Читать книгу Book Wars - John B. Thompson - Страница 23

Touch Press was housed in a small, two-storey building in Warple Mews, a quiet cul-de-sac on an old industrial estate in west London. The factories are now silent and many of the buildings have been converted into office spaces for small businesses and start-ups of various kinds. Touch Press had two units in Warple Mews – they owned one and rented the other, and they’d knocked a hole through the wall so that the units interconnected. It was a compact space for thirty employees. Mostly open plan, there were rows of desks with programmers working on Macs, and at the far end of one room there was a meeting space with a large oval table and a generous skylight, closed off from the rest of the room by a glass screen and door. Touch Press earned a reputation as a high-end app developer – the Rolls-Royce of the app world. But they didn’t think of themselves as an app developer: they thought of themselves as a publisher, and they thought of what they made as books. ‘If you say “app developer” to someone, they think of a purely technical company that is brought in by a publisher to turn a book into an app, and we’re clearly not in that business’, explained Max Whitby, one of the founders of the company. He continued:

We’re trying to create something which is a thing in itself. I also think that a lot of what is associated with thinking of oneself as a book publisher is critical to the success of what we make. So you want an author with a voice, and we give them a medium in which to express themselves, you care about good typography and things being spelt correctly and being grammatical, and you curate the information – and that’s what a publisher does. And you’re a filter – you select, you decide, you’re in the swim of the culture and help to choose the things that will make a difference.

Like many start-ups, Touch Press emerged from a fortuitous convergence of circumstances. Max Whitby, a former television producer for the BBC, and Theo Gray, a software engineer and author with a background in chemistry who lives two hours south of Chicago, happened to share a hobbyist’s interest in the Periodic Table. They found themselves bidding for the same samples of elements on ebay and losing to one another, and decided it was time to meet, which they did in 2002. They struck up a friendship and, indeed, a collaboration, building a small business around their shared interest in the elements – ‘a kind of empire of the Periodic Table’. It just so happened that Theo was working at the time for a software company that was commissioned by Apple to supply some of the software for the iPad. Although the iPad was still in development, Theo and Max immediately saw an opportunity to do something new with the enormous amount of material they’d gathered on the Periodic Table. In the course of preparing for a book he wanted to publish on the elements, Theo had photographed each element on a turntable to get a set of 360-degree images. It suddenly dawned on him that he could use the software they were supplying for the iPad – a technical programme called Mathematica that Theo had helped to create – to combine these photos in a way that would enable you to ‘spin’ the object with a flick of your finger on the iPad. It’s a unique experience. It’s hard to imagine what it’s like until you actually do it, and the first time you flick your finger and make an object spin 360 degrees, it’s captivating. Flick it faster and it spins faster, touch it and it stops in its tracks. You would never have imagined that a flat screen could produce such a compelling and dynamic 3D effect.

Now they had a serious challenge: could they build an app of the elements in just sixty days, so it was ready to launch at the same time as the first iPad was released in April 2010? Using Mathematica, they would need to come up with an algorithm that would tell the program how to integrate and resize the photographs to produce the spin effect, how to position the rotating objects on the page and how to combine the objects with the text and labels. They also needed to persuade Apple that what they were producing was something new, not just a static piece of text on a screen. They knew that one of the questions that would be asked about the iPad was: how does this compare with the Kindle? If the iPad was thought of as an ebook reader, then it wouldn’t compare very favourably: it would have a battery life measured in hours rather than weeks, you couldn’t read in sunlight and it would cost a lot more. If your definition of ebooks is static pieces of text that you read on a screen, then the Kindle is going to be a better ebook reader than the iPad. So their pitch to Apple was to seize this opportunity to think differently about what an ebook is. ‘Suppose you change the conversation about what the future of ebooks is – that’s a conversation you can win’, they said. ‘Suppose you can convince people that, sure, the Kindle has a million books, but who cares – they’re a million old books. Look at this amazing thing – this is what ebooks are going to be. And there are half a dozen reasons why it can’t run on a Kindle – the screen is crap, the processor is nothing like what it needs to be, there’s not enough memory and so on. There’s lots of reasons why the future of ebooks cannot exist on a Kindle. Never mind the present, look at the shining future.’ Apple was convinced. The Elements was finished on time and the app was one of a couple of dozen apps that were installed on the small batch of embargoed iPads that were sent out to journalists a few days before the public launch of the iPad. The response from reviewers was euphoric. Stephen Fry tweeted ‘Best App of all … Everything is animated and gorgeous. Alone worth iPad.’

The publicity was exceptional and the app took off – they sold 3,600 copies on the first day, priced at $13.99 and £9.99. It went on to sell over a million copies and came out in fourteen different versions, including Japanese, French and German, generating over $3 million in net revenue. Theo had actually published a book called The Elements in September 2009 with Black Dog & Leventhal, a small New York trade house. It had been translated into several languages and had sold about 70,000 copies in all languages before the app came out. When the app was released, sales of the print book went through the roof. By 2012, more than 580,000 copies of the print edition had been sold in all languages. It was a stunning success, both as an app and as a book.

The success of The Elements was the basis on which Touch Press was founded. The company was incorporated in summer 2010, a few months after The Elements had been released, and they raised about half a million dollars, partly from two angel investors, to get the company off the ground. They saw themselves as pioneering a new kind of publishing: the book-as-app. As they saw it, there were three kinds of companies that were experimenting with this medium: traditional book publishing companies, traditional media companies with expertise in video and TV, and video game companies. Each had something important to contribute but they understood only part of what was essential for this new medium to work. Traditional book companies understood the importance of storytelling and of authors, but they lacked the expertise in video and the technical skills to develop the book-as-app – hence they generally had to outsource this development to specialist firms. Film and television companies understood talent, storytelling and visual media, but they too lacked the software skills to develop good apps. Game companies, on the other hand, have the technical skills to produce good interactive video game experience, but they don’t understand storytelling and the value of authors. So that’s what Touch Press set out to do: bring together these three sets of skills in a way that none of the other kinds of companies had managed to do.

A key part of this was to see that the software engineer must be on the same level as the other parties involved in developing the app: ‘You don’t bring an engineer in once you’ve decided what you’re going to do: the engineer is part of the process of deciding what you do.’ The senior management team included an engineer, John Cromie, who joined the team in 2010 to help build The Elements in sixty days and became the CTO; John managed the technical team and was part of all the key decisions about which new projects to take on. Once the management team had decided to embark on a new project, the planning and development of the book-as-app took place in development meetings at which the CTO and some of the programmers were present. There was a large screen on the wall and the engineers around the table plugged in their laptops so they could manipulate images and text on the screen as they talked about what to do. Sample pages were displayed, options were explored, technical limitations were discussed, costs were considered, decisions about what can and cannot be done were taken. This was a creative process in which the technical input of software engineers was factored in as the book was being written, shaping the way that the text was developed and how it was combined with the visual and audio elements of the app.

While Touch Press was strong on technical skills and audio-visual expertise (given Max’s background in television), they were less experienced on the publishing side. None of the principals had a background in book publishing, and, while Theo was a successful author, his knowledge of the publishing process was based on his arm’s-length dealings with a small New York trade house. The publishing perspective was the weakest part of their skill set. Moreover, apart from The Elements, they lacked the kind of intellectual property that an established publisher would have, and lacked the experience of dealing with authors and agents. So it is not surprising that they soon found themselves collaborating with publishers and other creative organizations as a way of developing new projects. Sometimes, publishers came to them; in other cases, Touch Press came up with ideas and sought out organizations with which they could partner. ‘Almost every project we’ve done since The Elements has been in partnership with a carefully selected owner of IP, owner of expertise, often owner of brands with a marketing department’, observed Max; ‘we see partnerships as a 21st-century way of publishing.’ Their partners included traditional publishers, such as Faber, HarperCollins, Egmont, Barefoot Books and the University of Chicago Press; TV production companies, such as Wide-Eyed Entertainment, the team behind the BBC’s Walking with Dinosaurs TV series; classical music organizations, including the Philharmonia – the London-based orchestra – and Deutsche Grammophon; and large media corporations, notably the Walt Disney Animation Studios. In each case, a profit share was worked out that involved dividing the net revenue (after Apple’s 30% commission and sales tax are deducted) between Touch Press as the app developer, the publisher or other partner who typically controlled the IP, the author, and the party (or parties) that invested the capital to produce the app. So, for example, a typical split might be: 50% of net receipts to Touch Press, the partner and the author, and 50% to the investors; and, between Touch Press, the partner and the author, it might be 50% to Touch Press and 50% to the partner and author; or 50% to Touch Press, 30% to the partner and 20% to the author. If Touch Press or the partner put in all or some of the investment capital, then their percentage of the net receipts would be increased proportionately.

Among the publishers, Touch Press’s partnership with Faber proved to be particularly fruitful, leading to a series of books-as-apps that attracted a great deal of attention, starting with Solar System, released in December 2010, followed by T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, released in June 2011, and Shakespeare’s Sonnets, released in June 2012. The Waste Land took Eliot’s iconic poem – the crown jewel of Faber’s list – and brought it to life in ways that are simply not possible in the medium of print, allowing the reader to read it but also to hear the poem being read (in no less than seven readings, two by Eliot himself) and to watch it being read in a remarkable, captivating performance by Fiona Shaw that was filmed specifically for the app. The extensive apparatus of notes that weighed down the printed version of the poem are conveniently relegated to a side panel that can be turned on or off with a simple touch of the screen, while the reader can listen to and watch various individuals, from poets to pop singers, talk about The Waste Land and what it meant to them. The result is that a poem that had existed for ninety years as print on paper was now recast in a new medium, enabling the reader to experience the poem in a unique and unprecedented way, combining the reading of text with listening to and watching the poem being read and discussed. The app was a surprising success: it went to the number one position among worldwide bestselling book apps, and sold around 20,000 units in the first year. It was also a critical success and the reviews were glowing. ‘When I began to use the Waste Land app’, extolled one professor of literature, ‘I immediately understood why so many people were buying it. While it presented the same poem, it presented it in a very different light … . The Waste Land app’s marvelous feat, as I have come to understand it, is to have rescued a vibrant and dynamic poem from a print medium that had entombed and shrouded it, for nearly a century.’⁷

While The Waste Land involved recasting in a digital medium a poem that had previously existed in print, many of the apps produced by Touch Press are digital creations sui generis – that is, they had no previous existence in print but were created specifically for the iPad. Their music apps are good examples of this. The Orchestra, produced in collaboration with the London-based Philharmonia Orchestra and The Music Sales Group, was released in December 2012; it was followed by Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, released in May 2013; The Liszt Sonata in B Minor with Stephen Hough, released in July 2013; and Vivaldi’s Four Seasons with Max Richter, released in May 2014. The first of these apps, The Orchestra, enables you to watch and listen to eight orchestral pieces, composed over a period of 250 years, from Haydn’s Symphony No. 6 and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 to Salonen’s Violin Concerto. The music is reproduced in high fidelity, and the video of the orchestra offers close-up images of individual musicians playing their instruments. You can also choose to watch a ‘beat map’ that represents each musician in the orchestra with a coloured dot that flashes when they are playing, so that you can see how the music correlates with the activity of different sections and instruments. A full or curated score – again, you can choose which you want to see – scrolls across the lower half of the screen as you listen to the music and watch the video or the beat map. The app also provides an encyclopedic guide to the sections and instruments of the orchestra; touch on any one of them and you’re given an account of how the instrument works, narrated by the musician himself or herself, who speaks to you directly and shows you what the instrument can do; touch the instrument and it enlarges and leaps into the foreground, flick it with your finger and it spins 360 degrees, just like the objects in The Elements. Touch the conductor, Esa-Pekka Salonen, and he’ll give you a personal account of the art of conducting. There is text too, including a short, illustrated history of the orchestra and a guide to listening to orchestral music and reading a score, written by LA Times music critic Mark Swed. The Orchestra and its successor apps, with their fluent blending together of music, voice, video, image and text, are works that could only exist in the kind of digital medium offered by an app.

It would be difficult to deny that the apps produced by Touch Press were a creative success. They exploited the new medium of the app to its full, using it to breathe a new kind of life into texts that had previously existed only on the printed page and to create entirely new works in which text is woven together with audio-visual materials to produce a kind of user experience that is simply not possible in the medium of print. Of course, Touch Press were not alone in doing this. There were, and are, many other players in this space, ranging from one or two individuals working from home to much larger organizations, including the large publishing corporations, who have been actively experimenting with apps. But Touch Press stood out as one of the most accomplished of them all. They established a position as a leader in the market of what one could call ‘the premium app’ – that is, the app that was developed as a high-end product, beautifully crafted, making full use of the high resolution and functionality of the iPad. Their apps were regularly selected as App of the Week and Editor’s Choice in the App Store, and they were given rapturous reviews in the press. The Sunday Times devoted the front page of its Culture Section to The Waste Land,⁸ and The Orchestra was described in the Guardian as ‘an instant classic … one of the most impressive bits of app-ology I’ve ever seen.’⁹ Few app developers have enjoyed such consistently laudatory critical acclaim.

There can be little doubt that Touch Press was producing apps of the highest quality, but had they built a creative organization that was sustainable in the medium to long term? That was a question that preoccupied everyone at Touch Press too: they wanted to know more than anyone whether they had a viable business because their livelihoods depended on it. Some of their apps had been not just critical successes but commercial successes too – The Elements, of course, but also Solar System, The Waste Land, The Orchestra and others. They had earned back their costs and become profitable titles. But for every successful app of this kind, there were others that flopped – sometimes dismally so, selling 1,000 copies or less. Given the time and expense that goes into developing a premium app of this kind, that is a serious loss for a small business. To make this work, you need to be able to count on a regular flow of successful apps. You can take risks on some projects, but you have to be able to count on others to deliver high enough sales to cover their costs and be sufficiently profitable to keep the business going. Could it be done?

In 2012, Touch Press had reached a point where they needed to answer this question – not least because their investment capital was drying up and they needed to know if they had a viable business. Apart from the initial half a million dollars they had raised in 2010 to get the company off the ground, they had secured another £2 million of investment capital which had kept them going and enabled them to build the business, but by late 2012 their funds were running low. They were fortunate that, at just this time, a terrific opportunity came their way that would enable them to test their business model: some senior figures at Disney had seen The Waste Land and been impressed by it, and they approached Touch Press to see if they would be interested in partnering with them to do an app on the history of animation. It was a great project in itself: what could be more amenable to the medium of the app than a richly illustrated account of the history of animation? And who could be a better partner in a project of this kind than Disney, with their pivotal role in the history of animation and their incomparably rich archive of iconic characters and copyrighted material dating back to the 1920s? If you were setting out to find a partner for a book-as-app on the history of animation, Disney would be top of your list – and now they were saving you the trouble since they were knocking at your door. Moreover, with Disney’s powerful marketing machine behind you, this app would have everything going for it. If you couldn’t make this app work in financial terms, then what would your chances be with others?

Touch Press worked out a deal with Walt Disney Animation Studios in autumn 2012 and began working on the app in earnest in December, though much of the preparatory work had been done before then. A substantial part of Touch Press’s staff was assigned to this app – about ten people in total from the Press’s side, plus those on Disney’s side who also contributed to the project – and it required a good eight months of intensive work. The budget was substantial – around £400,000. Theo took on the role of author, and he wrote the text as the app was being developed. The app recounts the history of animation at Disney in a way that is thematically structured, with chapters or sections covering plot, character, the art of animation, visual effects, sound, etc. The text is interwoven throughout with a rich array of visual material that comes to life at the touch of a finger – the interweaving of text and image is so integral to the design that when you touch on a character to bring it to life, the text itself breaks up and reforms on the page to make way for the character, which now assumes centre stage. There are clips from Disney cartoons, starting with ‘Steamboat Willie’, the first Mickey Mouse cartoon that was released in 1928, and from all of the great Disney animated films – Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Bambi, The Lion King, Winnie the Pooh, Frozen, etc. Interactive tools are used to explain the principles of animation and enable younger users to have a go at producing simple animation effects, like adding and removing layers and creating movements. The app was released on 8 August 2013 at $13.99 and was immediately selected by Apple as Editor’s Choice, which ensured that it was featured on the front page of the App Store.

The release of the app was timed to coincide with the D23 Expo, the biennial exposition of the official Disney fan club which took place in Anaheim, California, on 9–11 August. This helped to give the app visibility in the community of Disney fans and contributed to a steep spike of sales during the first couple of weeks after its release. Sales then followed the normal pattern of app sales, falling off quite quickly and ticking over at modest levels – until, that is, Disney Animated was selected by Apple as iPad App of the Year for 2013. When this was announced on 16 December, it was followed by another steep spike in sales that lasted until the end of December, during which they sold another 20,000 or so. In January, Disney Animated won yet another accolade: it was named Best App in the Academic/Reference category of the 2014 Digital Book Awards, prizes that are handed out annually as part of the Digital Book World conference. It also won a Children’s BAFTA in the Interactive: Adapted category, and the Best Adult Digital Book in the Bookseller’s FutureBook Innovation Awards. In terms of critical recognition and awards, Disney Animated could hardly have achieved more: this is about as close as you can get to a clean sweep in the world of the book-as-app.

And yet, despite all this, Disney Animated was not an unqualified success in commercial terms. Given the costs involved in developing the app, the number of staff that was involved over a period of more than eight months, the extra effort and expense that was put into marketing, and the distribution of revenues between the partners, Touch Press needed to sell 100,000 copies to recoup their costs, and needed to sell considerably more than this – 300,000, maybe even 500,000 – to make a real financial contribution to the company. The app did well, but not as well as it needed to do to demonstrate that the business of developing premium apps of this kind is viable and sustainable in the medium to long term. ‘Disney Animated was a critical litmus test for us because it was a beautifully produced app into which we poured our soul, people worked nights and weekends and we couldn’t have made it better. It’s also on a popular subject that has deep roots in popular culture – the history of animated film is a subject that should interest lots of people. And, by God, it had Disney behind it – a bigger marketing machine it would be hard to find. And yet it ended up selling 70,000 units in the first five or six months. What this tells us is that our business model doesn’t work’, reflected Max. ‘We built this company and secured investment on the assumption that we could repeat The Elements. You make a beautiful title, very difficult to make, you sell large numbers and that’s a profitable, exciting business. You rinse and repeat, you scale up and you have a company that’s worth a lot. No.’ The sense of disappointment, conveyed by the hard reality of the ‘No’, was palpable. Max and his colleagues had spent four years embarked on an ambitious project committed to the invention of a new kind of digital book, building a team of around thirty talented staff who were able to exploit to the full the new media of the app and the iPad, and now they were faced with the stark realization that it could all be in vain. Nice idea, but it just doesn’t work.

Why not? ‘It’s partly because the ground has been moving under our feet as we’ve been working’, explained Max. ‘When The Elements came out, it was one of the very few games in town. And if you really wanted to see what your iPad could do, that’s what you got. Now there are over a million apps in the App Store and most of them are free.’ The number of apps was increasing and the average price was getting lower over time. The numbers bear him out. In January 2015, Apple reported that there were more than 1.4 million apps available in the App Store, and more than 725,000 of these were made for the iPad. Around 40,000–50,000 new apps were being added every month. Most analyses show that the vast majority of apps in the App Store – over two-thirds – are free. Many free apps contain In-App Advertising and offer In-App Purchases of various kinds – what’s commonly referred to as the ‘freemium’ model – but they are free at the point of download. After free apps, the most common price point is the cheapest one, 99¢ – they account for just under 50% of all paid apps. Apps priced at $1.99 are the next most popular tranche, and they comprise nearly 20% of all paid apps. Apps priced at $1.99 or less account for 89% of all apps available in the App Store, and they account for 66% – two-thirds – of all paid apps.¹⁰ From the consumer’s point of view, buying an app is a risk: if you pay $10 for an app and don’t like it, in all likelihood that’s $10 down the drain. ‘Because of that’, explained one app developer, ‘apps tend to be either lower priced and you try to sell more units or tend to be free and use In-App Purchase as the way to get money from people.’

For publishers like Touch Press, these developments posed two big problems. First is the problem of visibility – or ‘discoverability’, to use the term that is often used in publishing circles. How do you get your apps noticed in a world where there is only one store which is filled with over a million apps, and to which 40,000–50,000 new apps are being added every month? Book publishers often complain about how the dwindling number of bricks-and-mortar bookstores, with the loss of shop windows, display tables and front-of-store browsing space, is making it harder and harder for their books to get discovered, but compared to the challenges facing app developers, the retail environment of book publishers looks like an embarrassment of riches. App developers are launching their app in a world where there is only one store with only one storefront controlled by one player that selects and features a few apps each week entirely at its discretion, and tens of thousands of new apps are being added every month to this store which already holds over a million apps. You have to hope and pray that your app will get featured in that storefront and, better still, get selected as Editor’s Choice because without that, you’re screwed – a tiny speck lost in an ocean of content. Sure, there are some places where you can get reviews of a new app that will help to get it noticed, but these are nowhere near as numerous and varied as the review spaces still available to book publishers. And then there’s the problem of price: with two-thirds of all apps downloadable for free, and nearly 90 per cent of all apps priced at $1.99 or less, how do you persuade consumers to spend $13.99 on one app? In a world where information goods are increasingly free or very cheap, how do you overcome the risk factor and get consumers to pay for quality?

These two problems – visibility (or rather invisibility) and price (or rather the downward pressure on price) – worked against a publisher like Touch Press, which positioned itself at the quality end of the app marketplace. Touch Press was committed to developing premium apps, which require a great deal of time, expertise and expense to produce – in the case of Disney Animated, around ten people worked on this app pretty much full-time over a period of eight months, with a development budget of £400,000. They had to be able to sell this app in a quantity that numbered in the hundreds of thousands, and at a price that was well above the very low prices at which most apps are sold. They had everything going for them on this occasion, and they simply couldn’t generate enough revenue to cover their costs and provide the additional funds you need to make a business work: ‘We tested the model exquisitely well and it doesn’t work.’

So where could they go from here? What were their options? One was to scale back, let some staff go, produce apps of much lower quality, charge a lot less for them and hope you can make the business work on a smaller budget. But to Max and Theo, that felt like an admission of failure. They started this business in the belief that they could create something genuinely new, help to invent a new kind of publishing and a new kind of book – the book-as-app – that would bring important works to life on a digital device as a rich audio, visual and textual experience. To scale back now would almost certainly mean that their ability to produce apps of this kind and quality would be seriously compromised. They might be able to make small savings here and there and produce their apps for less – maybe 10 or 20 per cent less – but they couldn’t cut more than that and still produce apps of the kind of quality that was their trademark. Producing cheap apps that got the job done but had no real aesthetic value was not the kind of business they wanted to be in. They would also risk losing their best staff, who may not want to stay at a company that was downsizing and couldn’t afford to pay top rates.

Another option was to try to re-orient the business – to ‘pivot’, as they say in the world of start-ups. They could move more into agency work, for example, selling services to other businesses rather than, or in addition to, developing apps for individual consumers. They’d developed a set of technical skills that could be used to develop apps for companies and other organizations that were seeking to promote a product or build their brand. This had the potential to generate significant revenue and produce good margins, provided that your negotiating position was strong enough to enable you to charge a fee based on a substantial mark-up of 50 per cent or more from your actual costs. They could build on the reputation they’d established as a high-end app developer – ‘cash in’ their accumulated symbolic capital – to try to turn the company into a profitable business. The potential gains would be financial: it might enable them to generate sufficient revenue at a sufficient margin to turn the organization into a profitable business. The downside would be the loss of creative control. ‘I know that once you take on one of those commissions you find that you have absolutely no freedom of choice but to deliver the project to the highest possible quality on time, and you have to put your best people on to it to do that’, reflected Max. ‘And ultimately, if the client wants something, that’s what the client gets. So there’s much less room to do the new, totally different kind of work that we’ve tried to do. I just couldn’t see something like The Waste Land ever coming out of that kind of work.’

In the course of 2014, it became increasingly clear that the company would need to do something. They couldn’t continue to produce these big, beautiful apps, put their heart and soul into them, and hope for success: they would simply run out of cash. The Board brought in a new CEO who had a background in business development, and her remit was to cut the losses and make the business profitable. The company moved premises to a stylish suite of offices in central London, subtly altered its name from Touch Press to touchpress and tried to build up the agency side of the business. Relations between the principals of the old Touch Press and the new management cooled, Max stepped down from the Board and he and Theo began to put their energies into other things. The agency business didn’t pan out for the rebranded touchpress, and by early 2016 the company was in serious trouble. The new CEO was fired and the company sold its portfolio of science and literature apps to a new, venture capital-backed publisher in the educational content market, Touch Press Inc., that was formed through the collaboration of the Irish digital publisher StoryToys and the educational games specialist Amplify Games. Rebranded as Amphio, it was announced that the new venture would focus on developing interactive tools and content for educational and cultural institutions. The bold attempt to create a new kind of publishing by building beautiful apps for the general consumer that made full use of the technical possibilities opened up by the iPad was effectively at an end.

For Max and Theo, the two creative driving forces behind Touch Press, it was a disappointing realization. They’d set out six years earlier with the aim of creating a completely new kind of ebook, a book-as-app that worked in ways that were completely different from the printed book and that engaged the reader/user in a rich, multi-layered, multimedia experience, and with the aim of building a business that would enable them to sustain this creative activity. They succeeded in the former but not in the latter. ‘I think we’ve shown that the medium is capable of creating a really strong engagement between the subject and the reader’, reflected Max; ‘I think we’ve shown that the material has a way of inspiring somebody who has an interest in a subject and giving them the best possible way of exploring it.’ But he had to accept that the model didn’t work in the end. There was a brief moment in the two to three years after the iPad had been introduced when it was possible to produce a beautiful app and get people to pay $10 or $15 for it, and you could build a publishing venture around it. But that moment is now over. ‘It was a brief moment that opened and closed and I’m delighted it happened because it allowed us to take some steps forward in the long-term development of interactive media. But as a business venture it just didn’t work.’¹¹