Platform agnostic developers will help redefine print and literacy

By Wesley Fryer On October 9, 2010 · Tagged With: apple, develop, developer, esquire, ios, mashable, mobile · Add Comment

Great quotation from yesterday’s Mashable article, “The Reinvention of Print, One App at a Time.”

The final advantage is that because the app is built on an HTML5 base, the process of taking the app from the iPad to another platform is going to be less complicated. Portability and platform agnosticism is going to become increasingly important to publishers as more and more devices enter the market that are capable of displaying interactive media.

Great videos in the article too, like this interview with Josh Koppel, one of the co-founders of ScrollMotion which has published over 11,000 apps on the Apple iTunes App Store to date. That’s right, no misprint here: Eleven Thousand! This is a video demo of the new iOS app for Esquire magazine. (iOS App link)

This point is well made too: Publishers switching to digital forms need to think about additive transformation, not just digital replication:

However, as we’ve seen with music and home video sales, for these repackage attempts to be successful, the experience of the new media needs to be additive, not reductive. Whereas a consumer might replace a VHS collection with DVD or Blu-ray discs, you aren’t going to see the same level of mass repurchases with digital-only content, in large part because the digital downloads offer convenience, but rarely any other additive features.

Thus, it isn’t outlandish to predict that the most successful publishers will be those that create better and more enhanced experiences with the new digital product, rather than just exporting an InDesign file out as an ePub or a PDF. The experience needs to be better.

Check out the entire article:
http://mashable.com/2010/10/08/scrollmotion-profile/

– Posted using BlogPress from my iPad (except this embedded YouTube video, which I frustratingly couldn’t copy the URL or embed code to from the Mashable article on my iPad.)

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