Could the iPhone's Killer Scientific App Be Books?
Charles Parnot’s article on iPhone business models, and how they relate to scientists, has got me thinking about what types of apps would really be useful on the platform. To date, most scientific apps have been pretty much ported straight over from the Mac — we haven’t yet seen any significant rethink of what type of scientific software would actually be suited to the new platform. I know there are developers working on it, and I think we will see new and interesting applications appear in the coming months, but I don’t think we have seen any yet.
While I was thinking about apps, it occurred to me that there might already be a category of app that scientists have largely overlooked. As soon as the App Store opened, it became clear that some developers saw the iPhone/iPod touch as a new platform for electronic books. By packaging each book as a separate app, it is possible to sell books via the App Store. Not only that, but your books are protected by Apple’s DRM technology, making it difficult for users to copy them. The latter has always been a problem with PDF distribution of books, and probably one of the reasons that digital book distribution has not really taken off as it might have.
I haven’t yet come across a scientific book in the App Store, but it seems to me that it may be an interesting avenue to investigate. Scientific books typically have low sales volume, making them more difficult to get published. With the App Store, you can sell anything from a single copy up, and take next to no risk. There are no printing costs, payments to agents or distributors — other than Apple’s 30% cut — making it quite a low cost venture. Books just need to be exported as a PDF, packaged up in a simple PDF reader (eg WebKit), and submitted to the store.
There are also some disadvantages to buying books from the App Store. To begin with, you have to read the books on your touch device. For this reason, the price charged would probably need to be much less than for a paper book, but for a useful ebook in a niche market, most would probably be prepared to pay something like $10 a copy.
To get a series of scientific books off the ground would require a number of unpublished manuscripts, and a simple reader app. There may even be a business model in charging a fee, or taking a percentage of profits, to ‘wrap’ manuscripts and submit them to the App Store — a virtual publisher, if you will. This way, an author would not have to deal with the unsavory task of developing the app to wrap their book, which would no doubt be a high barrier for most.
What do you think about this concept? Is there an opportunity here for scientific publication? And is there even anything to publish?
Comments
Book pipeline
Interesting idea... That would work best with an approach similar to the Pragmatic Programmers, where the content of a book is processed automatically to fit whatever format is needed. The idea being that the iPhone would be just *one* avenue to sell the book.
Citrix Receiver
How about this, Citrix are building a Citrix Receiver for the iPhone.
http://community.citrix.com/blogs/citrite/gusp/2008/11/13/Welcome+to+Project+Braeburn!
"Our goal in delivering a Citrix Receiver to an iPhone is to ensure a completely seamless transition from personal to enterprise, all in one device. Virtually millions business critical application run today on Citrix XenApp, and soon enough all of them will be at your fingertips in an iPhone near you."
Reading books on such a
Reading books on such a small screen is going to be a pain for me. However, it it is just a few slides, or Endnote abstract, PDF papers, or manuscript, I would love to read it on iPhone while traveling.
Usually a killer app is
Usually a killer app is something that people already need to do quite a bit of, but existing methods are clunky and cumbersome. Think of desktop publishing vs. typewriters, or ledgers + calculator vs. VisiCalc, or making a ton of cassette tapes for your Walkman vs. something like the iPod, or organizing your social life by landline.
I don't agree with the thesis of this article. Quite a lot of the things ascribed to the iPhone book concept here could be ascribed to HTML in general. There was nothing preventing you from publishing your 400 page tome on the internet as a web page. As most know here, science moves too fast for books. Not many scientists really have time for writing books, and few have time for reading them. Many Professori that I knew frequently rarely got past the abstract of a paper. I don't see this method of publishing being anything more than a tiny nicety. It is certainly not something worth turning over the current publishing establishment for, and thus does not qualify as a killer app.
The killer app for the phone is connectivity/computing everywhere, IMO. The phone is more or less a pocket unix computer with network connectivity. The big difference is that you always have it with you and it (AT&T permitting) always has access to the internet.
I expect therefore that the killer app for scientists, should there be one, will be connectivity related. It could be collecting content you can't get any other way, (e.g. "squirting" your slides, supplementary info and contact info to audience members while you talk), or maybe a instant messenger service to alert you that some bit of shared equipment might be free / Virtual-queuing, "Free food/beer" twitters, or some other labor saving device that takes some of previous chunk of wasted time out of scientific endeavor.
Re: Killer app
Yes, I think you are right that there are some interesting avenues to explore in terms of sharing slides, articles, and perhaps monitoring long running processes. I know of a few people working on these types of applications, and I'm confident they will be very popular, and could indeed be the 'killer app'.
The only problem with these types of apps is that have enormous potential, but they require critical mass. You have to get to the stage where nearly every scientist has an iPhone, AND runs the app, otherwise they are next to useless. Definitely possible, but not easy.
The point of the article was not really to suggest that books would become THE killer scientific app, but more just to point to the option of publishing on the iPhone. It seemed to be an interesting avenue to me, and one which I hadn't heard mentioned before in scientific or technical circles. (There are vendors publishing fiction in the app store already.)
Drew
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Drew McCormack
http://www.maccoremac.com
http://www.macanics.net
http://www.macresearch.org
Re: Killer app
I kind of agree with both iollmann & Drew here.
The nice thing about the iPhone is it's a mobile device & it's pocket sized. You can use it anywhere, at the desk, in the lab, at a conference, at the pub, wherever & it's always in your pocket.
The key here is to build apps that either can make use of either the mobility or the size of the device.
Apps that tell you when resources are free, when they've finished processing, and allow you to either download or view a summary of the results would be great for mobile research. You could be processing your data on multiple resources (lab equipment, compute clusters, etc), anywhere in the world, all while your sitting in the middle of a lecture at a conference.
But from a pocket-sized computing perspective, an iPhone/iPod Touch is a lot lighter than most scientific books, and a bit more portable than a PDF on your computer. If the app was implemented nicely with bookmarks, searching, etc. then it'd be a lot easier to carry an iPod Touch opened to the "method" bookmark into the lab than a x-hundred page hard back.
Also, the browser could check for updates, and provide you with a constantly up-to-date version of the book.
Personally I think the mobile-research stuff is a more "killer app" but it's a 2 sided approach, both the iPhone & the resource would need to be running software that uses a common protocol... hello red tape!
On the other hand, the sci book idea is a fairly straight-forward approach, that could be done quickly & easily.