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The Waste Land iPad app earns back its costs in six weeks on the App Store
Landmark poetry app prospering without price cuts says Faber Digital's Henry Volans
![](http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2011/8/8/1312819194723/wasteland.jpg)
Faber and Touch Press released their iPad app for T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land in early June, and saw it rise up the App Store charts fuelled by acclaim from the literary and technology press, as well as featured placement from Apple. So how has it done since? Rather well, according to head of Faber Digital Henry Volans.
"The most pleasing thing is that we have earned out – we're in profit now," he says. "We planned for it to take a year to earn out, but in the event it happened in about six weeks. That's similar to our previous Solar System for iPad app. Some quarters of the industry had written off the concept of enhanced editions, and the chances of making that work. But we're proving that it can work, and that means a lot."
For now, Faber isn't revealing sales statistics (or costs for that matter) for The Waste Land, although Volans says that Solar System has sold close to 60,000 downloads. The idea of the earn-out is important, though, in the context of the book publishing industry, where the traditional economics are based on sale-or-return distribution.
To put it another way: The Waste Land and other apps have proved that book-apps can be innovative, but proving also that they can be profitable will draw attention throughout the industry.
Something else that's important about both Solar System and The Waste Land is the pricing strategy. Both have maintained a $13.99 price since launch – December 2010 for the former – and have never been discounted. Indeed, in the UK the price of both book-apps actually rose recently from £7.99 to £9.99 as the result of Apple rebalancing its global pricing tiers.
That means Solar System has generated around $840,000 (£514,000) of gross revenues since its launch, although 30% of that will have gone to Apple. The app will soon make new revenues for Faber when it becomes a printed book this autumn.
"The thing to say is that we have had almost zero complaints from people who have actually bought The Waste Land about its price, although we have seen grumbles on Twitter from people who haven't yet made the purchase," says Volans. "Everything we see suggests that when people open The Waste Land or Solar System, they feel they've got something with a heck of a lot in it that's worth the price."
The Waste Land launched with a blaze of publicity and promotion, but Volans says sales have been "steadily ticking over" since. At the time of writing, it holds fifth top grossing iPad app in the UK App Store's Books category, with Solar System in seventh place.
Volans says Faber and Touch Press were determined to make The Waste Land for as wide an audience as possible, without falling foul of accusations of dumbing down the poem written by one of its former editors. "If we'd just been selling to poetry buffs we'd have got nowhere," he says, pointing out that the feature providing notes to explain the text has been one of the most popular elements of the app.
"You're already selling your product to a niche of the population – people with iPads – so you have to be as open and general as possible. But The Waste Land proved that being open and general doesn't mean you have to be dumb, or that you can't pick something difficult. In fact, we've relished the difficulty of the poem. And that's what we want to do with the follow-up products: explaining, helping and making difficult things accessible."
Volans also says that Faber's partnership with Touch Press – which previously published another landmark iPad book-app, The Elements – was a key reason for The Waste Land's success. He thinks the company has more of a publishing mindset rather than simply an app developer or technology startup.
"Being a publisher is about having a really close engagement with what you do and what you make. Sometimes I think most startups are quite uninterested in that stuff, but they make a platform and host other people's stuff. These two things are quite different. The number of people seriously devoting themselves to making the best kind of book-apps is actually quite slender."
Volans says that Faber is now working hard on its follow-up apps, although they are still under wraps. "We've had an unbelievable amount of academics suggesting what they want next," he says. "There's a kind of informal debate going on, with some people saying it should be Ulysses, and others saying this book or that book."
He also thinks that there is plenty of evolution still to come in book-apps as a format, or rather multiple formats.
"We're at the real start of how digital books will become different to print books," he says. "Historically, for example, a natural history guidebook looks quite similar to a novel, which is an accident of printing. Very soon those things will absolutely diverge massively. It's important to keep innovating, and as publishers we need to have a role in that."
News from: http://www.guardian.co.uk/techno ... -the-waste-land-app |