We are extremely close to releasing our first interactive children’s book for iPad, iPhone/iPod and Android devices.  This represents a first step into a niche market that I feel is going to be very important to Glowdot in the coming months and, hopefully, years.

Glowdot has been developing software of just about every kind, for just about every platform, for over 10 years.  But by far our favorite type of project is games.  And not just because we love games, but because we love the opportunity to be creative, to create new worlds, and to put all of our artistic and technical knowledge and skill into making something immersive, alive and breathing.  Games are a lot like movies that way — the really great ones make you forget momentarily that you are playing a game, and actually make you feel like you are the main character (or, at least, feel a sense of empathy for him).

Interactive books are an interesting type of project.  They aren’t quite a game, but they aren’t quite a straightforward app either.  They really walk that fine line between the two worlds.

It is for that reason that I have always told potential new clients, when convincing them to go with us, that an interactive book is the hardest app an app maker can make, and the easiest game a game maker can make.

If you take a company that builds social apps, or business apps, or utilities, or any other kind of “standard” app, you are asking then to forget everything they know, and learn a whole new set of skills to build an interactive book (or game, for that matter).  In terms of technology, they are moving away from the iOS SDK and the CocoaTouch libraries to a game engine like Cocos2D or Unity — and that itself requires a good deal of learning time.  Essentially, for an app developer to make an interactive book, he’s basically learning on the job, and the end result is, essentially, his first game app ever.

This really became clear during my research phase into this new market.  Almost every interactive book app I found looked like a first project in a game engine.  That’s not to say they were bad, per se, just that they were a little amateur.  You could tell that the developer was in a little over their head, a little afraid to take risks, and a little bit lacking in knowledge as to how to breathe life into a scene.  I have yet to see an interactive book on the iPad that is more than a collection of buttons that trigger a sound or animation, or video embedded in a page, or a really remedial use of a physics engine to sort of randomly and meaninglessly bounce objects around a screen.

But they can be so much more.  The flipside is, for a game developer, interactive books are a dream project.  They contain everything we love to do (sound design, animation, art direction, interactivity, atmosphere) and none of what we hate working on (fine tuning controls, wrestling with physics, hacking around collisions, etc).  For us, they are wonderful projects because we get to spend all of our effort on the things we spent the most time becoming great at.  And those things, not coincidentally, are all the elements the end-user cares the most about as well, because those are the elements he or she interacts with and engages with.

To that end, we’ve internally come up with a sort of “grand concept” for any interactive book project that comes our way, and it is so far ahead of what is out there currently that we’ve decided a large part of our focus will be on these book projects.  Our first one, teased above, was done on an incredibly small budget and came out better than anything in the app store right now.  I can say that with full confidence.  And we’re so excited to do more.

And here’s the other exciting thing about this: we can offer up and coming authors access to the largest market on Earth right now, and we can package their idea into something thrilling and exciting for far, far less than it would cost to print and publish a physical book.  And for books that are already on the shelves, we can take that print book, create a digital, fully interactive version of it, and help publish it to the app store for a fraction of the total investment to publish the physical book.  And considering how quickly the big book retailers are folding, the time really is now to get your book published digitally.

If you are a publisher, or have a book idea, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us.  We’d love to share some of our ideas with you.