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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.

Again, things are slightly better on this front than they were back in 1996, thanks to the advent of online advertising, but while this might now cover the cost involved in conversion to online format it very rarely covers the cost of generating the content in the first place. And like CSS, online advertising is a double-edged sword, since it basically means the publisher doesn't actually want you to stay and read the online content as you only become monetized after you've clicked away from the page! Worse still, the online versions of the magazines and newspapers are eating into the money-generating print side of their operations.

From readers' perspective the web is great for finding content but hopeless for consuming it, whereas from publishers' perspective the web is great for attracting huge readerships, but hopeless for making enough money to pay for creating the content in the first place.

In short, for brand-name publishing of the high-quality content that most users want to read, the current web is both unreadable and economically unviable. However, a successful iPaper format would solve both problems at a stroke. All content could still be made available free via HTML just as now, but regular visitors could also subscribe to a low-cost, value-added, design-rich, ad-free iPaper version of a site's content - one that's a pleasure to read, not merely possible to browse. For the producers this would be a return to the tried-and-tested print business model, built on a mixture of advertising and subscriptions, and a way to finally begin making some money from the web's global audience.

Put like this it all sounds very simple, but then iPaper has always sounded good on paper: the problem has been translating from page to screen. Even now that the latest versions of both InDesign and QuarkXPress can finally output their rich designs onto the web as easily as to paper, I've yet to see any publisher offer access to an online replica of its branded print product, and I don't really expect to. So what will it take to finally see iPaper take off? Ultimately, I think that the missing ingredient is intelligence.

It's no good just offering a fixed representation of the printed page viewed through the device screen: its layout must intelligently adapt to make full use of the screen real-estate available, bearing in mind the end user's preference in terms of body text point size. That involves intelligently changing the number of columns, size of pictures and flow of text, complete with advanced features such as kerning. Whether you choose to read the iPaper Rich Internet Application version of PC Pro on a widescreen desktop, a dedicated screen reader, an A4 slate, a mobile or your TV, it needs to automatically produce an optimally paginated screen that's actively enjoyable to read.

This is a tall order, but it can be done - in fact, it already has been done, and you can see the sort of thing I'm talking about in the New York Times Reader, "the digital newspaper that reads like the real thing". You're meant to subscribe to try it for yourself - that's one of the points, remember - but there's a demo of what's on offer and a free trial. Interestingly, the demo employs the cross-platform Adobe Flash SWF format, while the Reader is based on Microsoft's WPF technology (restricted to Windows XP and Vista), and it's these two firms that will determine the future face of iPaper. The race is now on, with Microsoft trying to translate its existing WPF functionality for delivery via its cross-platform Silverlight player, while Adobe is reworking the binary Flash format into a new XML-based XFL and FXG and grafting on adaptive layout technology.