Digital Magazines and Books need to Evolve!

This was a week for some great ideas to emerge on how tablet platforms and digital readers need to evolve in terms of functionality, features, user experience, social media integration.

Now that the iPad has been on the market for some time and a slew of other tablets are about to drop, usage and behavior patterns are starting to emerge, and ideas on extending tablet functionality are becoming more concrete.

Here at Polymash we have been humbly completing work on extending tablet magazine reader functionality for the information product and educational market, adding plug-in features such as in magazine notepads and social media integration for Apple and Android platforms.

But for a more comprehensive and compelling glimpse at future possibilities, I’d invite you to check out this video from IDEO entitled The Future of the Book

My favorite concepts here:

• The idea that interactivity needs to extend to participatory and community based discussions about the material being read. (Ideo calls this “Nelson”)
• The idea to link to book clubs, reading lists and recommendation engines (Copeland)
• Ideo also proposes a concept (Alice), which allows for co-creating the story, affecting the plot, interacting with characters and so on, and while I love the idea I do see it more in the realm off app and game development.

However long term the creation of truly interactive content will blur the line between app development and content creation…

Frankfurt Book Fair

Also this week the Frankfurt Book Fair took place, and following twitter feeds and blog entries it was apparent that there was much tablet talk and discussion. I’d like to share Joe Wikert’s presentation he gave “My eContent Wish List–Frankfurt TOC 2010” as posted on slideshare, which mirrors some of VIMEO’s vision in a perhaps more pragmatic way:

Having worked with, and around, the limitations of today’s tablet reader technology, the critical element to me is to create platform independent APIs that allow developers to directly access and interface to the publications content

My favorites:

• Platform independent readers, with platform independent APIs
• Better Social Media integration, for example tweeting from within and article or story
• The ability to highlight and annotate content, and then be able to share, archive, collect and search these annotations across publications

There are some great ideas in these presentations, and I hope publishing houses and tool makers in the tablet industry are listening and adjusting to the market needs being formulated.

Samsung and WoodWing announce cooperation for GALAXY Tab

The first results of the cooperation will be demonstrated to the public during the IFRA Expo in Hamburg, Germany, held on October 4 – 6, 2010.

Samsung, a global leader in mobile technology, and WoodWing Software, a supplier of innovative cross-media publishing solutions, today announced a cooperation to bring digital publications to Samsung’s brand-new smart media device, the GALAXY Tab.

GALAXY Tab
Available to consumers in Europe starting in October 2010, and soon available in the United States and Asia, the GALAXY Tab has a large 7-inch TFT display, for an exciting mobile viewing experience. Weighing in at only 380g, it includes 16GB or 32GB of internal storage and 32GB microSD expansion. The GALAXY Tab features a TouchWiz 3.0 user interface, WiFi, GPS, rear- and front-facing cameras and also acts as a mobile phone. In addition, as an Android powered device, the GALAXY Tab provides access to numerous applications from Android Market.

via woodwing.com

Things are speeding up in the tablet publishing space, as expected.

Tools like Woodwing will become increasingly important, because they can support authoring content once and then distributing it across multiple tablet devices with multiple operating systems.

I believe the same will be true for content support agencies and service providers that can help clients navigate publishing to many app market places.

For a full description of Woodwing’s approach click through to the president release.

Who’s That Texting Your Kids in Class 66% of the Time? Parents.

With more than 42% of teens admitting to bringing a cell phone or iPod Touch to class, isn’t it time schools start cracking down? And if technology is to become more a part of education, how will teachers ever track students who are already able to pull off using these devices when they’re not supposed to? As more and more gadgets enter the classroom, won’t it just make it easier to find distractions?

via fastcompany.com

The point to me really is that if you are loosing your audience to mobile devices, you better figure out a way to engage them on their platform of choice.

For example, wouldn’t it be great if teachers could issue a pop quiz to all the phones surrepticiously under their student’s desks?

Or, I liked the example of Houghton Mifflin, the world’s largest provider of educational materials for K-12, who today launched its first full-curriculum algebra app for the iPad.