Mike
Osprey invades your iphone - Free Osprey Books now available on the iphone
March 25, 2010 12:00 AM
We are all about pushing the technological boundaries of publishing here at Osprey. We love seeing our books take on new forms, grow and develop from the humble book right through to a fully digital product. Over the last couple of years we have delved into all sorts of ways of delivering our books, or the information contained within them to our customers.
The latest, and perhaps most exciting development is the recent release of five of our Campaign titles as 'Freemium' apps for Apple's iphone. Thats right, Osprey have invaded the iphone with the help of our partners at Exact Editions.
Each of these five books can be downloaded onto your iphone and sections of each book can be accessed for free immediately. In the free preview section of the app you will get a chance to see what some of our artwork, maps and BEVs look like, and how they behave on the iphones touch sensitive screen. You can zoom in, flip the pages around from a vertical to horizontal view and scan through the book as you please.
You can then purchase a full version of the book through the app for £4.99 / US $7.99. A full list of the books that you can download as iphone apps, together with direct download links can be found here.
Over the last few years we have launched a digital archive which now contains all of the maps from our books, all of the plane profiles from our three aviation series, all of the artwork from the New Vanguard series and finally all of the battlescene art from our Campaign series. We have launched our first ever e-books, and now have over 30 titles ready to download immediately. We have constructed an interactive blog and forum, which we can use to deliver news to you and get your reactions on our ideas, books and other bits and pieces of news and gossip. We have taken tentative strides into Facebook, and more recently Twitter to increase the sense of communication and interaction with all of you. We have embarked on an extremely ambitious digitization of our books, so that we can launch a short-run or even print on demand service for all of our books in the future.
But I think this is perhaps the most exciting new way of delivering Osprey books! Now all I need to do is convince someone at Apple to send me a free iphone...
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"Free Osprey Books now available on the iphone"
Magnifying glass not included.
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How about just concentrating on actual BOOKS instead of pandering to the gadget nerds? There are scores of essential titles like Wellington's Heavy Cavalry that are out of print (had mine since 1982 when i was 14)
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Thanks for your feedback Michael - I understand your concerns, but having published around 130 new books in 2009 and due to publish closer to 140 new books in 2010,there is not much danger of us forgetting about books at all. And this month alone we have reprinted close to 100 titles (http://www.ospreypublishing.com/blog/books_back_in_stock_march_2010/) (http://www.ospreypublishing.com/blog/books_back_in_stock_mar_2010_pt_2/).
I am also very happy to report that MAA 130 Wellington's Heavy Cavalry is reprinting as we speak and I would anticipate that we will have stock in by the end of April.
We don't want to alienate our current customers, but while I hope that books never disappear altogether we do have to be mindful of the future. We won't ever let our digital expansion interfere with our primary concern, but by looking to the future we are actually looking to safeguard the existence of Osprey for all those future fans of Heavy Cavalry!
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