ScrollMotion hopes to be the iTunes of books for Apple's latest iPhone
One of these days I’ll get my hands on a Kindle or a Sony e-Reader and figure out whether they really are the future, or whether they are merely incredibly expensive emperors striding about town in the all-together. On the face of it, Kindle especially seems a little bit tough to get my head around, as it seems a little bit too limited to be a device for reading newspapers and magazines. For businesspeople and students with textbooks it makes a lot more sense. But it’s a hefty cost. Perhaps they’ll start tying up with mobile phone operators for subsidised packages. That would be interesting.
However, I’m more than a little bit intrigued by the goings on at ScrollMotion. They’re making interactive book-based applications for the iPhone there which seem interesting and highly interactive. I wonder whether some of the interactivity might not become a little tedious after a while — I’m thinking in particular of the graphic novel they have demonstrated there with the Iceberg Reader application — but somehow, ScrollMotion’s vision of the more popular publishing applications seem more spot on than simply trying to emulate paper. I’m talking about their magazine/newspaper apps, like the horoscope and the People magazine celebrity tracker.
In any case, that caught my eye in this growing debate about the future of publishing. Hopefully I’ll have a chance to write a bit more about it another time. Do have a look at ScrollMotion here if you’ve not already done so. Give it a thorough examination.