Gore, Ex-Apple Engineers Team Up to Blow Up the Book

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/04/app-stars-push-pop-press/

by benwerd • 15 years ago

68 44 15 years ago

Jun82• 15 years ago

WOW! This has the potential to be really big. Just think about all the cookbooks, children's storybooks, and DIY guides you can create easily with such a tool, if it's done right.

steverb• 15 years ago

I'm getting flashbacks from the heyday of CD-ROM publishing. I suspect the end story will be the same.

Jun82• 15 years ago

Maybe not. I've already spent $20-30 on iPad audio books for my son, they highlight the words as they are read, he loves them. iPad is his favorite toy, unfortunately, I've found out: I bought him a Stinky the Garbage Truck for $50that he's been talking about and he still wants to play with the iPad. And he's 4!

gaius• 15 years ago

CD-ROM? I'm getting flashbacks to HyperCard...

ugh2• 15 years ago

CD-ROMs are physical, you have to buy them in a store or order them from somewhere, you have to put them in those huge, bulky computers and sit in front of them.

I see few, if any, points of comparison. Magazines and books on tablets might still fail but I fail to see how comparisons to CD-ROM publishing are useful.

javanix2• 15 years ago

I'd be more excited about a really good self-publishing platform for non-interactive e-books.

A lot of the cost of e-books comes from publishers needing to support various paper-related overhead like binding, printing, etc. If it was possible for an author to self-publish I suspect it'd be very easy for them to equal the per-book profits (obviously, advertising would be a different story) that they'd get going through Harper-Collins or the like.

roc2• 15 years ago

Can't you self-register and publish whatever you want via Kindle and iBooks?

Specifically to your second point, you may want to read this link: http://www.novelr.com/2011/02/27/rich-indie-writer

javanix2• 15 years ago

Oh, yes, you can. But I think its probably beyond the technical abilities of many authors.

If there was a cheap, e-book-only publisher around that could help with all of the traditional publisher duties (editing, typesetting, advertising, etc) without the overhead of actually printing anything (or at least with being able to print things on demand rather than buying a big batch and praying) I think there would definitely be money to be made.

The number of submissions that large publishers get every day has got to be staggering - what if a small company could dedicate their extra resources to actually reading through more of them than Random House can? The beauty of the novel that it is pure content, especially on an e-reader.

dpapathanasiou• 15 years ago

"I'd be more excited about a really good self-publishing platform for non-interactive e-books."

Check out eBookBurn.com (https://ebookburn.com/), which is one of my projects.

lucasjung12• 15 years ago

The internet is already full of self-published crap because self-publishing in digital form is already trivially easy. Making it easier to self-publish is not going to disrupt the publishing industry, because the publishing industry still serves a valuable service: they sift through all of that crap to find the few good stories. More importantly, they identify promising authors and mentor them into authors worth reading. If you want to disrupt the publishing industry, you need to develop an alternative solution for helping people figure out what is worth reading (probably not too difficult) and and alternative solution for developing the skills of writers (much more challanging).

Shorel• 15 years ago

You can self publish a lot of free and full of ads crap.

Self publishing to the App Store seems a good model for professional writers, the diference is a distribution channel you can profit from without ads.

This is more a competition to Amazon and Kindle than competition to blogs and wordpress sites.

muhfuhkuh• 15 years ago

"they sift through all of that crap to find the few good stories."

Wouldn't customers be a better sifter than the publishing industry? Word of mouth and discovery? Samples and free reading demos (like Barnes and Noble does when you go into the store with a Nook)?

And, for every published nugget, there are tonnage worth of published muck and runoff polluting the shelves; their filter isn't so great either.

"If you want to disrupt the publishing industry, you need to develop an alternative solution for helping people figure out what is worth reading (probably not too difficult) and and alternative solution for developing the skills of writers (much more challanging)."

The publishing industry is plenty disrupted by the fact that eBooks are now 30% of their entire market in copies sold and is the format with the biggest share (2nd place is mass market paperback). Amazon sells more eBooks than paperback and hardcover. And, an increasing number of self-published authors are finding their way to the top 100 on Kindle and Nook paid eBook charts. Some self-pubbed authors have multiple titles in the Amazon top 100, meaning they sell at least several hundred of each of their titles per day.

As far as developing professional writer skills, you're ready for the business the minute you've made a sale and perhaps a fan. The idea of the minimum viable product (MVP) in the professional writer's world is akin to the dime novel or "penny dreadfuls" of yesteryear, where some of the greatest genre writers (Raymond Chandler, Ray Bradbury, Edgar Rice Burroughs, HP Lovecraft) started their craft with generally bad writing. Believe me, nothing says "welcome to reality" like getting a godawful review or even a return (which you will see when you self-publish through markets like Kindle, Kobo, and Nook).

lucasjung12• 15 years ago

Most of those eBooks are still being published by the big old publishing houses. Of the authors who are successfully self-publishing, most started out publishing through traditional channels, built up large fanbases that way, and then broke out on their own once they had sufficient popularity to sell books without help from the big publishers. People who jump right into self-publishing and experience dramatic success are way out in the narrow part of the tail.

The dime novels you mention were not just an entry-level publishing platform: their more important function was to let the editors and publishers work with new authors, mentoring them and helping them grow. A guy with "one sale and one fan" is still missing the most important part: regular, constructive feedback from successful professionals.

melling• 15 years ago

You can crowd source this by allowing people to rate the material. Sounds like a good idea for a startup. A "rottentomatoes.com" for self-published books? User rating and "pro" rating?

lucasjung12• 15 years ago

A rating can tell potential readers that a book is worth reading or not. It can't grow a talented but unskilled author into a great author. Most successful authors will tell you that they had to write hundreds of thousands of words worth of crap before they were able to produce anything worth reading, and then only because they were getting quality coaching while writing all of that crap.

neoveller• 15 years ago

Coming soon to a neovella.com relaunch near you!

roc2• 15 years ago

> "More importantly, they identify promising authors and mentor them into authors worth reading."

I disagree somewhat. What publishers actually do, is: identify economically promising authors and mentor them into writers of books they can sell.

Sometimes this aligns with good writers and good writing. Sometimes it does not.

atacrawl• 15 years ago

they sift through all of that crap to find the few good stories

Any market selling anything operates in the same exact way -- producers filter out the bad to find the good that they want to sell, and consumers filter further from there.

macrael• 15 years ago

But the interesting part of this to me is not that "anyone can publish"; tumblr gives you that. What is interesting is that they are building a framework for beautiful interactive "storytelling" as they said. It is something you definitely can not do on the web right now.

Most books probably won't really benefit from this work, I don't think I want an interactive version of The Great Gatsby, but their tools allow for the creation of something new and interesting.

cletus• 15 years ago

This is interesting because this was what I was going to do mid-last year but decided to go work for Google instead. There were other issues involved. Another key one was the biz dev side.

ugh2• 15 years ago

What's great about Push Pop Press is that their interaction design doesn't suck. All iPad magazines I have tried suck. Big time. I feel lost, gestures don't work as expected, magazines take forever to download. They definitely did a great job with the software, I encountered none of those problems.

wdewind• 15 years ago

This is not self publishing, this is powerpoint.

r0s• 15 years ago

Sounds like they're trying to recreate the web.

On a tiny platform, limited to the ebook market, mac only.

How is that in anyway pushing towards mainstream?

jamesbritt• 15 years ago

"The app is the richest form of storytelling"

What a bizarre claim.

Gore, Ex-Apple Engineers Team Up to Blow Up the Book

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