Tired of lugging around paperbacks, but don’t feel like dropping the extra change for a standalone e-book reader when you already own an iPhone? ScrollMotion has announced that they’ve partnered with Random House, Simon & Schuster, Houghton Mifflin, Penguin Group USA and Hachette to begin selling e-books repackaged as iPhone applications, or “books-as-apps”.
Serving as the core of all of these app-books is ScrollMotion’s Iceberg Reader, which they promise provides a “natural book-like reading experience”, with pagination, cover art, adjustable text size, and margin notes. To turn the page, readers swipe across the image as they would to jump between pictures in the on-device Photo app. Each book is self-contained, with both the reading application and the book itself built-in.
ScrollMotion certainly isn’t the first to take such an approach – in fact, Apple’s got an entire section [iTunes link] dedicated to this type of thing, already containing over 600 books. It is, however, the most significant publishing partnership we’ve heard of thus far, as each of the publishing houses involved has a solid library of popular content. As examples, ScrollMotion came out swinging with Random House’s The Golden Compass [iTunes Link] and Hachette’s Twilight [iTunes Link], both of which would be considered best sellers by anyone’s count.
For heavy ebook readers, the prices may be a bit steep. For the 11 Iceberg Reader powered books I could find in the app store, the prices fell between $12 and $28, with each book coming in at 30-40% more than what their respective “Kindle edition” goes for on Amazon. The Golden Compass is $11.99 through ScrollMotion, while it’s $7.50 for the Kindle. Twilight is $10.99, or $6.04 for Amazon’s reader. While that’s not enough to justify the purchase of a Kindle for most (especially at today’s post-Oprah prices), the difference starts to accrue pretty quick for avid readers.
As a side note, I’m a bit surprised that Apple has yet to incorporate a first-party eBook solution into the iPhone, beyond the clunky PDF-via-email method already in place. With the current books-as-apps solution, every development house has their own book reader, each with entirely different UIs and functionality. As anyone who has read through Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines could probably tell you, that sort of goes against their normal practices. Why not throw in a standard reader, and let publishing houses peddle their goods to the consumer as musicians and application developers can?
Great article. I’m an avid reader and traveler. Its great that I can get through the horrible lines at the airport without lugging heavy books along with my luggage. I did enjoy the Classics on the iPhone but these ScrollMotion apps kick butt in comparison. They are alittle pricey but I’m sure they will work out pricing soon. Well worth the money though.
Thanks for information ;)
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http://tinyurl.com/4rdhmc
eReader is already available for the iPhone
I’m definitely sticking with eReader. Several deal-breakers for me with this one.
http://www.readerville.com/index.php/blog/view/new-iphone-book-app-im-not-feeling-it/
As a book publisher I think ScrollMotion is more like a experiment, not an investment. Those big guys will probably sell like 10-20 titles and move on to another app solution.
I find that Stanza works just fine for me…
Thanks for information
What the article fails to note is WHY Amazon’s Kindle titles are so much cheaper: at this point, Amazon is taking a loss on them to make the Kindle THE ebook reader. While they’re taking a loss now, they’ll soon be forcing publishers to give them the ebooks at a lower rate, which will in turn mean less money for authors. If the publishing industry were smart (and they aren’t — and I’m a member!), they’d make sure that the Kindle didn’t become the iPod of ebooks.
”Why not throw in a standard reader, and let publishing houses peddle their goods to the consumer as musicians and application developers can?”…Umm, let’s see, maybe because the publishing industry doesn’t want to eventually be forced to sell all books for 99 cents and to suffer the same price pressures and low margins as the music industry? writers can’t go on tour…
Or instead of a-book-per-app you could get bookshelf ( http://www.iphonebookshelf.com/) and load as many books as you want, including books from Baen (http://baen.com), both free and for pay…that’s what I’ve been doing for a while, and it works pretty damn well for my 3-to-5-books-per-week vice :)
I guess prices should be higher, since apple would be taking a 50% bite out of every single book purchase :P