Hiptype offers third-party analytics for eBooks...with a catch

PaidContent reports that Hiptype, a company that offers third-party analytic reporting for eBooks, has launched. Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other eBook vendors can gather a variety of information about how their eBooks are read--how far a reader gets into an eBook, how often they open it, what notes and highlights they add, etc. However, that information is rarely shared with publishers. Hiptype allows publishers to independently gather similar information. The information is anonymized, but consumers can opt-out of Hiptype's data collection completely (assuming, of course, that they know that Hiptype is collecting information.)

There's a huge hole in Hiptype's data collection that may make it unattractive for most publishers: It requires eReaders that support both HTML5 and JavaScript in order to work, but according to paidContent, neither web-based eReaders like Kindle Cloud nor desktop eReaders, even those that are browser-based, will work. Black & white eReaders are also unsupported. That limits the usefulness of Hiptype to Apple's iBooks and a few iOS and Android eReading apps. Frankly, I'm surprised that they even released the service when its practical value is so low. This isn't a Minimum Viable Product--there's virtually no value in the current offering for most publishers.

They're offering a 30-day trial with service for one book, or programs priced at $19 or $99/month. The $19/month program is limited to 1,000 readers, so it's not useful to anyone other than self-publishers and very small publishers.

Germany's PaperC raises money to fund development of HTML5 eReader

GigaOm reports that PaperC, a German eBook retailer, is trying to raise from €50,000 to €100,000 through a crowdfunding site in order to transition to a HTML5-based platform. PaperC allows users to purchase eBooks by the page, chapter or entire title, and plans to offer a monthly subscription program giving members unlimited access to the company's entire collection. The company currently has 120,000 registered users and distributes titles from more than 100 publishers.

PaperC is working with German crowdfunding site Innovestment to raise funds to launch PaperC.com, a new platform that is based on HTML5, instead of the current PDF-based platform. They've developing their own HTML5 eReader and PDF-to-ePub converter.

Reviews of six eTextbook platforms

On The Textbook Guru blog, Jeff Cohen has reviewed six eTextbook platforms: Chegg, CourseSmart, iBooks, Inkling, Kindle and Kno. Cohen doesn't pick a "winner," but he does a good job of reviewing the pros and cons of each platform as they relate to eTextbooks. Here's a brief summary:

• Chegg: Based on HTML5, has a built-in "Ask a Question" feature for getting more information from experts, and its purchase and usage models are based on how students actually use textbooks. It's biggest downside is that it's online only and requires an Internet connection at all times. 
• CourseSmart: It allows both online and offline access to eTextbooks. Individual pages, along with highlights and notes, can be shared with classmates and instructors. Up to ten pages from any title can be printed. However, CourseSmart only rents eTextbooks, and they're disabled at the end of the rental period. It only has one level of zoom and no multimedia features.
• iBooks: It brings Apple's ease-of-use and user interface design to eBooks. eTextbooks can include 3D models, embedded video and interactive quizzes. There are also virtual study cards that contain chapter-specific glossary terms. iBooks eTextbooks work both online and offline. The biggest downside is the still-limited number of eTextbooks available for the platform. 
• Inkling: Works on the iPad and in some HTML5-compatible browsers. Allows students to purchase eTextbooks by the chapter or by the entire book. Supports online and offline reading. Video, audio, interactive and 3D content can be incorporated into the eTextbooks. Notes can be shared with other students. The biggest drawback is a strict returns policy. 
• Kindle: Has the most flexible rental and returns policy--eTextbooks can be rented for 30 days and extended as needed, or returned within the first seven days for a full refund. The "X-Ray" feature gives the definitions of important words, phrases and names, and visual diagrams of where they're used in the text. The biggest drawback is that most eTextbooks don't use Kindle Format 8, so they're black & white only, with no 3D, animations or video, and very limited audio support. 
• Kno: Supports iPads and HTML5 browsers, but not all titles work in both eReaders.  eTextbooks can be returned within 15 days, so long as the user hasn't gone past the first 20% of the book. Notes, bookmarks and annotations can't be transferred between platforms--for example, notes made in the HTML5 version can't be accessed when the eTextbook is opened in the iPad eReader. Cohen found that Kno's beta "Quiz Me" feature, which turns sections of the eTextbook into fill-in-the-blanks quizzes, didn't work properly. Some images were left out due to copyright restrictions. 

Two new HTML5 authoring tools

More than a year ago, I wrote a blog post bemoaning the lack of HTML5 authoring tools. Then as now, you could create sophisticated content using HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript, but you had to hand-code everything. Now, we have beta versions of two different HTML5 authoring tools that promise to make the process a lot easier.

First, there's Sencha Animator, which focuses on CSS3 effects (transitions, animations, transforms, and anything else you can define in CSS3). It provides an interactive timeline for creating animations with keyframes. Next, Adobe announced the first preview version of Edge, its authoring tool for HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript. Like Animator, Edge uses a timeline, but it's considerably more sophisticated: The user interface is designed to look and work similar to those of Flash Professional and After Effects, its animation framework is based on jQuery, it natively imports and exports HTML, CSS3 and JavaScript, and it stores all its animations in a separate JavaScript file rather than modifying the CSS3 file(s).

With Adobe jumping into HTML5, the obvious question is whether Edge is a replacement for Flash Professional? Not yet. Both Sencha Animator and Adobe Edge remind me of Swish Max4, an Australian authoring product that outputs Flash but is considerably simpler and easier to use than Flash Professional. Edge is still early in its development; when Adobe releases a new tool like this, it's typically a year away from commercial release. In addition, different browsers implement different portions of HTML5, and it will take time for the most popular browsers to fully implement the specification (which isn't even scheduled for ratification by the W3C until 2014). However, we're getting closer to the point where HTML5 becomes a viable replacement for Flash for a variety of applications.

Given that Adobe is cannibalizing itself with Edge, there's an obvious concern that the company might cripple Edge in order to keep Flash viable. If Adobe was the only company creating HTML5 tools, that would be a legitimate concern, but other companies are competing in the authoring tool space. If Edge creates inferior content, developers and artists will use a competing product. My belief is that Adobe would like nothing more than for Edge to make up for all the revenues that it's losing as Flash is abandoned, and that means that it can't create a second-rate authoring tool.

Adobe and Sencha are working to make HTML5 look and work more like Flash, and additional companies and organizations are inevitably going to release their own authoring tools. We may only be a few years away from witnessing Flash become a legacy application.

The (second) rise and fall of walled gardens

Those of us who have been around for long enough remember the era of proprietary online services. In the U.S., the leaders were America Online, CompuServe, Prodigy and GEnie. Canada and several European countries had teletext services. All of these services were what came to be known as "walled gardens": Each service had its own collection of content, its own email service, and its own client software. Subscribers could use the content and services from one vendor, but couldn't get to the content or services from other vendors without subscriptions to their services. You could easily send email and messages to subscribers of the same service, but it was very difficult to send email from one service to another. Content providers had to use the publishing tools provided by each online services, and needed contracts with each service to reach their subscribers.

The Internet, and in particular the web, changed all that. Anyone with a web server on the public Internet could reach anyone with a web browser. Thanks to HTML and HTTP, browsers, servers and authoring tools were standardized, so that proprietary software and tools weren't needed. It only took a few years for the open Internet to displace the proprietary online services. Of the four U.S. leaders, only America Online survives, with web-based services and content. CompuServe is now a brand name of America Online, GEnie closed down at the end of 1999, and Prodigy closed down in 2001.

We're now living in the second era of walled gardens, thanks to smartphones. Apple's iOS, Google's Android, RIM's BlackBerry, Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 and HP's WebOS all support web content, but they have their own proprietary standards for apps, their own app stores, and their own rules for which apps will or won't be allowed to run on their devices. Apps written for one platform won't work on a different platform without recompiling and significant recoding.

As with the proprietary online services, the web (especially the combination of HTML5, CSS and JavaScript) may lead us out of the walled garden era of mobile operating systems. PBS's MediaShift recently published an excellent video interview with Tom Peeters, the multimedia manager for Mediafin, the Belgian-based publisher of newspapers De Tijd and L'Echo.

Mediafin has been working on an HTML5 version of its newspapers for the iPad for some time, even though it already has native iOS apps in the App Store. The Financial Times' decision to release an excellent HTML5-based web app for iOS, and to commit to eventually replace its existing iOS app with a web app, is bringing a lot of other publishers with similar plans (especially European publishers) out of the woodwork. The FT's actions are also serving as an existence proof--publishers can deliver usable web apps with a high degree of interactivity without going through Apple. FT's decision also gives momentum to HTML5 publishing toolkits from companies such as OnSwipe and pugpig.

One point that you'll hear in the interview is that there's a definite marketing advantage to being in the App Store, but if you already have a way of reaching customers directly, as Mediafin does with its newspapers, you can gain much more control over the development process and save the 30% commission (closer to 40% for Mediafin, due to VAT) that would go to Apple.

It may be wishful thinking, but ten years from now, I expect that we'll look back at today's mobile walled gardens and wonder how they ever existed.

Episode 5 of the Feldman File videoblog is live!

This week's episode of the Feldman File videoblog is live on YouTube! If you can't see it here, click here to view it in your browser. Here are the stories in this week's show:

• Google's $6 billion offer for Groupon is rejected, but it acquires DRM specialist Widevine
• Verizon Wireless fires up its LTE broadband network and launches its first devices
• Comcast extends its agreement to acquire NBC Universal and contends with complaints from Level 3 and Zoom Telephonics
• Adobe releases the first beta of Flash Player 10.2
• The U.S. Justice Department is forced to drop charges against an accused Xbox 360 modder
• Flipboard adds HTML5 support and advertising

HTML5: The "Not Quite There" Valley

The battle between Apple and Adobe over Flash, which has been joined to a lesser extent by Microsoft and Opera, is almost certainly going to end with HTML5 as the dominant way of delivering video and interactive content on the web, with Flash becoming the RealMedia of a new generation. It'll be used by a few people, especially in legacy applications, but will fall out of mainstream use. However, that's not where we are now.

Today, Flash is still very much a mainstream technology, HTML5-compliant browsers implement different portions of the standard, and HTML5 itself continues to evolve. There are no graphic authoring tools capable of creating anything coming close to Flash-based interactive content in HTML5. Yesterday, Scribd announced that it's starting to shift from Flash to HTML5 for its online document sharing platform, after a six-month development effort. Moving from Flash to HTML5 for video is now fairly easy, but for interactive content, a major development effort is usually required.

So we're still far away from the time that HTML5 will be ready to take over for all of Flash's applications, and the decision tree is now very clear: If you need to access Flash content or applications, forget about using any device that runs on the iPhone operating system. Once Adobe releases Flash 10.1 for Android, that won't be such a big obstacle. If you're developing applications that need to live for more than a year or two, however, you should seriously consider wading into the HTML5 pond now to avoid having to rebuild all your code for HTML5 later on.

Is Microsoft working on HTML5 design tools?

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post asking where the tools are that will allow mere mortals to write HTML5 that works like Adobe's Flash. Adobe has Dreamweaver, but it has a strong incentive to keep developers and users from migrating from Flash to HTML5. Microsoft has the Expression suite, but it also has Silverlight, so I thought that it wouldn't take up the challenge, either.

Yesterday, however, a Microsoft executive went on the record stating, and I quote, "The future of the Web is HTML5." That quote came from Dean Hachamovitch, Microsoft's General Manager for Internet Explorer, and although he was writing about web video, his comments can easily be seen as extending beyond just video.

It would make a lot of sense for Microsoft to go "all out" for HTML5 support, not just in IE but in its Expression Studio authoring tools as well. Silverlight has miniscule market share compared to Flash, so Microsoft could cannibalize Silverlight without hurting its revenues. Further, by making Expression Web a better HTML5 graphical development tool than Dreamweaver, it could steal market share from both Dreamweaver and Flash.

Adobe is vulnerable, and no one smells blood in the water better than Microsoft. Expression Studio 4 could be Microsoft's opportunity to leapfrog at least some components in Adobe's Creative Suite 5. Microsoft can offer Silverlight for those developers who want it, and to provide capabilities that won't be implemented in HTML5 for some time, but it doesn't need to protect Silverlight the same way that Adobe needs to protect Flash.

Steve Jobs goes on the record about Flash

Apple's position on Adobe's Flash is well-known, from the company's new iPhone Developer Agreement, Steve Jobs' remarks at an Apple "Town Hall" meeting, and a series of emails between an iPhone developer and Jobs. However, Jobs has now gone "on the record" with an open letter explaining Apple's decisions.

I've linked to the open letter so you can read it yourself, but here are the key arguments:

1. Despite Adobe's claims of openness, Flash is a proprietary platform and format controlled by Adobe. Apple's approach is to use HTML5, CSS and JavaScript, all of which are open industry standards controlled by standards committees.
   
2. Adobe claims that 75% of the video on the Web is in Flash format, but an increasing number of sites (including YouTube) also supply video in H.264 format that iPhone OS-compatible devices can use, so the problem is getting smaller every day. Jobs admits that Flash games won't run on iPhone OS, but there are over 50,000 games and entertainment titles already available for the iPhone, so the lack of Flash hasn't caused a problem.
   
3. Flash is the number one reason that Macs crash, and Symantec has reported that Flash had one of the worst security records in 2009. Flash doesn't perform well on mobile devices, and Adobe has been promising to deliver a full version of Flash for mobile devices for almost two years and still hasn't shipped. Apple doesn't want to subject iPhone OS users to these problems.
   
4. Most Flash video uses a Sorenson or On2 codec that requires software decompression, while H.264 can use hardware decompression. In Apple's tests, videos that can use H.264 hardware decompression play for 10 hours on an iPhone before the battery runs out, while viewing videos that require software decompression cuts battery life in half.
   
5. Flash was designed for keyboard and mouse interfaces, not touch, and the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad rely on touch.
   
6. Cross-platform development tools like Flash can't take advantage of new features as quickly as Apple rolls them out, so Flash developers can only use these features after Adobe supports them. Also, cross-platform tools encourage development of  "lowest common denominator" applications.

You may disagree with some of Jobs' arguments, but his open letter is the most comprehensive and clearest presentation I've seen of why Apple has decided not to support Flash.

Where are the HTML5 design tools?

It should be really, really clear by now that Apple wants to, in the words of Raid, "Kill Flash Dead!". Yesterday, Apple introduced new terms to its developers program agreement for iPhone OS that prohibit use of any programming languages other than Objective-C, C, C++ or JavaScript, and any intermediate or multi-platform development tools. That includes the new Flash-to-iPhone OS cross-compiler that Adobe plans to include in Creative Suite 5, which will be launched worldwide this coming Monday.

Obviously, this puts Flash developers in a (slightly) deeper fix than they were before the iPhone 4.0 announcement, but to me, it raises a more interesting issue: Where are the graphical HTML5 development tools? You can use any text editor to code HTML5, and Adobe's Dreamweaver will do a fine job, but how do you create the sophisticated interactive applications that we've come to expect from Flash? It's extremely unlikely that Adobe is going to extend Dreamweaver to compete with Flash, and Microsoft's web development tools are focused on Silverlight for video and interactivity, not HTML5.

Where are the HTML5 graphical application tools going to come from? At this point, I don't know. There's a real market opportunity there. The first company with a HTML5 interactive design tool that feels familiar to Flash developers will hit a gold mine.