As you will probably know, the animated short “The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore” won an Oscar as the best animated short film, but what you may not know is that there has been an iPad app for it since late last year.

This allegorical tale about the place of books in our world and culture which you can see below, is a superb small film, likable and understandable characters and a story line which very quickly becomes apparent.

It is described as follows:

Following a hurricane which destroys his town Morris Lessmore is whisked away to a colourful old house full of books which come alive and interact with him spreading happiness in the community. He remains their custodian for years until it is time for him to pass on and another guardian of the books take over from him.

There is a sort of self animated book that seems to be his guide in the world he finds himself in… It animates itself by flicking through its pages, a rather nice idea, which works visually very well.

So, here is the film itself, which to my surprise is freely available on Youtube.

Fun, isnt it?

Now for the App itself.

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Oceanhouse Media have recently produced an App for the iPad and iPhone specifically intended for interactively reading “And to think I saw it on Mulberry Street“, which was the first book that Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seus) published for kids way back in 1937.

In this book, Dr. Seus’s main character is a small boy called Marco, and he fantasizes as he goes along with his father on his way home from school about all the things he sees as they go.  Elephants, Rajahs, and all manner of other wonderful things, rather to his father’s irritation, who in spite of having instructed Marco to keep his eyes open and to tell him what he sees, doesn’t approve of the wild runaway imagination his son lets rip on their walk home.

But we do, of course!

As this is an interactive version of the book, there are a number of useful and fun possibilities built into it:-

Read to Me

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As all ereader users know, any sort of page flipping beyond the simple one page forward, one page backwards, is a real pain on an ereader and at the best, very clumsy.  In fact it is the major area in which paper books are still way ahead of ebooks from the user friendly point of view.

But this may be about to change.

A bunch of guys at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) have come up with a very complete new system to allow us to  move around in our ebooks with the same ease we can do this  with our paper books.  They have given it the far from romantic name of Smart E-book System – but I suppose to expect them to come up with a riveting name for their splendid invention is perhaps unreasonable, they are academics after all – A group not known for their zingey use of words.

Wiggle your fingers and it all happens:

Basically what this system will offer us is the possibility to navigate through an ebook in a variety of ways, merely by using various single and multiple finger swipes, much as we already do with all touch screen devices.  But these guys have taken it a step further, and made a number of the “swipes” start from the bezel around the screen… Not sure how they have achieve this with software rather than hardware, but achieve it they have, as you will see in the video they have made to show off this system to the world.

Currently it only exists in their labs, and the iPads they have used to test the system.  I gather they hope to sell it to Apple, or at least get it included in the Apple accepted Apps, so people can enjoy this useful system on their iPads.  But in fact I gather it could work on just about any platform, from Smart Phones through PCs to tables and iPads..

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Apple doesn’t want you to buy ebooks from other companies on their devices:

In a rather depressing example of how much control Apple want to have over anything that uses their various devices (ereaders, tablets, phones) they have rejected the Apps that allowed you to connect directly to the Kobo, Nook, Kindle and Google online ebook stores from your Apple gadget.

The basic thing that Apple didn’t like was that those Apps allowed you to connect directly to these other ebook stores from within your Apple device, and thus avoided those companies having to pay Apple the 30% of the sale price of those ebooks.

The kindle and Kobo Apps that are now updated, link you to Safari, and then to their websites , thus no longer directly to them, Google Books seem to have disappeared entirely from the world of Apple.

And Sony never even got started with an App for Apple gadgets.

To put it simply, what this now means for us consumers is that if we happen to own an  Apple device and wish to use this to read our ebooks, we either are forced to buy them from Apple, or do so via Safari, so no more simply click in an App and go directly to the  ebook store of those companies.

Whilst I can understand that Apple want the money, I am amazed that a company can be so controlling of its customers, and even more amazed that its customers don’t rise up and tell Apple to pull their skull in and stop being so controlling.

As a relaxed Windows user, I am happily not bothered by this silly control freakery that Apple is demonstrating more and more

XinXii launch a HTML5 based ereader App for Smart Phones and Tablets:

XinXii, a German online site that offers self publishing and purchasing of ebooks in German (and about 6 other languages) have just announced that they will be  launching an HTML5 based app for people who want to use Smart Phones or Tablets for buying or selling all sorts of digital texts while on the move, thus removing the need for  a computer for this.

As they put it in their Press release:

With the web application, the Internet platform XinXii is once again demonstrating its pioneering spirit and its market leadership in digital self-publishing: The XinXii web app now makes it possible for any authors to publish and sell their works also via their iPad, Android-based tablet or smartphone – in real time. On XinXii, readers have mobile access quickly and simply to more than 12,000 eBooks – anywhere and anytime, online and offline.

XinXii, the online market place for indie authors and self-publishers develops a mobile version for HTML5-compatible devices: The web app means that the eBook shop can also be accessed by mobile users. The browser-based application scores with a host of useful functions for rapid and simple upload or download whilst on the move: Authors can now also manage their publications on their mobile end device after a simple log-in or upload new ones and offer downloads for a fee. All processes are done as usual in real time. In the same way, readers gain access to the overall catalogue of more than 12,000 titles that are displayed with the information that is standard on XinXii.com such as category, product description, length, author profile and useful rating information. The purchased eBook, document or audio book is downloaded and is available for direct or later reading/listening – even without a network connection. “Authors who want to publish, for example, their seminar documents while they are on the move no longer need a laptop  – just their iPad, their tablet or their smartphone,” says Dr Andrea Schober, CEO of XinXii.com. “Readers can read the purchased text as required either directly or transfer them into iBooks or native reader apps and access them for as long as they like.” Read full story »

New idea about how to use ebooks from Dutch publishers -  the Delay App, or in good Dutch – Vertragings App :

A consortium of Dutch Publishers (Querido, Uitgeverij Athenaeum, Q and Nijgh & van Ditmar) have got together and come up with a rather ingenious idea, an App that has a store of ebooks already in it, all arranged on the amount of time it would probably take you to read them, rather than any other criteria.   The idea being to give you an ebook to read that will take you about the amount of time you have to wait for something to happen, a film to start, a bus to come, a longish train journey or whatever.

Thus the ebooks that are built into this App are organised in sections, one section that should take you about 5 to 10 minutes to read, the next into a group they reckon will take you 10 to 20 minutes to read, and so on……..

Nice idea………

A nice idea I feel, and one that might well take off if properly developed.

At least one negative point though:

This first attempt in this direction suffers from an irritating  drawback in my view, as I mentioned, it comes complete with a collection of ebooks already in it, but you cannot add any more ebooks, so once you have read the ebooks they build into it, you have to throw it away – as it were.

Their answer to this criticism is to announce that every quarter they will introduce a new version of this App stocked with a whole collection of different ebooks which you can then buy, and start all over again.

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