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BREAKING NEWS & VIEWS
A ‘How-To’ for Living is Bonnier First iPhone BookTuesday, March 29, 2011 You are facing off with a mountain lion - what do you do? The prom is coming up next week and you .PNG) have been tasked with making the garish mirror ball. But how? The answer to both questions is packed within "Show Me Now," the first book for the iPhone from Bonnier’s illustrated book division Weldon Owen. Bonnier was among the first magazine publishers to bring magazine titles to the iPad, but this is the first app treatment of a book from the company. The app repurposes some but not all of the content from the Show Me How series, which offers 500 life tips and tricks in print for $24.99. the mobile app comes at a fraction of the original book's cost. The $2.99 handy guide to over 300 life situations (common and rare) is divided into nine sections covering skills needed for survival (what if the brakes fail?), stylish living (do a hem stitch), emergencies (do a fireman’s carry) and odd circumstances (crashing a wedding). A handy search function can query the full database of solutions. You can share the tip with others via Facebook or save to favorites for later reference. The beauty of the app is that the instructions are exhaustively illustrated in an invitingly simple and clean style that fits the iPhone well. Short captions give minimal guidance along with the image. The entire book communicates its essence visually, which suits the mobile medium. As with the original book, the app re-imagines the reference genre as more of a visually striking serendipitous experience. Which is great as far as it goes. but the app does raise the issue of how well a clever book concept translates to the mobile use case. On the mobile platform, the app doesn’t have an overarching voice or presence to make it as entertaining as it should be. A novelty title such as this seems to beg for mechanisms that push some of its small treasures to the surface to keep it interesting and worth revisiting. Simply mobilizing a resource in such a workmanlike fashion demands that the reader remember it is on their deck and that they want to keep drilling for items they may not have seen. We think an app like this (almost any app, for that matter) needs to be more proactive in being fun. The app could use a game like feature or even an odd tip of the day – something, anything, to make the content more insistent on a user’s deck. The truth of the matter is that this is not the app a person will think to consult when being faced with a mountain lion. Nor is it the place someone will think to go for beauty tips, even though there are many here. It is like any novelty book, something to thumb through when discovered on a table top. But that reflex may not be the same on a mobile smartphone. Here the reader needs a more entertaining reason to remember and revisit an otherwise wonderful time-killer.  If you have breaking news to share please contact Steve Smith at ssmith@accessintel.com
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