Earlier this year, our co-founder Peter Collingridge was interviewed about Enhanced Editions and digital publishing at Digital Book World:
“We see ourselves kind of like a publishing company. What we’re trying to do is not do stuff just because you can do it. I kind of got that stuff out in the last ten, thirteen years of being paid to do kind of wacky marketing stuff. Some of it works, some of it doesn’t.
“With digital books, the suggestion is, reading is an amazing, immersive, time consuming, rewarding endeavor. It’s not Twitter. It’s very very different to that kind of thing. You’ve got to be careful as to how you seek to disrupt that experience from the eyes of the person that’s reading it.
“We see our company as an experimental company. We’re trying to drive the future of the book commercially. We’re very commercially driven. We want to see what consumers like. We gather a lot of data, we look at that data, we see what’s popular and what’s not popular and we iterate on the back of that.
“There’s an amazing opportunity…to properly digitize the books. Not just digitizing the text, but digitizing the whole experience.
“There’s a lot of things you can do. You shouldn’t do all of them. You should have an editor’s view of which are the right features, functionalities, experiences to add around the text. But you also have to experiment. We’re interested in using technology intelligently to make books a part of our – increasingly digital – lives in the 21st century.
“We’re trying to innovate at a user experience level that isn’t just that facsimile of the book because we believe that, to kids growing up today, there’s more to offer than that. I’m very interested to see how that landscape is going to evolve, even in the next 3 to 12 months.”
