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Special Report: Dumping print, publisher bets the ranch on apps
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By Mark Egan
NEW YORK (Reuters) - The prince of coffee table books believes paper books are dead. Now he wants to be king of the app.
Since 1980, Nicholas Callaway has made the finest of design-driven books, building a publishing house and his...
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A commuter reads on his Kindle e-reader as a subway train arrives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, March 18, 2011.
Credit: Reuters/Brian Snyder
By Mark Egan
NEW YORK |
Fri Apr 1, 2011 12:00pm EDT
NEW YORK (Reuters) - The prince of coffee table books believes paper books are dead. Now he wants to be king of the app.
Since 1980, Nicholas Callaway has made the finest of design-driven books, building a publishing house and his fortune on memorable children's stories and on volumes known for the fidelity of their reproductions of great art. But the quality of paper, ink and binding mean nothing to him now.
For Callaway, it's all about apps -- small applications sold in Apple's App Store where books are enhanced beyond the mere text of e-books. In this cutting-edge new medium, cooks can clap hands to turn pages of an interactive recipe, a book about Richard Nixon can include footage of him sweating during presidential debates, a Sesame Street character can read a story out loud and, should your child get bored, the app can turn the tale into a jigsaw puzzle or a computerized finger-painting set.
"I have bet the whole ranch on this," Callaway told Reuters. "This kind of juncture happens maybe once in a century."
Publishers from New York to London agree this as a moment of huge change. They are adapting to rising sales of e-books, and the popularity of smart phones and tablets such as the iPad. The retail landscape has changed with Amazon becoming the dominant seller of books while countless book stores go the way of video rental stores. America's No. 2 book store chain, Borders, is bankrupt. Some authors have dropped their publishers entirely, self-publishing online and using social media to connect with readers. Others have become adept at using Facebook and Twitter to reach readers or have attracted fans by becoming popular reviewers of books on Amazon and then publishing their own book.
Callaway is among those who believe the change is just beginning and, in the years to come, the app will change things utterly.
Sitting in his chic offices on Manhattan's cobble-stoned South Street Seaport, the 57-year old Harvard graduate, photographer, father of two and daily Anusara yoga practitioner bristles with excitement as he flips open the worn black cover of his iPad.
"This is revolutionary," he says, stroking his finger at the iPad's glass surface and prodding to open an app he has developed. "This is the Looking Glass. This is Alice in Wonderland. We are at the beginning of an entirely new medium."
The increasingly popular e-books sold on Amazon's Kindle, Apple's iBook store and Barnes & Noble's Nook store are electronic reproductions of paper books. So, for publishing innovators such as Callaway, it will be Apple's App Store that will ultimately transform books into a new medium.
Titans from Random House, Penguin and HarperCollins are jostling with the likes of Callaway for a piece of the pie. Experts say it's like a Wild West gold rush, perhaps the biggest moment in publishing since Gutenberg's invention of the movable-type printing press in the middle of the 15th Century.
FROM SCULPTURE TO "SEX"
Callaway seems an unlikely man to lead a technological revolution in publishing. He started as a publisher at age 26, having read classics at Harvard and spent some time in Europe studying art. He had no publishing experience. Nevertheless, with a $5,000 loan from his brother Reeves Callaway, he published books about Constantin Brancusi's sculptures, about 20th century photography icon Alfred Stieglitz and painter Georgia O'Keeffe's best-selling "One Hundred Flowers." He repaid the loan within two years.
He gained fame outside the book world when he published Madonna's book "Sex" and later convinced her to write children's books, which have sold millions of copies. But his biggest success began with David Kirk's "Miss Spider's Tea Party" in 1994. It was Callaway's first children's book and it sold one million copies in its first year.
Then in 1995 came the first movie made entirely from computer-generated imagery, "Toy Story," and Callaway had his "eureka" moment.
"I thought, this is a new form of story telling, this is going to change the world," he said. "We stopped thinking of books as the sole vehicle for our products and we thought more of core intellectual property that could be executed across many different media."
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