iPad Only No More: Inkling Debuts HTML5-Powered E-Book App For The Web
Inkling, the San Francisco-based startup that's known for making super slick interactive digital versions of college textbooks and other educational titles for the iPad, has debuted its first ever platform for the web browser.
Context & Ripple Effects
Inkling built its name on richly interactive digital textbooks that lived only on the iPad, a bet made possible by Apple's 2010 iBooks Store and app launch and the broader push to upgrade print textbooks that the Wall Street Journal covered back in 2010. The startup has been broadening beyond campus titles too, with a May 2012 move into Frommer's travel guides signaling ambitions past the textbook shelf.
The new web app puts Inkling's catalog in any browser, and it lands squarely on a path Amazon already cleared with its web-based Kindle Cloud Reader, which was built specifically to answer Apple's in-app purchase terms; Twitter's HTML5 site followed the same logic in 2011. With confirmed data showing the iPad driving the overwhelming majority of tablet web traffic, Inkling is choosing reach over exclusivity at the moment its platform ambitions are widening.
First-order effects
- Students and readers without an iPad can now use Inkling's interactive titles in a browser, removing the device requirement from every book in its catalog.
- Inkling's sales no longer run solely through Apple's storefront economics — the same route Amazon took when it launched the Kindle Cloud Reader against Apple's terms.
Second-order effects
- Other interactive-textbook makers face pressure to follow the web-first playbook or defend their iPad-only distribution, since Inkling now reaches buyers the App Store funnel excludes.
- Apple's gatekeeper position weakens at the margin: each high-profile publisher shipping an HTML5 alternative makes web distribution a standard negotiating counterweight to App Store terms.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, premium educational content consolidates around HTML5 platforms that treat native apps as one channel among several rather than the only storefront — shifting leverage from platform owners to whoever owns the reader relationship.
The trend: Digital publishers are increasingly routing around app-store gatekeeping with HTML5 web apps, a path blazed by Amazon's Kindle Cloud Reader and now extended to interactive textbooks.