Monday, July 25, 2011

Book apps: A reading revolution, or the end of reading?

As I post this I am sitting in a coffee shop in a strange town, with an old fashioned print book (PAtricl Hennessey's The Junior Officer's Reading Club) balanced on my knee, while synching, updating and charging my iphone before I hit the road. End of reading? Don't think so. Maybe mixed media reading? And as for the article below, I confess I would buy an ipad as soon as I can afford one, if only because I can't find the New Yorker reliably here in AB and I can't read it on my iphone. MP+


JOHN BARBER
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
Published Saturday, Jul. 23, 2011 6:00AM EDT
Last updated Saturday, Jul. 23, 2011 10:12AM EDT



The On The Road app sells for $16.99, compared to $10.88 for a paperback on Amazon and $9.99 for an electronic copy of an earlier “deluxe” edition. “The app itself has all the text of the book and then it’s got five times more material,” Morrison notes.

But the economics of book apps are still a matter of guesswork. “We’re in this experimental stage,” Morrison says. “We’ll see how this one does, figure out how much it costs us and, if we were going to do more, how many we would have to sell to make it worthwhile.” It will be a very long time before the last of the 1,500 titles on the Penguin Classic backlist get apped, he added. “At this point, they are very time-consuming, so we have to pick our shots.”


Read the whole piece here.

1 comment:

J Goreham-Penney said...

Y'know, the other day I was looking at my ever-expanding comic book collection, and I realized I just couldn't fit any more in, so for the first time, today during my lunch, I got the latest issue of my favourite comics in a couple of seconds on my android phone. I have no idea if I'll like reading my comic regularly like this but I'm going to give it a go. I do still think there's room in my life for traditional print as well as digital media, even if there's isn't room in my apartment for it any longer.

Mad Padre

Mad Padre
Opinions expressed within are in no way the responsibility of anyone's employers or facilitating agencies and should by rights be taken as nothing more than one person's notional musings, attempted witticisms, and prayerful posturings.

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