to build software into their books that tells them how much a reader reads, when they read and for how long, for starters.

While publishers should push hard to gather all the information retailers will allow, retailers may resist, citing security risks and privacy concerns, said McCoy.

But the terms of the conflict might change when retailers allow books to fetch remote data, like a dynamic Google map or an ad that changes at the whim of the publisher.

“Once you allow that, it’s very hard to limit,” said McCoy. “Some distribution channels will enable that kind of remote data access early in 2012. The question is when the top-end vendors do that. That will depend on competitive situations. Some may try to jump first. I don’t want to predict the moves in the game of Risk, but some of the vendors are more oriented at being open than others.”

Publishers might have an unlikely ally on their side: the specter of piracy.

“As you move into the world of HTML 5, interactivity is becoming the new DRM [digital rights management],” said Johnson, who helped craft the EPUB 3 language as part of a working group at IDPF. “As you enable new interactivity, you are making it harder for people to share the content; you have to have the whole book in order to use those rich features.”

As EPUB 3 is adopted, many of those “rich features” will require remote data calls.

New Paradigms in Sales and Marketing

If allowed, remote data calls through JavaScript embedded in an EPUB 3 e-book will open up a whole new world of customer information and customer interaction for book publishers.

Beyond being able to collect dynamic data from readers, publishers will be able to talk to readers, on the fly. The most obvious incarnation of this is advertising.

“JavaScript support allows the same kind of ad ecosystem as exists on the Web,” said McCoy, meaning that publishers can theoretically advertise anything at any time using ad space they develop in their books sold with such capabilities.

For instance, a book sold today might advertise a related book in the back-matter, plugs for new books that typically appear in the back of the book. If that ad were served through JavaScript, publishers would know just how readers responded to it, and if response wasn’t what was hoped for, they could change or adjust the ad for better results.

New Ways of Thinking About Content

As tablet and smartphone adoption increases, readers will expect richer features from books.

“Users want features. They want eye candy, they want sharing,” said Johnson.

That doesn’t necessarily mean that publishers should seek to add features haphazardly to their current pipeline of e-books. Publishers should think more holistically about their content.

“Publishers are going to need to think about their content as a more malleable asset,” said McCoy. “If you’re doing a novel, you don’t think of it as only a hardcover.”

With the proliferation of devices and screen sizes, publishers need to consider all of the different kinds of places their content could appear – and both compensate and take advantage of those different venues.

“It’s not just about tablets. EPUB 3 is going to live in browsers, in native applications,” and publishers that try to get their content onto screens of all sizes – and looking good – will be ahead of the curve, said Johnson. Scripts, or bits of code that answer questions for a piece of software, that can be built within EPUB 3 will allow publishers to optimize one piece of content for multiple screens, he added.

New Workflows

Publishers that want to build new kinds of reading experiences need to think about what new features they want to add to their books at the earliest possible stage.

“They need to figure out how they want their books to sing and dance,” said Eric Freese, until recently a solutions architect at Aptara, a Falls Church, Va.-based e-book production house; he was also part of the working group at IDPF that developed EPUB 3 and is now an information architect at Amsterdam-based health publisher Elsevier. “Do they want audio and video added in? If so, they need to be thinking about that at creation time, not publication time. The earlier the better. By thinking about it early, you’re more nimble and flexible with what you can do at the end.”

For those publishers that haven’t quite mastered the art of quality assurance (QA), EPUB 3 will bring fresh challenges, ones that should be addressed by changes in workflow.

“With EPUB 3, you have the capability to style things differently and have things adjust to layout,” said Johnson. “You have to make sure you have all the basics down. I encourage publishers to have a good way to do QA work.”

Hiring New, Expensive Workers

EPUB 3 is built on HTML 5. A relatively new coding language, HTML 5 isn’t yet a common skill for developers. And where there’s scarcity, there’s cost.

“If you’re doing children’s books or cookery or anything that needs to take advantage of interactivity, HTML 5 is going to be the core building block and that’s the core skill that publishers need to make sure they have in house or an outsourced relationship that they can count on as a business partner,” said McCoy.

Publishers will need to hire more in-house staff, said Johnson. They will either need to build their own HTML 5 development teams or at least hire a knowledgeable liaison for any vendors they work with.

“With this enhanced digital content, they [publishers] will need to grow the skills and capabilities of their staff,” said Johnson. “They will also demand more from their vendors.”

Building it or buying it, engaging an HTML 5 development team is a costly proposition.

According to Salary.com, the median salary for a Web applications developer in New York is nearly $95,000. And that’s for people whose skills may not even reach the high level necessary for top HTML 5 development.

And that doesn’t factor in the recruitment costs. Good developers are hard to come by, with the unemployment rate for technology workers under 4% for most of 2011 and companies like Google, Facebook and hot startups duking it out for top talent.

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As EPUB 3 gains support among reading platforms and devices, publishers will face a time of difficult change. But there is light at the end of the tunnel.

“As the adoption of digital continues to accelerate, many of the problems that have emerged – workflow for publishers, expectations of readers – are addressed by EPUB 3,” said Johnson.

Write to Jeremy Greenfield

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Hear more about EPUB 3 and what publishers should do about it at the Digital Book World Conference + Expo in New York City from January 23 to 25.

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By Jeremy Greenfield, Editorial Director, Digital Book World, @JDGsaid

Many book publishing companies are entering into the book application business, some with more success than others.

National Geographic, the Washington, D.C.-based publisher of nature magazines and books, has a hit app on its hands with “Weird But True” based on its Weird But True book series.

The book is full of “weird but true” facts. The app allows readers to rate just how strange the facts are and to see the ratings that others gave the facts.

The app has sold about 50,000 copies since its launch in September 2011, according to the company. According to our calculations, that’s an average of about 2,700 per week and at $1.99 a pop, that’s about $100,000 in revenue. Apple takes a 30% cut of revenue for apps sold in the App Store. National Geographic said that the app has turned a profit.

“This was an inexpensive app to make and it’s already paid for itself,” said Nancy Feresten, senior vice president and editor-in-chief of children’s books at National Geographic.

Related: Are Children’s E-Books Really Terrible for Your Children? | For Reading and Learning, Kids Prefer E-Books to Print Books

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For more on the state of children’s publishing and children’s book apps, attend the Digital Book World Children’s Publishing Goes Digital Conference on January 23, 2012 in New York City.

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Getting Started

The idea for the app was conceived in the Fall of 2010, according to Natalie Jones, the digital project manager at National Geographic who shepherded the app from concept to reality. Jones said the project had been conceptualized by January 2011 and that development began in March.

Once the concept was finalized, the first thing National Geographic did was select a software development vendor for the project. The company chose Mission Data, a Louisville, Ky.-based app development firm.

It’s easy for development costs for any software project to spiral out of control; National Geographic managed to avoid this pitfall.

“We had firm dates in our contract,” said Jones. “They started working on it in March-April and finished September 1.”

In selecting Mission Data, National Geographic looked at a variety of factors: Can the company do the programming? What is the consumer feedback like in the iTunes store for other apps it has produced? Did their ideas for the app match what National Geographic had in mind? Cost was also a factor.

What It Costs

Cost for apps ranges widely, depending on a number of factors, like size, scope and how much work will be handled by the developer versus the client.

“No two apps have the same functionality. No two efforts are the same. The content is always different,” said Stuart Gavurin, CEO of Mission Data.

Mission Data was hesitant to offer many details about the project, citing confidentiality with the publisher. Both Mission Data and National Geographic would not divulge how much Mission Data was paid to develop the app.

According to Peter Meyers, a digital book consultant based in New York and author of the new book Breaking the Page, which is about digital books, a vendor might charge $100,000 or more for a “professional-quality” children’s book app, depending on the work involved. An independent software developer might charge $200 an hour, according to Meyers, and a book app project can take hundreds of developer hours.

To cut down on cost, a well-established publisher might negotiate with a developer for a smaller up-front fee and a system of royalties where the app developer would receive a small percentage of the take until it reached a certain level of revenue, according to Meyers.

A company like National Geographic might also be able to take advantage of a different kind of discount.

“Deals get cut with developers looking to build a prestigious client list,” said Meyers.

To be sure, each app project is unique and what the “Weird But True” app coast may not be indicative of what other apps might cost to develop.

“Asking what it costs to do an app is like asking an architect what it costs to build a house,” said Nicholas Callaway, founder, chairman and chief content officer, Callaway Digital Arts, an app developer based in New York that has partnered with Sesame Workshop and Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia on apps.

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Hear Nicholas Callaway speak about e-books and apps at the Digital Book World Children’s Publishing Goes Digital Conference on January 23, 2012 in New York City.

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How It’s Built

Mission Data provided a lead software developer, a project manager and feedback on the project from their executive management and design team. National Geographic handled the rest of the project in-house, gaining valuable experience along the way.

The in-house team consisted of a sound engineer, two designers, a rights management professional, about five people from the editorial department, a project manager (Jones), a mobile analyst in a technical advisory role from the digital media department, the quality assurance team and a director-level manager to oversee the whole project. In all, 12-to-15 people worked on the app internally. Staff at National Geographic juggle many projects, however, and no one staff-member was dedicated solely to the project.

The app was finished in September and out of the hands of development and design and into the hands of sales and marketing.

Pricing, Marketing and Selling

“We thought we could successfully market it based on the success of the book,” said Jones. “We had a robust multi-media marketing campaign – print, digital, social media – using a wide variety of tactics.”

First, the price of the app was determined based mostly on two factors: amount of revenue needed to recoup costs and the price of other, similar apps.

Then, National Geographic took steps to ensure to Apple, the only seller of the app, that it was serious about marketing it. The main carrot was an ad that National Geographic printed on the back of the Weird But True book slated for the Fall.

“We are reliant on Apple same as everyone else to have them promote [the app] on our behalf,” said Jones. Support from Apple is “the key for discoverability in the App Store.”

The gambit paid big dividends. The app was featured for two weeks in the “what’s hot” section of the app store and was an Apple “staff pick” for an extended period of time. A spokesperson for National Geographic said that the company had features in the App Store several times this Fall.

In addition to its efforts courting Apple and promoting through the App Store, National Geographic used its own consumer-marketing levers to drive interest in the app. The company used its website, a variety of editorial newsletters, social media, a live event at company headquarters in Washington and even hired Appency, a Sacramento, Calif.-based app public relations firm, to reach out to bloggers and media.

The result? A best-selling, profitable app – and lessons for the next app venture.

Takeaway

“Keeping the creative in-house was a valuable lesson we learned from this,” said Jones. “We know our products best and know what it takes to make a good product. And timing is key. It takes a long time to develop any app.”

National Geographic is planning to build more apps for both children and adults, including more Weird But True apps.

One open question is how should the true cost of apps be measured? Weird But True was profitable, according to the company, but cost of developing the intellectual property for the app was attributed completely to the book and not the app.

“If you count the intellectual property, then very few apps on the market are profitable,” said Feresten. “If you think the digital transition will continue where the print book is the smaller play, then you need a business model where the app can bear the intellectual-property expense. If the book is going to shrink as a proportion, then the fact that the business model is maybe unsustainable on the app side is a big issue.”

Write to Jeremy Greenfield

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For more on the state of children’s publishing and children’s book apps, attend the Digital Book World Children’s Publishing Goes Digital Conference on January 23, 2012 in New York City.

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By Jeremy Greenfield, Editorial Director, Digital Book World, @JDGsaid

Apple is likely to lower the price of its iPad 2 tablet in response to a market-share grab by No. 2 competitor Kindle Fire, according to a new report.

“Apple may reduce the pricing on the iPad 2 when the company introduces the iPad 3…in the same way that the company continued to offer the iPhone 3 when it rolled out the iPhone 4,” said the report from IHS iSuppli, an El Segundo, Calif.-based technology research unit of global research firm IHS.

Amazon Inc., the maker of the Kindle Fire, will ship an estimated 3.9 million units of the device in the fourth quarter this year, according to the report, vaulting it into second place in terms of market share at 13.8% of units shipped. Apple has a commanding 65.6% of the market share in the fourth quarter.

The Fire was able to take so much market share in its debut quarter due to its low $199 price, a new benchmark for the industry. According to the report, Amazon’s strategy is to sell as many Fires as it can to hook users into its commerce engine and its Prime streaming content and shipping program, for which customers pay about $80 per year. The Fire itself costs about $201.70 to produce, not including research and development and software costs, IHS iSuppli estimates.

While the industry awaits Apple’s response, the overall tablet market is set to explode in the coming years. Nearly 150 million tablets will be shipped next year and nearly 300 million will be shipped in 2015, according to the report.

Publishers should note that the trend of readers moving to digital formats is accelerating, said Rhoda Alexander, senior manager for tablet and monitor research at IHS iSuppli.

“If you’re not in the digital publishing space, you need to get there in a hurry,” she said. “This is how consumers are going to be reading for the most part moving forward.”

Another recent study by UK-based research firm Juniper Research projected that the worldwide portable e-book market would grow to nearly $10 billion by 2016. The report also predicted that 30% of that market would exist on tablets and 55% of it would exist on dedicated e-readers.

“E-readers will continue to grow in the market, but they face a strong challenge from tablets,” said Alexander. “People are purchasing multipurpose devices instead of single-purpose devices.”

Write to Jeremy Greenfield

By Jeremy Greenfield, Editorial Director, Digital Book World, @JDGreenGrass

When it comes to the Kindle Fire, it’s all about scale.

Tablet app developers are excited about the Kindle Fire platform because they think it could someday help them reach as many consumers as the iPad – or more.

“The Fire represents a way forward for Android developers to monetize the tablet platform,” said Scott Schwarzhoff, vice president of marketing at Appcelerator, which conducted a survey released today that revealed tablet app developers are nearly as interested in developing apps for the Kindle Fire as they were for the iPad when it came out in April 2010.

Amazon is one of three companies in the world, along with Apple and eBay, that have direct consumer relationships with 100 million or more consumers, and that fact has app developers seeing dollar signs. The Motorola Xoom and the Samsung Galaxy, two early iPad competitors running Android software, never really panned out as fertile ground for developers because they never reached enough consumers and those consumers weren’t as conditioned to buy content.

“These are people [Amazon customers] who are used to paying for content on the Amazon store,” said Schwarzhoff, who has worked on this survey each of the past eight quarters when it has been conducted.

The big number of possible customers (read: possible readers) combined with Amazon’s content strategy is why Schwarzhoff sees the Fire approaching the same popularity the iPad has with developers over the next three months.

When asked about the Fire as a development platform, 49% of 2,160 developers showed interest, according to the survey conducted by Appcelerator, a Mountain View, Calif.-based mobile development platform, and IDC, a Framingham, Ma.-based market research firm. Compare this with the 53% who said they were interested in the iPad as a platform before its April 2010 release. Today, however, the iPad stands at 88% interest from developers.

“Fire could hit 75% or 80% in three months,” Schwarzhoff said. “The holiday season and selling well will be critical factors.”

Again, with the Fire, it’s all about scale.

Related: Kindle Day Roundup

What Does It Mean for Publishers?

Significant app interest in the Fire could help book publishers develop new and increased revenue streams from book apps.

With more consumers downloading book apps on yet another device – one that could prove to be very popular – book publishers should think about customer-loyalty opportunities, said Schwarzhoff. With frequent updates to book apps, publishers can “keep the conversation going with the consumer,” he said, offering opportunities for marketing and up-selling.

A growing army of Kindle Fire app developers looking for more dollars from tablet users will experiment with new ways of turning app-buyers into repeat customers – methods that can be copied and improved-upon by book publishers.

“We’re going to see interesting monetization that will extend beyond the individual content experience,” Schwarzhoff said.

Write to Jeremy Greenfield

By Jeremy Greenfield, Editorial Director, Digital Book World, @JDGreenGrass

Amazon has decided to ship its hotly anticipated (sorry, couldn’t resist) Kindle Fire tablet a day early, but will consumers like what they get when that familiar brown box appears on their doorsteps 24-hours earlier than anticipated?

PC World called the device “revolutionary” and reviewer Sascha Segan ooh-ed and aah-ed its “amazing specs for just $199.” The Chicago Sun-Times calls the Kindle a “killer device” that won’t “kill” the iPad and reviewer Andy Ihnatko notes “the Fire slips into many pockets and will set you back just $199.” And MSNBC’s TECHNOLOG blog review is simply headlined, “Kindle Fire review: Yes, it’s that good” and reviewer Wilson Rothman notes that much of the “overall potency” of the Fire “comes from that $199 price tag.”

See a pattern?

While many of today’s reviews focus more on the specs than the price (as opposed to many early, September reviews where price dominated headlines), price still seems to be a big factor in giving the thumbs up to the new tech toy.

That said, consumer reviews be damned! You know who likes the Fire? Developers.

According to a new survey out today, developers are nearly as interested in developing for the Kindle Fire as they were in the iPad before its initial launch in April 2010.

The survey of 2,160 developers was conducted in early November by Appcelerator, a Mountain View, Calif.-based mobile development platform, and IDC, a Framingham, Ma.-based market research firm. About 49% of developers said they were interested in developing on the platform; in a similar survey from 2010, 53% of developers said they were interested in working on the iPad platform before it came out. Let’s see, though, how that number changes as the Fire hits store shelves; currently, 88% of developers are interested in working on the iPad platform. (More on this here.)

In other Kindle Day news, the device is set to ship a day early, according to a statement from the company. Originally set to leave warehouses tomorrow (November 15), the Fire will now hit the road today for those who ordered it off Amazon.com. PaidContent has the call out to Amazon on if the Fire will also be available at bricks-and-mortar retailers early, too.

Is this move a subtle dig at the Kobo Vox? There were grumblings on Twitter and elsewhere that the Vox, aggressively set to ship by the Toronto-based e-reader company two weeks before the Fire, was not reaching customers on time. More likely, Amazon and its well-oiled logistics machine under-promised and over-delivered.

Oh, and in case you’re interested in a more traditional offering from Amazon, the company also announced today that its Kindle Touch and Kindle Touch 3G e-readers will ship tomorrow, six days ahead of schedule.

Write to Jeremy Greenfield

By Anne Kostick, Partner, Foxpath IND

While the push to digitize, convert and distribute e-books goes on in the publishing industry, there’s a smaller but influential network of researchers and technologists trying to develop smart, interactive – but still touchable, tangible – books made mostly out of paper.

This is a leap from commercial offerings of the 1990s, mostly for children, of astronomy books with embedded, light-up galaxies, talking storybooks, and glow-in-the-dark Halloween books. The new generation’s books move and respond to user input; they are truly interactive.

Looking for a New Blend of Technology and the Book Arts

Their inventors live equally in academia – such as in the High-Low Technology Group within MIT’s Media Lab, and the Computational Design Lab at Carnegie-Mellon University – and outside of it, in various tech industries as well as peripheral publishing areas. Riding the strong current of the Maker movement (the latest generation’s mash-up of technology with a cultural return to crafting and DIY), these book investigators want to hold on to the sentimental comfort and the form of the book while infusing it with high-tech abilities.

First, the form: Tangible computing (working to interface real objects with computers) is partly an effort to snatch from extinction a crucial part of users’ experience – receiving more sensory feedback– as our activities of life transform into pure digital. For example, screen reading, whether on a computer screen or an e-ink reader, lacks the feel, smell and sound of a paper book.

Tangible results were on display at the recent ACM (Association of Computing Machinery) Creativity & Cognition conference in Atlanta, and at the workshop, the Future of the Book. A deep nostalgia for bound books made of paper infuses many of these projects, but with a twist.

There are pop-up books that respond to light, sound, or touch. Some delve into the meaning of the book form, as in the project Novel Architecture, offering a concrete take on the idea of “immersive” reading. Others reveal pages that fold, shimmer, and interact with the reader.

Bridging the Gap Between Research and Commerce

This is next-generation e-book thinking, for sure, but there’s potential application everywhere in areas that current e-books have struggled with – for example, children’s educational, picture-book, and edutainment products, as in TOK, a storytelling project for young children from EngageLab at Portugal’s University of Minho.

Are these “Maker” books really e-books?  They’re electronic, at least in part, but in their prototype stage they only demonstrate functionality: they don’t yet reach the goal of the book experience – the information, or the story.

Technologists should think about how they can deliver e-text in this more traditional, book-like package, preserving the form and also the material that so many readers will always care about. The bridge, then, is to find a way to program them to contain and display changing text.

Publishers won’t be wasting their time if they keep an eye on this trend. E-books have moved so quickly away from the tangible and the familiar, but perhaps not forever.
There are more possible books in this digital book world than we have dreamed up so far; and those who are developing them live where art and technology meet.

Next: text.

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Anne Kostick is a partner in Foxpath IND, a digital-print-web consulting and services company specializing in the transition to and from traditional content development, management and publishing. She is also the current president of Women’s Media Group.

Anne is also a member of the advisory board for the Publishing Innovation Awards, which celebrate the best in ebooks, enhanced ebooks, and book apps. New to the Awards this year is the QED Seal, which highlights usability in ebooks along a thorough 13-point ebook inspection in multiple formats and platforms.