I have an affinity for Al Gore because the year I got a national Sierra Club award, he was given one as well. However, it was the same year he won the Nobel Prize, so he couldn’t attend and had to accept, and give his speech, via conference call. Still an amazing experience, so when I came across this, I wanted to share. It’s from the New York Times’ Tech Writer David Pogue. When I get my hands on an iPad, I plan to check this out….
Al Gore Invents a Showpiece E-Book
By David Pogue
People pitch me on new apps all the time, but Al Gore doesn’t do it that often. In fact, only once — last week.
I took the bait. I met with him and his collaborators on “Our Choice,” a $5 app version (iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch) of Mr. Gore’s 2009 best seller of the same name.
Now, I’ll be frank with you: I must get pitched every other week on some “revolutionary” e-book app that claims to reinvent the book. That usually means it has a couple of video clips in it.
“Our Choice,” though, might actually live up to the boast.
A page from Al Gore’s new e-book app, A page from Al Gore’s new e-book app, “Our Choice.”
As Mr. Gore puts it, his 2006 book “An Inconvenient Truth” was 90 percent about the climate crisis problem, and only 10 percent about solutions. “Our Choice” swaps that ratio.
It’s all about the steps he thinks we need to take right now to avoid the worst of the climate disaster. It explores all of the factors: solar, wind, nuclear, politics, population, deforestation. It’s vintage Gore: persuasive, careful, reasoned and filled with layman-ized recaps of recent scientific research. If you didn’t know about black carbon, albedo and halocarbons, you will after reading “Our Choice.”
Mr. Gore acknowledges the skeptics, even summarizes their arguments, before trying to demolish them. His message continues to be that we have to act quickly to avoid truly devastating climate problems. ”The United States is still borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn in ways that destroy the planet. Every bit of that’s got to change,” he writes.
The book was published in 2009, but the app version has been updated. It incorporates discussions of the “birther” skeptics, the tsunami in Japan and last year’s Climategate.
But enough about the book. The bigger news is the app.
It’s laid out like a book, with 400 photos, illustrations and charts. It works best on the iPad, of course, but the miniature versions on the iPhone/Touch work surprisingly well, too. In both cases, you can zoom out to see scrolling page miniatures at the bottom of the screen for easy jumping around.
In both apps, the real magic is all the visual elements. You can expand every photo and graphic to fill the whole screen; they look spectacular. At this point, you can interact with them. You can tap the corner of any photo, for example, to see where on the planet it was taken. You can press your finger on a bar of a chart to “explode” it into smaller bars, showing the component data underlying the primary bar. (For example, one bar chart shows the six gases that contribute to the greenhouse effect. Hold your finger on a bar to see it split into smaller bars, showing where those gases come from: transportation, buildings and so on.)
Some of the illustrations become narrated animations. Some turn out to be movies (there’s a total of an hour of video), most narrated by Mr. Gore.
The interactivity, the zooming into graphic elements and the videos aren’t a gimmick. They actually add up to a different experience. The book feels more Web-like; at your leisure, you can jump from the main river of text into one of these deeper dives. Yet there’s no fear of falling off the primary train of thought.
Thanks to all of the smoothly integrated multimedia, the book engages more parts of your brain than just the one that reads prose. As a result, Mr. Gore goes much farther in his mission — persuasion — than he could on the printed page alone.
Another result is that you can spend many hours with this “book,” immersed and exploring. For once, here’s an e-book that really does redefine the net effect of an e-book. It really does exploit the touch screen, speakers and storage of your gadget to the fullest.
Best of all, the small company that created the app (called PushPop Press) says that over the last 18 months, it didn’t create just “Our Choice.” It simultaneously created a platform, a technology, that will permit them and others to publish subsequent immersive book-apps much faster and more easily.
There’s room for improvement. You can’t search the text, or annotate or copy or highlight it. Links to the Web might have been an obvious inclusion. Mr. Gore’s narration is not, ahem, the liveliest you’ve ever heard.
You should also know that it’s a big app, over 50 megabytes. In fact, when you buy it from the app store, all you’re getting is the introductory video; you’re then prompted to download the rest of the book in a Wi-Fi hot spot. That could be a rude surprise if you download the book just before heading out on a road trip, for example.
But over all, this is one of the most elegant, fluid, immersive apps you’ve ever seen. It’s a showpiece for the new world of touch-screen gadgets.
I told Mr. Gore that, frankly, I was relieved that “Our Choice” is such a great app. “I was afraid it’d be lame,” I said. “I would have had to show up at this meeting and pretend I really liked it.”
Mr. Gore didn’t miss a beat. “I know,” he said. “I felt the same way about your Nova miniseries.”
Funny guy. Also a persuasive, careful writer. He’s overseen the creation of a really cool app-book that, as one app-store reviewer puts it, “makes reading an interactive, fulfilling and, above all, emotional experience.”
Well done, Mr. Vice President.
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