Books in App Store
Originally published on macresearch.org, around 2008. Reproduced from the author's archive; some links may no longer resolve.
Charles Parnot’s article (link no longer available) on iPhone business models, and how they relate to scientists, has got me thinking about what types of apps would really be useful on the platform. To date, most scientific apps have been pretty much ported straight over from the Mac — we haven’t yet seen any significant rethink of what type of scientific software would actually be suited to the new platform. I know there are developers working on it, and I think we will see new an interesting applications appear in the coming months, but I don’t think we have seen any yet.
While I was thinking about apps, it occurred to me that there might already be a category of app that scientists have largely overlooked. As soon as the App Store opened, it became clear that some developers saw the iPhone/iPod touch as a new platform for electronic books. By packaging each book as a separate app, it is possible to sell books via the App Store. Not only that, but your books are protected by Apple’s DRM technology, making it difficult for users to copy them. The latter has always been a problem with PDF distribution of books, and probably one of the reasons that digital book distribution has not really taken off as it might have.
I haven’t yet come across a scientific book in the App Store, but it seems to me that it may be an interesting avenue to investigate. Scientific books typically have low sales volume, making them more difficult to get published. With the App Store, you can sell anything from a single copy up, and take next to no risk. There are no printing costs, payments to agents or distributors — other than Apple’s 30% cut — making it quite a low cost venture. Books just need to be exported as a PDF, packaged up in a simple PDF reader (eg WebKit), and submitted to the store.
There are also some disadvantages to buying books from the App Store. To begin with, you then have to read the books on your touch device. For this reason, the price charged would probably need to be much less than a real paper book, but for a useful book in a niche market, most would probably be prepared to pay something like $10 a copy.
To get a series of scientific books off the ground would require a number of unpublished manuscripts, and a simple reader app. There may even be a business model in charging a fee, or taking a percentage of profits, to ‘wrap’ manuscripts and submit them to the App Store — a virtual publisher, if you will. This way, an author would not have to deal with the unsavory task of developing the app to wrap their book, which would no doubt be a high barrier for most.
What do you think about this concept? Is there an opportunity here for scientific publication? And is there even anything to publish?