Smart E-Book Interface Prototype Demo - YouTube

Smart E-Book Interface Prototype Demo - YouTube

This is a problem I worked on about two years ago: How to make it easy for someone to flip through pages and thumb-mark pages in an eBook. I think these researchers have hit the nail on the head and I hope to see these technologies licensed to others.

Chris Stevens on Alice for the iPad, Book Apps, and Toronto: a Q & A | The Toronto Review of Books

Chris Stevens on Alice for the iPad, Book Apps, and Toronto: a Q & A | The Toronto Review of Books

Chris Stevens is kind of a founding father of book apps with his historic and ground breaking Alice for the iPad, which in my opinion, along side TouchPress' Elements launched the book app industry. When Chris speaks I listen and so should you.

Book Apps: State of the Industry

Believe it or not there is a budding Book App industry but it is so new that you can hardly see it.  The truth is that the vast majority of book apps produced today are crap. They are being developed by people from all over the world, on small budgets, big dreams, and little or no talent.

All Over The World
I look at the new releases in the Books category of the iPad App Store every day to see what new book apps have been released.  There are plenty of new titles every day from developers all over the world. The majority of these are produced by individuals or small companies.  This is good because it demonstrates one aspect of the book app industry I love; there is a low barrier to entry.  As a result we get to see lots of different ideas - but there has a been a far great supply of really shoddy work than anything else.

Small Budgets
Since most of the book apps are being developed by small teams or individuals the budgets are extremely small for most books and that is nearly always reflected in the quality of work.   I'm not saying that quality is directly tied to amount invested, but small budgets determine two things: The quality of the assets and the features provided by the book app.  If you have a small budget you can't afford a great artist, animations, voice overs, or writing.  Even if you get the content right, which is very rare, the enhanced features offered by most book apps are pretty lame.  I'm sorry, but using basic physics is not going to cut it anymore. You can't just take old art work, wrap it in a 2D physics engine, and call it a wrap.  That may have worked in 2010 with the first books but it rarely pays off now.  To do something really interesting you need to innovate and provide a unique experience which means more sophisticated programming and a bigger budget.

Big Dreams
Most of the folks that enter this industry have very big dreams about building a publishing empire and making loads of money.  The reality, even for the most successful book app publishers, is just the opposite.  The truth is the audience for book apps simply doesn't exist yet.  At least not at a level that can sustain a full time studio.  That's going to change over the course of the next five years, but right now most book app publishers have discovered, or are discovering, that there is little or no money to be made in book apps.  There are a few who may be doing well, but they are a very small percentage of the total number of publishers attempting to make money in this new media.

Little or No Talent
This is the other thing about book app publishers: The vast majority of us have no practical experience in either publishing, film making, radio, or anything creative.  I think you really have to have a fundamental understanding of the entertainment industry to do a good job at publishing book apps. Most of the book app publishers have created a couple games - probably unsuccessful games - but few have a background in publishing, film, radio or any of the other high-production entertainment skills needed to make this work.

There is Hope
While the present is rather grim for anyone who wants to make a living at publishing book apps, the future is extremely bright.   When I talk to other book app publishers I often compare the present state of our budding industry to the beginning of the film industry or automobile industry.   At the beginning of the film industry there was far more people interested in making silent films than there were people interest in watching them.  This changed pretty quickly, but at first a lot of movies were made that were (a) really horrible (b) never saw the light of day.  The same is true of the automobile industry. There was an explosion of automobile manufacutures all over the world between 1900 and 1914 but few of them survived to become part of the really huge automobile industry that came into existence after the first World War.  The shortage of consumers was exasperated by the shortage of infrastructure. Finding a decent road to drive on was difficult to say the least not to mention finding a gas station.

The book app industry, currently in its infancy, is suffering just as the film and auto industries did, but conditions are significantly different.  For one, the app stores (in particular Apple's for now) makes it really easy to distribute book apps and to reach a potentially huge audience.  Second, growth in tablet computers and advanced eReaders (the infrastructure of book apps) is growing really quickly. More quickly than anything else I've seen - even the Internet.  In five years I suspect 80% of people in 1st World countries who own computers today will own a tablet or advanced eReader device.  When we reach that level of adoption, the book app industry will explode into a mainstream media.  

The folks who focus on producing great quality works today and on implementing a sustainable business model - one based on growing recognition not revenues - will be the ones best prepared to win in what will become a very big business.  I don't plan to have a huge back list five years from now. Instead, I plan to have several extremely well executed works and a fantastic reputation for creating quality book apps.  When 'Lord of the Rings', 'Dune', and 'Harry Potter' are ready to be adapted into book apps my studio, Noble Beast, will be on the short list for developing those titles.  That's the goal.

SteampunkHolmes.com: The Web Site!

I'm really excited to announce the SteampunkHolmes.com web site, which is dedicated to the discussing the development of "Steampunk Holmes: Legacy of the Nautilus" and the rest of the Steampunk Holmes series.  I've copied all the blog posts originally posted here about the series to the new web site. In addition, there are pages dedicated to showing the art work including character portraits, device designs, and scenes!

I also want to announce that SteampunkHolmes.com has its own twitter account @NobleBeastBooks (Noble Beast is the name of the publishing company that is creating Steampunk Holmes).  So if you've been following me to hear news about Steampunk Holmes than please consider following @NobleBeastBooks - if you are following me for general purposes just stick with @rmonson.

In the future this blog will go back to talking about the Book App (App/Book) business in general. My thoughts on the market, technologies, and offerings.

Steampunk Holmes: The Black Widow in Action!

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I've spoken a couple times about the Black Widow, Sherlock Holme's super-chopper, in our story Steampunk Holmes: Legend of the Nautilus.

I announced the intent to use Mikky's design and to even manufacture the bike for purchase back in July and then about the addition of the side car and the Gatling Gun in August - the Gatling Gun will not be included in the real bike we are going to manufacture.

 Now I get to show Holmes and Watson riding the Black Widow in a big shoot out toward the end of the story. Holmes is driving and Watson is shooting the Gatling Gun. Daniel has out done himself on this one!

I won't tell you what he is shooting at just yet but I have included a excerpt from earlier in the story about the Black Widow and Watson's apprehension riding in the side car. Here is the excerpt written by P.C. Martin - Enjoy!

“No; a telegram from my sister Mycroft,” replied Holmes, “which promises to be of exceptional interest. Mycroft never sends for me except in cases of the most baffling nature, and I thought you might rather accompany me.” 

“Certainly I would,” cried I, leaping from my pillow and splashing my face from the basin in the corner. 

“Very well, then; have some coffee before we go. I'll get my coat and start up the Widow.”   

I winced at the prospect. Holmes' enormous motorized bicycle, the Black Widow, was his pet hobby, and so enamored was he with its power and terrific capability for speed, he could not keep his enjoyment of the vehicle to himself. As I had shown great unwillingness to ride pillion on the monstrous machine, Holmes had contrived a marvelous side-car in order that I might share in the excitement of the Widow's adventurous sallies in what he called perfect safety. I had been flattered by this excessive kindness on my friend's part, until about ten seconds had elapsed on my first ride in the Widow's side-car. 

In defense of my own courage, I have been shot at, stabbed, and seen my own arm torn from my body upon the hostile battlefields of India and Afghanistan, and yet none of those terrors compare in my estimation with that of driving through London with Holmes at the helm. After that momentous and traumatizing inaugural ride, my mistrust of the vehicle had grown to a positive terror—less for the vehicle's sake than for my friend's tempestuous and unbelievably reckless driving skills.

As you can see P.C. Martin is an excellent writer and we are all working hard to match plot, to story, to art. I'm really excited about the whole project!

Steampunk Holmes: The Nautilus

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It took two weeks of trial and error but Daniel Cortes and are proud to present the final design of the Nautilus for Steampunk Holmes: Legacy of the Nautilus project. I want to thank Daniel for his patience and for re-conceptulizing the Nautilus many times until we got it just right.

As we work on this project I'm getting a very good idea of what it must be like to produce and direct a movie.  You have an idea that you share with talented people and they work their butt's off to make it tangible.   I imagine that this must require as much give-and-take as Daniel and I have when working on characters, scenes, and gadgets.  The same kind of back-and-forth I have with P.C. Martin about the story.  Truly wonderful things are not built in a vacuum; they must be the result of passionate collaboration among peers.

To the left you see the final design for the Nautilus.  This is a mechanical drawing that will be featured in the book along with Doctor Watson's Arm, the Black Widow, and other gadgets yet to be announced.

The Nautilus design went through many variations as we experimented with one idea after another.  We have, after all, very big shoes to fill.  If you look at the design of the Nautilus by Disney in "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea", a steampunk masterpiece, or the versions done by other adaptations such as "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" or many of the animated takes on the story, you'll soon agree that the design must rise to meet the merits of the story.  We knew we had to get it right, and I think we did.  Click on the image to above and judge for yourself.

The Nautilus sinks many ships in the original story by harpooning them to create a great hole in the hull that fills and sinks the ship.  We needed a big-ass pointy thing on the front and Daniel gave us one. I also wanted to make the ship look somewhat organic, but not like a fish.  Look at the curves and I think you'll agree that Daniel delivered on that request as well. I wanted the Nautilus to reflect Nemo's Indian heritage - Something Daniel took to heart adding beautiful India-like decorative designs.  Finally, I wanted the Nautilus to be HUGE! Check out the "crew" label next to the ship.

Below are some of the earlier concepts that lead us to the final design.

Concept Drawings of the Nautilus

The Steampunk Holmes Sound Track

One of the things I'm going to do with our app book, Steampunk Holmes: Legacy of the Nautilus, is incorporate a sound track with the book. This goes beyond simple sound effects where you click a button and mechanical gear sounds are heard - that's a given.  When I talk sound track I mean a sound track like a movie has - mood music.

At the very least I hope to provide appropriate ambient music derived from the instrumentals of songs from Abney Park who has contracted with me to provide music for the book.  It would also be good to provide ambient sound effects so, for example, a scene that takes place a busy street has street sounds in the background.

The idea first came to me last year when a MMOG I played, EVE Online, incorporated a more sophisticated sound track into the gaming experience. If you have the sound track playing in EVE it varies over time and the music gets more intense and changes if you entering battle, engaged in battle, or simply floating peacefully through space. It's really a cool effect.

My original thought, and one I considered submitting a patent application for, was to use eye tracking to determine where the person is reading and to have the music and ambient sound effects change seamlessly according the content.  I gave up on that idea because of complexity. For Steampunk Holmes: Legacy of the Nautilus I plan to base the music on the page you are reading which is technically much simpler.

Yesterday, I discovered an app book developer called Backtrack which uses a sound track for their books, most notably an app/book version of Sherlock Holmes: Adventure of the Speckled Band and The Power of Six a modern young adult novel.  Backtrack has a pretty cool approach. They have a very non-invasive carrot (arrow) that moves along the right side of the page at what they predict to be your speed of reading. As the carrot moves to different paragraphs and even different sentences the ambient music and sound effects change to match the content.  I think you can train it to read at your own speed pretty easily - it seems to have slowed down when I kept double tapping the carrot back to the sentence I was still on as it was way ahead of me (evidently I'm slow reader).  I really enjoyed the experience and I tip my hat to the folks at Booktrack for the engineering and quality of music and sound effects.

Today, I discovered that iOS 5 just might ship with facial recognition APIs in the SDK including eye tracking.  If that is true, and it works well, I can see combining eye tracking with context sensitive sound track and ambient sound effects to improve the experience.  That's a nice to have.

For now I'm sticking with page level sound track as that's is easier and my budget is not unlimited. I hope, however, to incorporate eye-tracked ambient sound and music in an update providing the APIs exist and I have the money to afford to implement it.

There are so many things I want to do with the app/book but I'm going to have to throttle my ambitions if I want to be able to afford produce the book.  However, just because I can't do them now doesn't mean I can't talk about my ideas which is one the main reasons for this blog. I want to be totally open about what I'm thinking and producing.

Why I Develop Interactive Books

Steve Jobs speaking at Stanford's
2005 Graduation Ceremony

This is a bit of a personal note, but I wanted to post it here so folks understand me and what my company, Noble Beast, is all about.  There are a lot of other things I could do that would make me a lot more money than I will ever make on Interactive books, but I don't do them and here is why.

When I was 19 years old I came to the realization that I didn't want to work in my Father's business, which I had assumed I would do since I was about 10.  My father is self-made man from humble beginnings and his business (now over 50 years) is very successful.  When I confided in my father that I didn't think his line of business was of interest to me, he supported me.  He gave me what I think is the best advice you can give to any high-school or collage graduate.  He told me to discover what I love and stick to that.  He warned me not to work just to earn a living, but to work at something I'm passionate about.

It turns out that Steven Jobs gave exactly the same advice during a commencement speech at Stanford more than a decade later, in 2005.  You can see a video of the speech and the transcript here but I wanted to quote a couple of lines from it in the hopes that his words, far more elegant than my own, will inspire other people to follow his and my father's advice.

You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.   

-- Steve Jobs

It took me 12 years to graduate from collage with a degree in a field I love, computer science.  I dropped out of collage three times, joined the army for three years, started a few businesses, and then discovered programming.  I was 30 years old when I graduated - an age at which other people are established in their careers. Since then I've done well in my field and have loved nearly every day as a software professional.

Last year I discovered a new passion: Producing interactive books for the iPad.  This still involves my first love, software development, but it also allows me to work with very talented artists and to produce a product that entertains thousands, perhaps one day, millions of people.  I'm so passionate about it that stopped working as a software consultant and spent most of last year earning nothing trying to build my business.  I started the business with a talented individual but in the end we had very different visions of what our focus should be.  In February, I left the company I helped co-found and landed my current position working for a software consulting firm. I enjoy the company I work for and the work I do, but I remain truly passionate about producing interactive books.  Shortly after leaving my first publishing company I started a new one, Noble Beast, which is the company that is developing Steampunk Holmes.  It's through this new company that I pursue my passion and because I do not have to compromise on anything - I'm the boss and only employee - I'm very focused and having the time of my life.

Along the way I have heard a lot of negative things about pursuing production of interactive books. The most painful for me has come from venture capitalists and the like who don't support the idea of a company that is a life-style business.  Understandably, VC's want a company that you can start today and sell for a billion dollars in 5 years. Who wouldn't?  Well, I can't create the company and books I want if that is my focus. I have to put quality before everything else including earnings to create the kind of interactive books I can be proud of and be passionate about developing. I'm creating a life-style business not a venture business and I'm proud of it.

All my life people have been telling me that I can't do this and that I can't do that.  I failed English in high-school and couldn't write a simple note let alone a blog, but in 1999 I wrote my first book and have written five very successful books since then.  I failed math in high-school and had to start out in remedial math in collage, but by the time I finished I had completed three semesters of calculus, a number of math intensive science classes, and was a computer programmer.   Today people are telling me that I don't have the right ingredients to make a publishing company work, but I'm going to prove them wrong just as I proved all the other nay-sayers wrong.  Success, I believe, has nothing to do with natural skills.  It has to do with dogged determination and passion. Armed with these things you can accomplish anything.

I would like to quote once more from Steve Jobs 2005 commencement address. If you've read this far than thank you for taking the time to listen to what is probably a very narcissistic post. I only hope that my words, or more likely Steve Jobs words, will motivate you to focus on your passion and not get stuck doing something you don't care about.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.   

-- Steve Jobs

Steampunk Holmes Technology: The Black Widow's Gatling Gun

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As I wrote in the blog entry "Steampunk Holmes Technology: Mechanical Drawings" one of the Steampunk Holmes book enhancements is to provide more information about the various gadgets that Holmes, Watson and others use or encounter through out the story.  To the left is the mechanical-like drawing of the Black Widow which runs on a H2O2 steam engine and sports a Gatling gun under the hood of the side car.

I did a little research on the design of steam engines and ended up combining two designs available at the time into one.  The Black Widow uses a two cylinder (or compound) engine for quick acceleration and power and a steam turbine as a second stage for sustained speed and long distances.

The Gatling gun fires 300 rounds per minute. At that time (1885) Gatling guns could fire much faster but there would be a problem with storing ammunition so I chose a slower rate of fire but instead of being driven by a hand crank, as was common, the eight barrels turn and fire using the kick-back for the previous round (aka Recoil-Operated).   The ammunition is a smaller caliber .303 Lee-Metford bullet of lead encased (jacketed) in copper to improve accuracy (lead tends to warp its shape when fired distorting accuracy).

I don't know if most readers will appreciate all the work we put into these designs, but I know we are having a total blast developing the story, gadgets and art work.  Stay tuned as we are currently working on the design the Captain Nemo's Nautilus!

Daniel Cortes Art Work for Novus AEterno

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Daniel Cortes, the amazingly talented artist working with me on Steampunk Holmes, has also been working for the folks developing Novus AEterno as a character artist.  Not only has he been developing character designs but he also worked on their web site. Daniel promises me that the Steampunk Holmes web site will be equally as cool when we finally get it finished.

Check out Novus AEterno and the great art work by Daniel and other artists - It looks like EVE on Steroids.  Instead of running a single ship you get to become a Consul General and run an entire space Navy!