The current explosion in interest around mobile devices such as the iPad and Kindle raises an interesting question for publishers. Is it best to create mobile specific websites to deliver content to smartphones, iPads or other mobile devices, or is it better to develop apps targeted at the iPhone, Android and other mobile platforms? In this post I examine the pros and cons of each approach.
Developing mobile optimised websites
By developing a mobile optimised website publishers can provide the best user experience for users with limited screen sizes and limited connection speeds. For example, this blog is fully optimised for mobile devices, so do try reading it from your smartphone to check out how the experience differs.
Advantages
- Lower cost of development (compared to app development)
- Fast time to market
- Support for dynamic content, content updates can happen in real time
- Completely cross platform and cross device
- The ability to leverage existing publishing commercial infrastructure; access controls and subscription models for existing websites apply equally well to mobile optimised websites
- Leverage existing development and production processes and tools
- Leverage publishers existing hosting and support services
Disadvantages
- Internet connection required at all times
- Speed & latency of the site must be fully optimised
- Mobile delivery creates new ways of using content and business models will have to adapt
- Discovery of the content will be via existing channels; SEO work may be needed to ensure users can find your content effectively
Developing apps
Developing an app allows a publisher to take full control of all of the capabilities of the underlying device. It gives you the opportunity to use every advantage that mobile delivery has to offer. If fast interactive graphics and immersive functionality are important to your content then developing an app will be the most appropriate choice.
Advantages
- You can control the user experience, ensuring all users get the best you can offer
- Ability to use native UI for fast graphics
- You can leverage existing distribution and monetization services via app stores (e.g. Apple and Google)
- B2B publishers can extend their reach into direct consumer markets by using app store services
- The app upgrade mechanism can be used to push new content and functionality onto devices automatically
Disadvantages
- Custom app development may be expensive
- Publishers may have to re-invent the wheel by re-implementing solutions to problems they have already solved in the web environment
- There is little or no potential for sharing development effort between different mobile platforms
- Lack of ways to hyperlink apps together. Academic citation depends on linking but apps cannot be linked in the way web resources can.
- Limited memory of mobile devices means large publisher datasets cannot be accomodated.
These are just some of the pros and cons of each approach. Inevitably the best choice in any given situation will depend on the content, the market, the level of investment needed and the risk publishers are willing to take on individual titles.
At Semantico we anticipate that some new titles and projects will need development for both web and apps whilst existing online titles may have apps designed for them. By offering both web and app development we’re giving publishers the chance to treat the two ways of presenting content as one project.
Each one of the bullet points could be a blog post in itself and no doubt we’ll be revisiting some of these issues future posts. Because whilst the issue of whether or not apps are the future of ebooks is still undecided, those publishers who’ve not yet dipped their toe in the water need to start rolling up their trousers. Do contact us now to start a conversation about your mobile delivery options.
I haven’t looked too closely — but how does ePub play into this? It would seem to address the “always online” concern of the mobile optimized website.
Apps can be great when done right. But getting the amount of work to get them that right is very large. I’m really enjoying the Guardian Anywhere app. But it’s clearly taken some effort to produce, and even then it’s not perfect in a couple of places, mostly because it’s reusing existing content, instead of having content produced especially for it.
The key differentiator, in my opinion, is sales opportunity rather than technology. Both mediums serve their purpose, bringing the publisher’s content to new markets. The eBook market, itself, is expanding very rapidly.
There are now more than 3 million users using eBooks in North America alone. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos recently wrote that Amazon now sells 6 Kindle books for every 10 physical books when both editions are available.
The key is branding and sales opportunity. Creating a custom app to distribute content gets your brand onto the various mobile platform stores, but requires the publishing organization to effectively market their own product. Listing your titles in the iBook Store or Kindle provides the publisher with instant access to millions of new consumers, but at the cost of sharing revenue as much as 50%.
Great question, mobile site vs. app is one that the market still really doesn’t understand and the best answer is… it depends on what you’re trying to accomplish with the app.
We’re more focused on cross-platform news distribution at Joyspoon but I’m interested to know more about how this pertains to the book world. Do you see individual publishers developing their own ebook stores for various platforms? How would they compete with offerings from companies like Kobobooks.com?
Also I disagree with a number of your points on where you’ve placed pros/cons, maybe you can clarify these two disadvantages specifically.
1. Lack of ways to link to external sources from inside apps –> isn’t this what in-app browsers are for?
2. No potential for sharing development effort –> What do you think of projects like PhoneGap, Grapple Mobile and MotherApp’s HTML engine?
Thanks for starting the conversation, interested to see how the issue pertains to the book world!
John
(comment posted at LinkedIn as well)
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Hi John,
Replying to your two specific points:
1. Lack of ways to link to external sources from inside apps –> isn’t this what in-app browsers are for?
I think I need to clarify things a little here. I’m not talking about shelling out to an internal browser. What I meant is if you publish an eBook (packaged as a complied downloadable application) and I publish an eBook, using the same model, there is currently no way for me to link to your book from mine. They are both objects which don’t really “live” on the web. Although we could link to the respective pages on the app store I would expect this type of link to be extremely fragile.
Whilst this might seem like a contrived scenario, in academic publishing the ability to like and cite is critical, and stale linking mechanisms (e.g,. DOI) are an absolute requirement.
2. No potential for sharing development effort –> What do you think of projects like PhoneGap, Grapple Mobile and MotherApp’s HTML engine?
I’ve only looked at PhoneGap so far. Although the idea is good the results wall a long way short of being usable except for specific projects. In reality the toolkits, operating systems and APIs of the main platforms are just too different, and building an abstraction layer that presents a consistent interface for developers across all platforms is just not possible as the core platforms are all changing quite quickly, and the task would be huge even if they were stable.
Hi Dom,
ePub and HTML5 could make an interesting conjunction; by packaging ePub files using the manifest mechanisms that HTML5 provides it should be possible to turn ePub files into off-line packages that work with all HTML5 compliant browsers.
Richard
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