Has Apple Defined a New Medium, Again?

Apple announced new tools to cre­ate and view iBooks on the iPad, and a new dis­tri­b­u­tion chan­nel for dig­i­tal text­books. In doing so Apple ignited a firestorm of debate on the sub­ject of dig­i­tal books, and the future of the pub­lish­ing indus­try, book dis­tri­b­u­tion, and likely con­sumer con­sump­tion pat­terns. More impor­tantly, they set the stage for what we will some­day rec­og­nize as a new medium, a new form of con­tent in its own right.

And mean­while Apple is doing so at a time when the pub­lish­ing indus­try is at risk, with out­moded busi­ness mod­els, under attack on mul­ti­ple fronts.

More Than Just Textbooks

Apple posi­tioned their Jan­u­ary 19 announce­ment as an edu­ca­tion event, with the aim of rev­o­lu­tion­iz­ing the text­book pub­lish­ing indus­try. Accord­ing to the Wall Street Jour­nal, only 6% of text­books are deliv­ered today in dig­i­tal form, fore­casted to reach 50% by 2020. That’s a big tar­get in its own right, but I’d guess Apple’s unspo­ken aspi­ra­tions are even broader…

Well beyond what we think of as “books”

Years from now, we’ll look back at this moment and real­ize that Apple lit a fire, fuel­ing a new medium, one still to be named.

What Apple has in mind is not just a book or a text­book ren­dered dig­i­tally on an iPad. Their vision for this new type of con­tent goes well beyond dig­i­tal books, enhanced ebooks, or what­ever labels we use today.

Their vision mashes up ele­ments of movies, games, ani­ma­tions and dynamic mod­els, inter­ac­tiv­ity,  hyper­link­ing and non­lin­ear nav­i­ga­tion — key enhance­ments to the core ele­ments of sto­ry­telling, nar­ra­tive flow, design, lay­out, etc. Here are some of the core ele­ments that will drive our under­stand­ing of this new medium, as I see it.

— Source, Chris­tine Thomp­son, Inform­ing Arts ©2012

Text­books First, But Not Last

I sus­pect Apple chose the text­book as the ini­tial tar­get for rein­ven­tion because the lim­i­ta­tions of a print-based medium for multi-dimensional, com­plex or time-sensitive sub­jects are so well under­stood. Apple’s long expe­ri­ence at sell­ing to and sup­port­ing edu­ca­tional insti­tu­tions affords the com­pany unique insights into what works, and what’s bro­ken, when it comes to 21st cen­tury education.

The text­book pub­lish­ing indus­try is huge, and can help finance the tri­als that will even­tu­ally shape the win­ning char­ac­ter­is­tics of this new emerg­ing medium. In North Amer­ica alone the tra­di­tional text­book pub­lish­ing indus­try gen­er­ates $12–14 bil­lion annu­ally, accord­ing to one expert (for a more con­ser­v­a­tive assump­tion: > $4 bil­lion in 2011 text­book sales, accord­ing to the WSJ today; $8 bil­lion in 2010 accord­ing to For­rester. Clearly no one agrees on the def­i­n­i­tion of the indus­try, but it’s huge.)

From Apple’s per­spec­tive (as a mas­ter of dis­rup­tive inno­va­tions), the edu­ca­tional pub­lish­ing indus­try must be a sit­ting duck, ripe for transformation.

““We are edu­cat­ing peo­ple today in the same way as we did when there was 1% as much knowledge.”

– Danny Hillis, The Econ­o­mist, March 22, 2001

That said Apple is will­ing to be a part­ner, not just a dis­rupter. Apple announced that it plans to part­ner with edu­ca­tors and pub­lish­ers (reported by the Wall Street Jour­nal today). When this part­ner­ship is pro­duc­tive, those who embrace change and can envi­sion a new medium should profit enormously.

This New Medium Requires New Tal­ents & Specialties

What will emerge is a new form of multi-faceted con­tent. This new medium will require con­tri­bu­tions from many spe­cial­ties, such as:

• Pho­tog­ra­phers, video­g­ra­phers, musi­cians, producers
• Design­ers, illus­tra­tors, animators
• Art/creative direc­tors for the ensem­ble as a whole
• Game devel­op­ers — peo­ple who know how to incor­po­rate game mechan­ics (“gam­i­fi­ca­tion”) within designed experiences
• User expe­ri­ence and inter­ac­tion designers
• Usabil­ity testers
• Web devel­op­ers and pro­duc­ers (HTML5 and CSS3 experts), scripters and coders
• Infor­ma­tion archi­tects, tax­on­omy and tag­ging specialists

And of course, the usual:

• Writ­ers and copy­writ­ers (as well as trans­la­tors for books with global appeal)
• Edi­tors
• Fact check­ers
• Tal­ent spot­ters (acqui­si­tion experts)

On the strate­gic level this new medium will require vision­ar­ies, risk tak­ing pio­neers, game chang­ers and oth­ers whose per­son­al­i­ties are prob­a­bly abhor­rent to the tra­di­tional pub­lish­ing world.

Not to men­tion new mod­els for brand build­ing, social media inter­ac­tions with con­sumers, and new forms of mar­ket­ing. But that’s a whole dif­fer­ent sub­ject in its own right.

[Dis­clo­sure: I played a key role in Apple’s early days of dig­i­tal pub­lish­ing, but have had no involve­ment in their cur­rent activ­i­ties. The opin­ions described here are my own, based on inter­pre­ta­tions of what I’ve read and heard over the Web.]

Tagged as: content strategy, digital publishing, digital textbooks, enhanced ebooks