Book Wars. John B. Thompson
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books under contract and they could add more. That might have been a sensible way forward if you weren’t in business with IAC. IAC was a digital company, they owned The Daily Beast and a host of other internet-based companies: why would they want to tie up resources in warehousing and inventory? It’s not a business strategy that would’ve made sense for IAC, nor would it have furthered in any obvious way the original aim of the investment in Atavist Books, which was to experiment with digital publishing.
So six months after the first book was published, it was clear that Atavist Books had reached a dead end. Digitally elaborate ebooks were not going to work anytime soon, e-singles were not going to generate enough revenue to be viable on their own, and ramping up the print side of the business wouldn’t make sense for IAC. It was time to throw in the towel. In October 2014, Atavist Books announced that it would close at the end of the year. Authors whose books had not yet been published were found homes with other publishers. In total, Atavist published half a dozen ebooks, including some that were very creative and beautiful, but this bold new experiment in digital publishing was over shortly after it had begun.
The failures of Byliner and Atavist Books demonstrate how difficult it is to create something new in the publishing spaces opened up by the digital revolution. The digital medium makes possible new ways of creating texts and engaging with them, new ways of creating ‘books’ whatever they might be, and both Byliner and Atavist Books were bold attempts to experiment in this space. But their short lives attest to the difficulty of creating something that is both new and sustainable – that is, that has sufficient support, institutional as well as financial, to enable it to survive beyond the initial fanfare of excitement that greets the invention of the new. They created new forms but they were unsustainable – forms without a viable business model and without a large enough audience to make them work.
Of course, this does not mean that the new forms with which Byliner and Atavist Books experimented are of no enduring value and have no role to play in a diversified publishing programme and a mixed ecology of digital and print. On the contrary, as the experience of Tom at Mansion House showed, digital-only shorts can work well for different purposes – for example, as a kind of ‘monetized marketing’ for new books by brand authors. But in this case, digital shorts are parasitic on pre-existing structures and formats of the publishing world: they are a new and innovative publishing format that existing publishers can use to generate supplementary revenue streams and to build demand for new books by their bestselling authors. Understood in this way, digital shorts are not so much a radical re-invention of what ‘the book’ is but rather a format that supports and feeds into more traditional formats, serving as a kind of prequel that appeals to existing fans and primes the pump for a forthcoming book. Similarly, the experience of Atavist Books showed how difficult it is – at least in the current environment – to make innovative ebooks work in the absence of print, and Atavist Books was not the only new publishing venture to discover the need to re-invent the wheel and build a print business if they wanted to sustain their digital publishing programme.5
One could perhaps say, however, that Atavist Books suffered from a particular technical problem: it was creating digitally elaborate ebooks that required the reader to download and sign in to another application – the Atavist app – in order to buy and read the ebook, and this multi-step structure was just too complicated and off-putting for users. In the age of the iPad, why not just create the book itself as an app that can be purchased and downloaded directly from the App Store – that would be much simpler, surely. Wouldn’t that stand a better chance of success?
Ebooks as apps
Tom at Mansion House experimented a lot with app development, both at Mansion House and at the small, cutting-edge indie for which he previously worked. The procedure he followed at both houses was pretty much the same: come up with an idea for an app, either on his own or in discussion with one of the in-house editors, scope out the project and then put it out to tender either to an agency or to an app developer. Tom developed a good relationship with a small developer, ‘BirchTree’, to whom he gave a lot of his app development work. BirchTree is a small operation, two guys in their early thirties, self-taught programmers who worked briefly for a games company, became disillusioned, left, set up on their own and now work from home. One day, one of them got a phone call out of the blue from someone at a publishing company asking him if they’d be interested in developing an app with a scientist. That was 2010, shortly after the iPad had been launched. They’d done lots of iOS stuff, so they knew they could build an app – yes, they were interested. ‘He asked me how much it was going to cost and I was like, hmmm, I just picked a number out of the air, I said £20,000. And he said, yeah, that sounds fine, that sounds about right.’ So the deal was done. The publisher, Tom, was then working for a small indie, and the app was for a digital-only publication by a young American scientist about the future of the internet. The text didn’t exist in advance – he wrote the text as the app was being developed. It took the two guys at BirchTree about two months to produce the app. They built a unique non-linear navigational interface and enhanced the author’s text with interactive 3D models, video, images and other content pulled from the internet. It was available from the App Store for £4.99. Tom was happy with the way the app came out and had nothing but praise for the two guys at BirchTree (‘they’re fucking brilliant’) but he had to confess that sales were disappointing – ‘you get to 1,000 copies and that’s about it.’ With development costs of £20,000 and revenue after Apple’s commission of less than £4,000, that’s a serious loss – and that’s without taking account of any fees or royalties paid to the author.
It isn’t always like that, however. Tom described another app he did, this time for one of the commercial imprints of Mansion House. The author was a well-known scientist who had written many books of popular science. His new book was a lavishly illustrated book aimed at showing young people how science can explain natural phenomena. Tom and his publishing colleagues at Mansion House came up with the idea of doing an app that could be released at the same time as the book was published. They put the project out to tender at various agencies and developers, and those who were interested pitched their ideas to them. Tom and his colleagues decided to go with an agency, ‘Phantom’, that worked across different platforms and industries and had an in-house team of app developers. They told Phantom that they had a fixed amount of money for the project, £40,000, and they needed the app ready to be released by the publication date of the book. This sum was considerably less than Phantom would have needed to develop the kind of app they had in mind – they would normally have wanted at least twice that amount. But they liked the project and could see benefits in developing their collaboration with publishers, so they were willing to be flexible on the terms. They agreed a deal where the publisher put up £40,000 to cover the production costs, and the agency took a share of the revenues. Phantom had three months to deliver. They put five people full-time on the project and brought in specialists and freelancers when they needed them. They used the text from the book and supplemented it with specially created illustrations, animations, audio and video clips of the author and a variety of interactive activities and games. The main technical challenge for Phantom was to find a way to link large amounts of text to a single image – they were using the entire text of the book in the app, not an abbreviated version. In a large-format book, you can fit a lot of text around a single illustration, but you can’t do this on a tablet screen in landscape mode. Phantom’s solution was to develop different layers of content so that images and text would move at different speeds as you swiped the screen. It was a technique they borrowed from game design, where it’s used to create the illusion of depth – for example, clouds in the background move slowly while things in the foreground move quickly, giving the illusion of depth. But none of their developers had done this before, so they had to invent processes on the fly and then go back and fix the things that didn’t work. Despite these challenges, they delivered on time and the app was released a week after the hardcover edition was published in September 2011, available from the App Store at £9.99 and $13.99.
This one worked. ‘It followed a very traditional kind of app sales curve’, explained Steve, the project manager at Phantom. ‘Huge initial spike and then a long tail of ongoing sales. So we sold 15,000, 20,000 in the first couple of months, and