If Apple is Doing Enhanced EBooks like Enhanced LPs-Trouble.
It is likely Apple will be announcing a new computer tomorrow. There is news of negotiations with publishers. Speculation is that enhanced ebooks might be the wow that is bringing book people together with Apple people.
Enhanced ebooks you say? Sigh. Big fat sigh. That is just from the publisher side.
I wanted to note — before the reality distortion field powers up — that Apple’s LP feature (the possible progenitor of the enhanced ebook platform) simply isn’t that compelling.
To try out the LP feature I downloaded Tyreses Gibson’s comic book, Mayhem, from iTunes a few months back. Unlike other motion comics, Mayhem loads in iTunes as an LP featurette, not as a TV-show. This allows for ‘interactive’ features similar to a DVD-features menu. In this case the features are few. There is a making-of doc. There is a wallpaper section. There is concept art. And of course there is Tyreses’ auto-tuned single. It is slick. Sure. You get that Flash website feel, without Flash and without the outbound links of a website.
I see two problems with using this approach for books. One, it is a faux-website of a faux-book. Using iTunes as a website platform is like going to EPICOT-center to experience Europe. They are trying too hard to create an experience. You need linkability and shareability and all those good things you get with the open web. iTunes works as a closed platform for music and movies because of the payment ecosystem not the content platform. Typically, you know about a song or a show before you track it down in the Apple universe. Extras that are exclusive to iTunes and are not linkable nor sharable are DOA.
Second, LP development is out of reach of all but the big houses for all but the big books — and I am not just talking cost. Currently, LPs can only be added by a select number of record companies, subject to Apple’s approval. I assume they will open this up eventually but there will likely remain an app-store-like approval process. So publishers would need to create the extra content, hire an ‘iTunes’ developer to cocoa-ify it for Apple, and then wait for Apple’s blessing to get it into the system. That is a high barrier to entry. Only the sure-thing books will likely get that treatment.
To make enhanced ebooks compelling via iTunes, Jobs needs to blow-up the iLife suite on Macs and replace it with a suite of tools that make making enhanced ebooks as easy as doing a podcast in Garageband. He would then need to open up the platform to lower the risk of the content creators.
Publishers, for their part, need a new metaphor for the enhanced ebook. Create enhanced content for books in the style of Facebook not in the style of DVD extras.
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