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Bon jour!

Early spring in Paris is not the worst one can experience – as always it was an enjoyment to visit this beautiful city. Also it was a pleasure meeting so many great children’s books publishers and service providers at the Paris book fair. It is obvious that a lot is happening in the digital space for children’s books, and we are pleased to be part of that. TapBookAuthor was present at the Paris book fair to showcase our solution and to connect with the key players in the French market. We met some very interesting people and businesses, and we are excited moving forward establishing a presence in France.

I made a cup for our designer, Alin, that says “The cup of the world’s best designer”. That is only half-joking, because at his best Alin is really that good. And of course he likes praise, like we all do!

Here is what Alin wrote about himself:

Title: Graphic & UI Designer

Specialities: Adobe suite, Software & Website Interfaces, Branding & Graphic Design and coffee

Background: Arts & Design Faculty, Timisoara, “Multimedia Design” bachelor degree. For 7 years I’ve been trying to share my ideas creating website layouts, software interfaces, corporate identities, graphic design, video editing, prints, advertising and advising on marketing strategies.

Fun Fact: It is impossible to lick your elbow. I stopped trying long time ago.

And if Alin likes me when I hint to his greatness as a designer, I know he also have his times where he does not really love my feedback. (How do you make a design “a bit more fresh and playful” or “a tad more lighthearted” – I know I would kill anyone giving me that kind of feedback expecting to be taken seriously…) But all in all we enjoy working together a lot and I hope we will have the chance to do so for a long time.

We are participating in Innovation Norway’s Tech Incubator program at JFDI in Singapore. So for the next three weeks, our CEO is discussing with potential partners and collaborators in the South East Asian market.

If you happen to read this, even if not during our period here, and are an indie publisher in the area that may want to test our offering – give us a ping (or on local number +65 9166 5766), and we’ll help you getting started.

This spring, you might meet us around the world as we travel to trade fairs and to work with partners. The way it looks now, the places we could meet include:

• Bologna when March turns into April (for the Children’s book fair)
• Singapore early April
• In London for the London Book Fair April 14th and 15th
• End of May in NYC for Book Expo America

Let us know if you have an exciting project and want to meet with us, also in places not mentioned above!

We are visiting the Bologna and London book fairs this week and the next. We thought this was a good occasion to do some good and at the same time get our platform in the hands of even more creative people across the globe.

Our TapBookAuthor.com platform is used by children’s book publishers all over the world to create interactive content for learning and entertainment. The company got a first international breakthrough when Samsung decided to use the platform in seven countries in South East Asia. Recently an Indie Edition, aimed at self publishers and small organizations, of the platform was launched and can be tested for free by anyone.

We are now running a competition where we sponsor the winners with free access to the premium edition for a year, free 1-to-1 training as well as App Store fees for the year for Apple and Google’s respective stores. This is a total value of over 2000 USD. As always: You keep all your revenue, publish in your own name and own your work 100%.

To take part in the competition, write an email to selfpubgrant@tapbookauthor.com and explain why your title will be a success in the app stores. Feel free to include sketches and other materials that will convince us, especially highlight how your title will benefit from digital enrichments. All materials submitted will be treated confidentially.

Today we held our third user forum, in the cinema at Oslo Science Park, where we are currently situated in the EdTech Lab. The attendance was good, and we were super proud to see what our customers are creating as well as showing some goodies ourselves in terms of new functionality.

The highlights included:

• A presentation from GAN Aschehoug of their Bokbussen app
• A presentation of how TapBookAuthor is helping Samsung KidsTime create around 40 rich titles for the award winning titles from seven countries in South East Asia
• A look at the new backend technology for social reading, with pilot customer Samlaget as the first user (utilizing more or less our complete backend platform including Reading Analytics, gamification and social challenges, the subscription engine as well content delivery and a rich reader app)

We also announced a new partnership with voice-over professionals with talent from all over the world available, new employees (we are now 10 counting part time employees!) and several new clients.

In the practical demos of new functionality, we went from idea to fully functional app on our Android Tablet in a few minutes. The app included camera interactions, free hand drawing, drag and drop, text input and of course sounds and videos.

If you want to get a version of the “highlight reel” from our user forum demoed live over Skype, please give us a ping. We are also planning to start doing regular webinars that we think will complement our library of HOWTO videos in a great way.

Hope to see you in person the next time we are arranging our user forum!

Little Pickle Press and Cabot Creamery partner to support KaBOOM, to help support their efforts to bring balanced and active play into the daily lives of all kids, particularly those growing up in poverty in America.

The app Farm2Table, made with TapBookAuthor.com based on the printed book The Cow in Patrick O’Shanahan’s Kitchen by Diana Prichard with illustrations by Heather Devlin Knopf, is a cute and fun story about the sources of the food we eat.

So if your answer to the question about where food comes from is “The supermarket”, you’ll learn something here. 🙂

The Farm2Table app is available in the iTunes store, currently for less than three dollars – check it out: apple.co/1VDtHSn

 

The world is constantly changing. Since book lovers of all kinds are a part of this world, they’re changing too. Digital solutions are getting more present every day, either to replace something or as an addition to something. That’s why Norwegian publishers and bookstores need to realize that there is a big potential to be exploited. Right now it seems they don’t.

The gas station

An idea really struck me a few months ago during a visit to a Norwegian gas station. Usually I pay for my gas outside by the pumps, but this time I needed something in the store, and went inside to get it. When I wiped my card to pay, the girl behind the counter told me that by entering my phone number on the payment terminal, I would automatically register to a loyalty program; giving me a 10 cent discount per liter every time I wiped my card. Since I didn’t have to spend a lot of time and energy filling out different forms, I found it a pretty good deal and went for it. And even before I reached my doorstep, I received an sms from the gas station, telling me how to complete the registration. Really quick and easy. These things are often irritating and time consuming, but not this one.

I am not saying that publishers and bookstores should do exactly the same thing as gas stations. But the gas station example could surely inspire publishers and bookstores to get to know their customers better, and to dig deeper into the digital world of eBooks and apps. It is obvious there is a lot to gain by taking advantage of these digital opportunities.

Why not jump on the bandwagon? E-books and apps are always in stock without taking up much space, and they are always just a couple of clicks away. You just need to know where to find them.

How come the industry is still hesitating?

Publishers don’t know their digital customers well enough, and hence neither the possibilities created by digital solutions nor how to market their digital products. Also, the customers don’t know the digital products available or where to find them when they are in “buying mode”. It is complicated to find the actual products, even though there are loads of sites selling them.

Take ebok.no (the biggest Norwegian digital book store) as an example. Have Norwegian book lovers even heard of it? Some of us – of course – have, but too many haven’t. Still ebok.no doubled its turnover in 2015 (compared to 2014), and the positive trend – according to statistics from Den norske forleggerforening – doesn’t seem to end.

What about the sites put up by the bookstores? Do they sell eBooks and apps? Of course they do, but it seems they still rank the physical product higher, in spite of the increase of digital readers.

There’s a huge android market too. With over 10 million downloads last year, Aldiko Book Reader is an example of a great, small app in an aspiring market. These apps are user friendly and easy for the reader to handle with their eBook.

The solution

In a competitive and tough market both publishers and bookstores need to get in closer contact with potential customers to increase sales. They need to get to know their customers by getting their names and contact info. If this works out they can even send different information – based on interest – to different customers.

The main key:

• When someone buys something in a physical bookstore, the store needs to establish a relation with the customer right away, by getting them into a customer register.
• Paperwork is not a good thing – unless the store wants to scare their customers away. Therefore the register process needs to be quick and easy. Entering a phone number on the payment terminal – like they do in gas stations – is a possible way of doing this.

Everybody wins

Sale doesn’t have to be pushy. At least not if you do it the gas station way. If this works out successfully, the bookstore will be able to adapt their marketing to individual taste, whether it is digital or physical. Making the product «one click away» also makes the threshold for buying lower. As a result publishers and bookstores will be able to sell more books, and authors will be even more inspired to write them. This will be a win-win situation. Even customers would profit from this.

So yes, I would like an app with that.

A little while ago we joined a hackathon put together by Telenor Digital, as part of their Digital Winners conference. And in case you didn’t know, a hackathon is an intense collaboration trying to make tangible results in a short time, often between different people from other teams and companies.

The goal was to find a problem and come up with a solution within 48 hours. If not perfect, the solution would hopefully demonstrate how technology could help solve the problem.

Our team consisted of Cecilie Liset & Kamilla, service design students at Arkitekthøyskolen in Oslo, Colin Dodd & Ingrid Ødegaard from the video chat service appear.in  and of course our own Sondre Bjørnebekk, founder of TapBookAuthor.com.

Since Norway and many other countries are destinations for a great number of refugees these days, we decided to let our task focus on newly arrived refugees by giving them a simple tool for learning basic language skills.

To kickstart our research we made contact with the managers of the Facebook group Refugees welcome to Norway. They put us together with Ahmad, a high school student who agreed to do a quick video interview with us in appear.in.

We also spoke to people from the Red Cross who work with welcoming refugees on a daily basis, as well as guiding them in their new home town. We should probably have done more research, but the time aspect is unfortunately a part of the game when it comes to a hackathon.

Anyway we asked Ahmad a load of questions to get closer to a possible solution. Here are a couple of them:

• What was it like arriving in Norway and starting to learn the language?
• Do you speak English? (The interview was done in Norwegian, as he spoke it very well.)
• What was most hard to learn as regards the Norwegian language?

Based on our own research and Ahmad´s response we kept working on our idea, finding an app to be a good solution. Then Kamilla and Cecilie sketched out the journey from when a refugee arrives, until he/she starts learning the language, finally showing how our app could fit into this. Check it out here: https://vimeo.com/143230111

We decided to use TapBookAuthor’s own technology to make the actual app, and started to make a skeleton for a book. The book-app would first take the learner through a few language lessons, before a quiz would check out how much was learned. Finally the learner could use the appear.in video chat room inside the book, and chat with another learner who also wants to practice. In this way learning becomes both fun and interactive, in addition to having a social aspect.

To promote the idea we thought of informing about the app with posters in areas that refugees have go through when they arrive. We also made a simple webpage prototype for this purpose. The idea was simply to show how a solution like this could work, so we didn’t actually make real content for the language lessons. But we really hope that someone who works with educational material might be interested in picking up this idea and put it into life!

We believe that there could be some quick rewards for everybody by making it easier for newly arrived refugees to start learning Norwegian in this way. And if you have the content – we have the technology!

Do contact us if you’re interested!

Oh, and one more thing:

In addition to the group creating the prototype of the language app for refugees, team member Colin Dodd created his own small interactive picture book in just a few hours. During a demonstration of it the book asked him for a few details, including his phone number. Unfortunately Colin lost contact with his robot. But a bit later, after flipping a few pages, his phone started calling, and it spoke to him in a somewhat metallic voice?! It was his lost robot calling!

That fun concept, bridging the digital and physical, showed a cool way of using our API, which basically lets the user include any piece of HTML5 as a widget inside our interactive books. During the presentation someone even suggested a book using Google Earth to show a picture of your house in a horror story, and THEN the phone rings … Maybe too creepy?

If you have ideas for how you could use the API, please drop us a line and we’ll set you up with an early access user for free!

 

We are happy to launch our newest major feature; an API for developers wanting to combine the efficient production of rich interactive content in our visual online editor with custom development.

The API is already in practical use. One example is the title “Eg og Pontus går i land” where singer-songwriter Odd Nordstoga is singing his marvellous book (you can still read it yourself, if you prefer to!), illustrated by the excellent Rune Nyhus. You can see the title in action in the screenshot below.

This book, with a completely custom menu, autoplay of pages, various animations and zoom effects, shows one way of using the API (mainly it is controlling timing and menu, the effects are actually created using standard tool features).

Other use cases include custom bookshelves beyond what you can already do directly in the visual tool, as well as creating a very rich custom-coded infographic as part of a tool-produced interactive book for e-learning. Two examples of the former use case are being released the coming week or so, in fact.

The API functions include (but are not limited to):

• Starting/stopping sounds and videos
• Navigating to new pages (known as scenes in TapBookAuthor.com), titles or chapters
• Kicking off animations
• Hiding and showing layers or individual objects
• Using in-app-purchases to enable functionality and content
• Tracking user actions to our Reading Analytics backend
• Change menu state and look
• Opening/fetching pages from the Internet
• Opening the email client of the device operating system

Do you see a missing feature or something you would like to add? Let us know!

Next week the API will be officially launched at a hackathon at Telenor. We are really looking forward to it. One of our ideas is to create apps helping refugees from Syria and neighbouring countries. It will be interesting to see what the hackers can come up with.

If you are following the the tech press, you might grow a bit tired of the term “Big Data”. Thus, I will not use it again in this short blog post. But the fact is we are now working hard to finalize the architecture for version 2 of our analytics platform (the first version dates back a few years and was tightly integrated into the authoring tool, this new one is running completely separately from the content production platform). This is an important part of an innovation project for which we have gotten some funding from Innovation Norway.

The most recent incarnation of Reading Analytics in TapBookAuthor.com goes way beyond the basic counting of titles and pages that the user accessed. Did the users really use the quiz on page 8? How about the video on the credits page – was it money well spent? Stop guessing and gain actionable insights to optimize your next titles, and learn in detail how your readers are spending their time by utilizing Reading Analytics.

Our Reading Analytics platform also allows for clients to plug in their own Business Intelligence platforms and feed data into production systems, if they desire. And opposed to old fashioned data warehouses (I avoided saying the B-word!), these can efficiently be queried and we provide a set of default real-time-updated widgets and reports as well.

If you want to join our beta program for our updated Reading Analytics platform or have some input for us, please contact us.

We all aim to find the formula for the “next generation textbook”, and as tool makers we sometimes find a bit too few of the opportunities of the platform being used. But then again, what is wrong with a super efficient production process and clear and valuable enrichments based on the layout of a printed book?

Recently the small Norwegian publisher Tell Forlag has impressed us with how streamlined they made the process to release their latest book-as-app. It is called “Ortopediteknikk” and is teaching orthopedics for high school level students.

A clear design goal for the title was that the digital edition could be used alongside the printed edition, with the same page references and ideally the same layout. To achive this, Tell used the following process:

• Import a PDF with 99% of the design identical to the printed book (layers in InDesign helped make the 1% smooth)
• Enrich it with interactive elements like quizzes, image pop-outs and custom-made videos, at least a couple per chapter
• Use the tool’s capabilities of automatic full text indexing and dynamic table of contents, as well as zoom and simple bookmarking out of the box
• The below screenshot shows the dynamic table of contents where the user can answer quizzes and watch videos directly, and also do a free text search and jump to the relevant page

To achieve the perfect looking layout, we have licensed a specialized third party conversion tool and are running this on the server side. So the user can import the PDF directly by clicking the wizard button in TapBookAuthor.com. Then, with no human interaction, the HTML5 backgrounds are in the tool and can be enriched with interactive elements. Compared to an image-based process, the difference is very clear when zooming in and seeing the perfect vector shapes of the text. And even in casual use, the great readability on high resolution screens is striking. Below is a screenshot of a page from the book that contains a quiz that was added in the enrichment process.

We have talked to teachers that prefer this book-like visual layout more than reflowable pages. In out experience, it also depends on the content what fits most. So is this a “next generation textbook”? Maybe not, but it is clearly a textbook that provides great value and enrichments to the next generation – and is popular and recognizable for teachers.

If you want to discuss in more detail or have a title (or an entire library!) that could come to life through such an enrichment process, please do contact us.

Maybe we are too modest, but today – after several customers have been using it for almost a year – we are announcing at new product; nicknamed a subscription engine. Sometimes even refer to it with the cryptic description as a “white label subscription backend”. More simply put the product lets our Enterprise Edition customers packet, deliver and sell digital products in any way they want.

The product is API-driven and can integrate with the customers’ e-commerce solutions or run standalone. One use case would be using it to run a set of digital subscriptions, another a digital bookstore selling individual titles and a third to sell licenses in bulk to schools. Or all of the above! 🙂

If you want to discuss options or have a potential use case, please contact us.

This Saturday TapBookAuthor.com was featured, through an interview with our CEO, in Finansavisen – one of our two major business newspapers in Norway. Below you can find a quick snap of the article.

This Friday, our CEO is proud to be joining Samsung Singapore to give a talk at AFCC – The Asian Festival of Children’s Content. Their talk will cover enrichments to digital interactive books and what is popular with the kids that use the apps, as well as with their parents.

Samsung has selected TapBookAuthor.com as their platform and partner for digitizing all the winners from the Samsung KidsTime Author’s Award competition.

Literally as we speak on Friday, the 38 winning entries – from some 7 different countries in South East Asia! – are being enriched in a digital format. There are 6 grand prize winners and as part of the talk, you can see a live preview of some of these winners.

If you are in Singapore, I hope you will be able to come to the talk, and look forward to discussing with you in the Q&A and after. I am of course also happy to show you how our tool helps such amazing titles come alive.

The purpose of this short post is twofold; to tell anyone stopping by that we are at BEA and would be happy to meet and to let you know about ebok.no starting to sell interactive ebooks for children today!

BEA – Book Expo America – is on in NYC this week and we are listening, discussing and mingling. Shout out if you want to chat! I’ll be here the rest of the week.

And from home, I got news today that ebok.no launched their updated ecommerce page selling interactive books for children. They have nicknamed the format “ebook plus” and the titles typically contain voice-over, sometimes interactivity and animations and in some cases mini-games and quizzes. Out of the 150 or so titles available at launch, I believe only one single title was not made using our tool!

Frøet from Gyldendal – was called “the first app that proves that an app can be art” in a review.

This makes us as toolmakers very proud!

The app is different from a few other apps made with our tool in that it is not interactive in the sense that you tap to make things happen, but it is very visual with simple yet effective animations and the sound effects and actor create a very coherent experience.

Well done, Gyldendal – looking forward to the next masterpiece from you and our other great customers and partners!

We’ll be holding our second User Forum in Oslo March 14th, at Mesh in Tordenskiolds gate. We’ll keep it low-key, personal and above all useful. We are keen on getting feedback from our users and excited to tell more about recently added features, share some tips & tricks as well as have a look at the roadmap for further development.

About 20 existing users have already enrolled and will be joining, if you want to join us and have not yet gotten an invitation – please reach out and contact us as soon as possible.