I had an interesting conversation with someone from MIT Press yesterday. They are interested in creating another iPad app or apps for specific titles. I was talking about how it's a pain to have my ebook collection fragmented between different apps (most books I'm reading are in Kindle, but some in iBooks, some in Stanza, some in Nook, some as random PDFs).
So the idea is this: what if scholarly publishers and academic libraries could collaborate to create the ultimate e-reading mobile app for scholarly ebooks? (and other scholarly content) Wouldn't it be nice if there was one app for all your scholarly reading?
Yes, there is already GoodReader as a great way to organize and read your PDFs. It's great for ejournal articles you've downloaded. But what about full-length ebooks? The kind you want to read cover-to-cover. (as opposed to reference books where you want to look up quick facts, those function more like web-databases, rather than books, even though they are often called "ebooks"). But whole books or whole chapters of books are the kind of thing you want to read on your iPad, iPhone, Android phone, Kindle, Nook, or any mobile device.
If scholarly publishers could collaborate on an app, it could have special features designed for scholarly content. Features like:
- integration with citation management tools, like Papers, Zotero, CiteULike, etc.
- special image viewers for large, detailed, complex images, like maps, diagrams, blueprints, or formulas. Imagine you could zoom and swipe into detailed sections of the images in the same way you do on those great comic book readers on the iPad, such as Marvel Comics, or Comics X. Those have wonderful interfaces for zooming in on each panel.
- integration with your campus authentication system, so it would save your credentials and give you permission to access the e-content that your academic libraries provide by subscription.
- an Instapaper-like feature that allows you to save what you are reading for later when you are offline. Instapaper is really great for freely available content on the web, but currently it can't get behind the authentication systems we have and scrape the content of ejournals that our academic users have permission to view because of library subscriptions.
- integration with file storage systems, such as Dropbox, Google Docs, MobileMe, and Gmail. This would make it easy to move content into the mobile app without plugging it into your computer. GoodReader does this and it's great for PDFs.
- ability to create your own system of folders or collections of what you are reading.
- ability to share quotes and snippets of text via email, Twitter, or Facebook.
- it might be nice to create one "store" as the go-to place to search for newly-published scholarly ebooks. This app could access that store. It would be like the Amazon store, but with better metadata for scholarly titles. It could be run by scholarly presses and academic libraries instead of Amazon or Apple, which could allow for a more sustainable financial model for authors and publishers.
We were just dreaming, but maybe there are some possibilities for collaboration between scholarly presses and academic libraries everywhere.
