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The story of iPaper

Posted on 4 Mar 2009 at 10:45

For his final Real World column, Tom Arah looks at the past, present and future of rich design delivered via the web.

It's been a hard and expensive process, but via trial-and-error most large publishers now have significant data-driven online presences, and the rewards have begun to flow. Visit the PC Pro site and you're not restricted to reading last month's news and articles, but can access a "constantly updated net version". The underlying database puts links to relevant items from the last five years immediately to hand, something an issue-by-issue iPaper solution just can't offer. In addition, with the spread of Web 2.0 principles, you get to read not just PC Pro's paid contributors, but other readers' comments and opinions, and to contribute your own. The very nature of online communication is changing from traditional one-to-many publishing to something more like an ongoing mediated group conversation. And the way we access the internet has changed, too, with small-screen mobile devices increasingly replacing high-resolution desktop PCs and bringing with them truly universal, any-time any-place access to this constantly-growing content resource.

This looks like the natural end for iPaper, and it's been largely a story of missed opportunities and what might have been. Now both Quark and Adobe having finally delivered systems that let you publish to the web as easily as to paper, the goal posts have moved: an electronic window onto an essentially print-oriented layout is no longer enough - especially now that the typical window has shrunk. Tim Berners-Lee's visionary decision to exclude all design concerns from his specification for HTML has been vindicated, and the single column of simply flowed text looks all-conquering. Quark's prediction at the launch of QuarkImmedia that HTML is a "short-term solution" has proved way off the mark, as have all prophesies of the demise of paper. The gap between typographically rich page and internet-connected screen proved too wide to bridge, and the whole iPaper concept has been swallowed into it.

Design future

Both paper and HTML-based web pages undoubtedly have a long future ahead of them, with the former providing the richest reading experience and the latter (thanks to Google) the perfect way of finding the most relevant content. However, despite the lessons of the past, I still firmly believe there's a future for iPaper and an increasing merger between page and screen for two main reasons.

First, from a reader's perspective, despite all the advances made over these last 12-and-a-half years, the quality of current web page design remains atrocious. Compared to 1996, the advent of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) means you can at least specify basic factors such as how the screen is divided, the leading and alignment of text and so on, but without control over features such as kerning and hyphenation these advances are strictly relative. Moreover, in many ways CSS made things worse by allowing designers to fix things that shouldn't be fixed, like setting a specific text size that works well for some people but is rendered too small on higher resolution screens or just doesn't suit older eyesight. Worst of all, the body copy you see onscreen is still of horrendously poor quality, given that all web content is presented in a few default fonts composed of spidery one-pixel lines. It's as if all the centuries of typographic evolution since Gutenberg simply hadn't happened, and we'd only ever invented the portable typewriter...

The bottom line is that the web is great for finding content, but it's dreadful for reading it. From a producer's perspective, web publishing is worse: it's great at attracting browsers from around the world, but its fundamentally free nature means that there's no mechanism for generating real revenue streams to make it pay for it itself.