10 Membranes

» Inkling - Flipboard for TextBooks

Have just been checking out Inkling, a new start up that provides an interactive, web native sort of platform type thing for textbooks and other learning materials. I’m still not quite sure how it works and how the model will work but the web site and the execution are slick, the idea good and in general I can see this working. Blio will need to think about producing an app. 

My main thought was - already? The speed of change is actually accelerating. I had anticipated that this kind of content would only really start to be seen about a year after the iPad launched. Yet within six months we are seeing hefty amounts, and on the grapevine I keep hearing about yet more in the wings, not to mention the huge announcement from the iBookstore dev team that it can now handle multimedia elements within ebooks. Piled on top of that is Penguin’s chart success with Spot and suddenly the landscape of digital publishing is looking ferociously competitive, an “innovation” fest working on hyperspeed to launch new products each more webby than the last. 

This makes it harder to have impact. Safe to say the days of a quick app and a cheeky press release and hey presto, a publicity win, are over. It also raises the stakes. We may hit some kind of design/feature set arms race where publishers out do each other to produce the coolest enhanced ebooks. We could then see fatigue for this kind of thing among consumers.

The question(s) for me: which functionality/features do readers really want in the long term gimickry aside? What will be seen as standard? And to what extent does convergence of media create convergence of companies? Will media companies that are today horizontally organised actually be able to transition this into verticality to produce new cross and trans media workflows? The trouble is, there is no time to think, only time for everyone to keep up.