NYPL Biblion: a "truly innovative application' about the 1939-1940 World's Fair from the New York Public Library

Because TNM has an international audience, this post from Pedro Monteiro, publisher of the new website Digital Distribution, first appeared online very early this morning, US time. It has been "bumped" to the top for the convenience of readers in the Western Hemisphere.

Every now and then, the app store can deliver some really nice surprises. These past weeks, I've been thrilled to find a lot of these surprises. We've seen and played with some new applications that finally bring a new "look" to what magazines and newspaper should really be on the iPad: I'm thinking about Al Gore's book Our Choice, or Above & Beyond: George Steinmetz, and just a couple of days ago we saw Letter to Jane: Moral Tales with its very fresh and experimental interface, navigation and content.

But today, I was mesmerized with NYPL Biblion: World's Fair. Who would have thought, just a couple of months ago, that a great out-of-the-box layout, one that sets such a interesting example of UI for magazines around our tablets, would be designed for a library?

Yet, here it is, in all it's glory and novelty, the New York Public Library application Biblion. And what a sight it is! This publication (a first of more to come, we are told) bares the title "The World of Tomorow: Exploring the 1939-40 World's Fair Collection" and delivers a huge amount of content, from historical pictures, to essay's about the fair and its innovations.

But it is the interface that I want to talk about, so let's get to it.

Right at the beginning, the Table of Contents - if you can call it that - is presented in a very visually powerful way. You get a great taste of the amount of content you'll be able to explore and its navigation, even if different, is natural and needs no instructions. Tap the introduction "stack" and you'll see a cover for the issue (if it is the first time you choose the stack) and there's a very clever idea to start: you get cover titles on the left and right side of the cover.

On the left side, titles for previously read articles;on the right side, titltes for articles you might want to check out, from the ones not yet read. Publishers and developers out there, please copy this and understand the thinking behind this kind of UI solutions.

The articles view is just beautiful, taking full advantage of the iPad's functions and physicality: on horizontal view, you get text and pictures separated. Reading navigation is done horizontally also, swiping through the pages in a cadence of pictures and text. Rotate your iPad to vertical mode and you get the Book View. Set for the reading experience, I just love the way pictures grow from their stack in acordande with the text you're reading. To add even more enjoyment to a design and UI freak like me, the NYPL application teaches another lesson with yellow marked, on the side to be pulled, related content to the one you're reading. The cherry on top of the cake has to be the left thumbnail of the article content. Such a nice way to visualize the full article. I expect this kind of approach to be copied all over very soon.

Talk about this visual hints of the articles, back on horizontal mode you can choose to see all of the section's articles in that way, a very nice way to understand fast what kind of content is on each article.

This is truly a innovative application – you'll just have to download it for free yourself from the app store. If you are as impressed as I am, then you should go to the Settings popup menu where can donate to the library. Go ahead, these guys really deserve it!

One last word for the developers of the app, the interaction design and technology firm Potion: well done guys, the kind of thinking that has gotten into the making of this application is amazing and should be a huge inspiration for everyone in the news business that is (or will be) publishing on the iPad. I will try to talk with the Potion guys about Biblion (if you are reading this, I'm the one asking for an email interview) and if I'm successful, I'll post it on my own blog.

– Pedro Monteiro

Two new media apps look at news and events in the state of Texas: The Texas Observer, The Statesman for iPad

As far as I know, the state of Texas has not seceded from the United States, though the day is still young. The state has just passed a bill requiring women to view sonograms of the embryo or fetus and hear a lecture on its development before being allowed to proceed to have an abortion – very subtle, huh?

My sister lives in Texas, 'nuf said.

So it was with trepidation that I approached these two new media apps from the great state of Texas. One app is from The Texas Democracy Foundation for its magazine The Texas Observer, the other is from Cox Media for its daily newspaper The Austin Statesman.

Neither app breaks new ground, though both are usable and will be welcomed by loyal readers. Both apps are free to download but only the app for The Texas Observer charges for content.

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The Texas Observer is strictly a replica editions app, offering those who download the app one free issue, the April 8th edition, while charging for older issues. Because of this, the iPad app is already six issues behind the print editions.

The app contains a direct link to the TexasObserver.org website, as well as a donate button. I wonder if the donate button caused a hiccup in the app approval process, creating the issue delay problem.

The Texas Observer writes about issues ignored or underreported in the mainstream press. Our goal is to cover stories crucial to the public interest and to provoke dialogue that promotes democratic participation and open government, in pursuit of a vision of Texas where education, justice and material progress are available to all.

– from the app description.

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The Austin American-Statesman is the daily newspaper for the state's capital city, with a circulation of a bit over 173,000 daily, around 215,000 on Sunday.

The Cox Media app for its Austin property, The Statesman for iPad, is also a free download. For now, the app allows readers free access to the app's content. But the app description hints that this won't be the case forever.

Note: The Statesman for iPad app is free to download and during this introductory trial period, there is no charge for access to the full content.

The app is RSS feed driven and contains a refresh button that allows you to update the copy.

The news app allows for both portrait and landscape use, with the font page's ad switching from a button-styled ad in landscape, to a banner along the bottom of the page when in portrait. Currently the advertiser there is Dillard's, a major department store.

When the user taps a story it takes you to an article layout that contains a banner ad along the bottom in both orientations. In landscape the section navigation stays in place, but in portrait it is hidden behind a toggle switch.

The app is serviceable, though I wonder if it is a good replacement for the print edition. But since Austin is both a college town and the center of much of the tech community in Texas I would think that iPad ownership would be fairly high, so getting this right will be important for Cox Media. This app is at least a start.

The Red Bulletin launches first iPad app; the magazine is in a unique position - it has marketing dollars behind it

For a magazine designed to promote a product, Red Bull, the Red Bulletin is showing quite healthy growth. Now claiming a circulation of 4.6 million for its various editions, the magazine has just released its first tablet edition and it is very well done, indeed.

The Red Bulletin is a free iPad app download that gives readers free access to both English and German language editions.

But what makes this magazine really unique is that its creator, Red Bull Media House, is actually spending money to promote it. Just this week, the company inserted copies of the US print edition into AdAge issues. I assume that cost a fortune as the magazine is a typical European A4 sized publication at 100 pages.

According to the promotional flyer that accompanied the print magazine, 1.2 million copies of the magazine are distributed in the US using newsstands. events, mail and as a Sunday supplement in the The Los Angeles Times, The Miami Herald, The New York Daily News, The Houston Chronicle and The Chicago Tribune. These five daily newspapers have a combined circulation of well over the 1.2 million mentioned in the flyer, so I have no idea how they determine how many to insert into each paper, and how many each paper gets.

The flyer gives a clue, I guess: the magazine is designed to reach s 15 to 34 year old demographic, presumably the target market for the Red Bull energy drink.

"The idea for The Red Bulletin was conceived at 2:30 in the morning in a mountain hut in the Austrian Alps near Salzberg," Red Bull CEO Dietrich Mateschitz states in the introductory column of the issue.

"It attempts to convey that spark of excitement that rushes through the unique people who manage to transform their crazy ideas into reality, thanks to the energy in their bodies and minds."

(Sounds like Base Commander Jack D. Ripper should have been drinking Red Bull to avoid 'loss of essence'.)

The tablet edition and the print edition share their main features, but of course treat them very differently. The cover feature on two-time Cy Young Award winning pitcher Tim Lincecum of the San Francisco Giants is a good example.



The print edition has a series of photographs of his pitching motion that appears to have been taken directly from the video that was shot for the iPad edition. The layouts are fairly traditional print layouts with an emphasis on photography. The tablet edition concentrates on the video content which can be seen in landscape mode (the portrait layouts tell you to switch the orientation of your tablet).

The video content and the app's animation is extremely well done here. The user interface is fairly standard tablet magazine design, but the transitions are excellent.

The tablet edition does not try and duplicate the front part of the print magazine which contains lots of little news stories. Instead it just moves right into the features. Clearly this first tablet edition was conceived at the same time of the print edition, improving both.

And there, I suppose, is the big lesson to be learned here: if you are going to create a tablet edition it should not be produced after the print edition has been put to bed, but should be part of the original work – this will greatly improve both products as The Red Bulletin clearly demonstrates.

Update: Bloomberg yesterday afternoon posted a mega-profile of Red Bull's CEO Dietrich Mateschitz and mentions the company's media efforts – worth a read.

Morning Brief: Rapture could slow down tablet sales; Google shuts down newspaper archiving project

They'll be partying it up in Fayetteville, North Carolina tomorrow as Harold Camping, an 89-year-old pastor, holds what he describes as "the best damned party in NC."

Camping, you see, as once again predicted the end of times, or more accurately, the rapture. Camping and his followers expect that on Saturday they will be swept up into heaven, and that tomorrow begins the destruction of the world (with all non-believers dead by the fall).

If true, the event may have a significant impact on the plans of developers currently working on new tablet projects. Unfortunately, Camping is silent concerning the whole iOS versus Android debate. Will iOS developers be saved, or will it be the Android folk who rise to heaven.

"On the first day of the Day of Judgment (May 21, 2011) they will be caught up (raptured) into Heaven because God had great mercy for them," the BBC quotes paster Camping. To me this seems a little vague, better launch for both platforms.

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It was a great idea, digitize thousands of newspapers for posterity. But Google has called a halt to its plans to scan millions of pages of print newspapers, telling Search Engine Land's Matt McGee that Google doesn't plan to introduce any further features or functionality to the Google News Archives and we are no longer accepting new microfilm or digital files for processing."

No word as to whether this all has something to do with the first story above.

NYPL Biblion: a "truly innovative application' about the 1939-1940 World's Fair from the New York Public Library

Pedro Monteiro, publisher of the new website Digital Distribution, and a contributor to TNM, looks at the new iPad app from the New York Public Library.

Every now and then, the app store can deliver some really nice surprises. These past weeks, I've been thrilled to find a lot of these surprises. We've seen and played with some new applications that finally bring a new "look" to what magazines and newspaper should really be on the iPad: I'm thinking about Al Gore's book Our Choice, or Above & Beyond: George Steinmetz, and just a couple of days ago we saw Letter to Jane: Moral Tales with its very fresh and experimental interface, navigation and content.

But today, I was mesmerized with NYPL Biblion: World's Fair. Who would have thought, just a couple of months ago, that a great out-of-the-box layout, one that sets such a interesting example of UI for magazines around our tablets, would be designed for a library?

Yet, here it is, in all it's glory and novelty, the New York Public Library application Biblion. And what a sight it is! This publication (a first of more to come, we are told) bares the title "The World of Tomorow: Exploring the 1939-40 World's Fair Collection" and delivers a huge amount of content, from historical pictures, to essay's about the fair and its innovations.

But it is the interface that I want to talk about, so let's get to it.

Right at the beginning, the Table of Contents - if you can call it that - is presented in a very visually powerful way. You get a great taste of the amount of content you'll be able to explore and its navigation, even if different, is natural and needs no instructions. Tap the introduction "stack" and you'll see a cover for the issue (if it is the first time you choose the stack) and there's a very clever idea to start: you get cover titles on the left and right side of the cover.

On the left side, titles for previously read articles;on the right side, titltes for articles you might want to check out, from the ones not yet read. Publishers and developers out there, please copy this and understand the thinking behind this kind of UI solutions.

The articles view is just beautiful, taking full advantage of the iPad's functions and physicality: on horizontal view, you get text and pictures separated. Reading navigation is done horizontally also, swiping through the pages in a cadence of pictures and text. Rotate your iPad to vertical mode and you get the Book View. Set for the reading experience, I just love the way pictures grow from their stack in acordande with the text you're reading. To add even more enjoyment to a design and UI freak like me, the NYPL application teaches another lesson with yellow marked, on the side to be pulled, related content to the one you're reading. The cherry on top of the cake has to be the left thumbnail of the article content. Such a nice way to visualize the full article. I expect this kind of approach to be copied all over very soon.

Talk about this visual hints of the articles, back on horizontal mode you can choose to see all of the section's articles in that way, a very nice way to understand fast what kind of content is on each article.

This is truly a innovative application – you'll just have to download it for free yourself from the app store. If you are as impressed as I am, then you should go to the Settings popup menu where can donate to the library. Go ahead, these guys really deserve it!

One last word for the developers of the app, the interaction design and technology firm Potion: well done guys, the kind of thinking that has gotten into the making of this application is amazing and should be a huge inspiration for everyone in the news business that is (or will be) publishing on the iPad. I will try to talk with the Potion guys about Biblion (if you are reading this, I'm the one asking for an email interview) and if I'm successful, I'll post it on my own blog.

– Pedro Monteiro

The publisher's dilemma concerning tablet editions: 'You're selling ice, and I have a refrigerator'

I received a call the other day from the local newspaper, one that, frankly, I have not subscribed to in quite a very long time. I was very nice to the telemarketer, after all, I've employed telemarketing firms in order to sell subscriptions or renew B2B trade magazine readers.

I let the salesperson finish their pitch and then gently said "you're selling ice, and I have a refrigerator."

There was silence on the other end of the phone for a second and then I continued: "I do most of my reading of the news on my computer, but if I want to spend time reading a paper, I pick up my iPad. You guys are selling a product that may still be good, but I'm not reading newspapers that way anymore."

There was silence again. Then the salesperson said "yep, me, too," and he was on to the next call.