ScrollMotion - Press - What's Going On

Major textbook publishers have struck deals with software company ScrollMotion Inc. to adapt their textbooks for the electronic page, as the industry embraces a hope that digital devices such as Apple Inc.'s iPad will transform the classroom...

The publishers are tapping the know-how of ScrollMotion Inc. to develop textbook applications and test-prep and study guides for the iPad...

The iPad also will be helped by the interest that schools have always had in tablet-form computers. Science teachers, for example, could use them for taking lab notes, which often use a combination of sentences, charts and mathematical equations, while others could use them on field trips. "This is the beginning of handheld education," said John Lema, chief executive of ScrollMotion.

—The Wall Street Journal, Feb 2, 2010

The news today is that there is no news, no magic bullet that will transform media. Instead, we're going to have to face up to the fact that we're in the middle of a multi-year migration from old media to something new. Today, the iPad has the iBooks store to allow it access to old media—but it won't be a new-media device until we build more news and information apps that are truly innovative and addictive...

As luck would have it, I sat for a few minutes yesterday with Josh Koppel of Scrollmotion, an app maker that is a pioneer in working with Apple devices. Koppel showed me his Esquire app and made a point of saying that the size of a print page no longer had a bearing on how magazine content could—and would—be presented...

For those of you who marveled at Sports Illustrated's mock-up of the magazine reader of tomorrow, Scrollmotion and the iPad show that it's already here today.

—The Big Money, january 27, 2010

Sesame Workshop has teamed up with ScrollMotion, the company behind the Iceberg Reader kid apps, to bring the "Where Is the Puppy" Sesame Street book series to the iPhone...

One of the things that I love about the ScrollMotion books is the way they handle illustrations. The illustrations flow with the story and you're also able to pinch and zoom and pan through them with your finger.

—The iPhone Mom, Jan 7, 2010

Sesame Workshop has partnered with ScrollMotion to bring the first in a series of Sesame titles to the iPhone and iPod touch. ScrollMotion's Iceberg Reader and the Sesame Apps also allow users to record their own voice using the iPhone microphone, which Josh Koppel, co-founder and Chief Creative Officer of ScrollMotion, says acts as a digital keepsake. "Not only can you record a parent's voice reading the story so the kids can listen to it, but what about grandparents? Someday, you might wish you captured their voices, too."...

Earlier this month, ScrollMotion released Veggie Tales and Curious George Apps for its Iceberg Reader, which Mr. Koppel says have been "enormously popular"...

—The Wall Street Journal, Dec 22, 2009

Iceberg Reader Kids has brought Curious George to the iPhone in several storybook style apps...

If you look at all the apps Iceberg Reader Kids has put out you'll see they really know what they're doing. This Curious George app is well put together and has all the features that make a great story book app…extremely well done, easy to navigate and it's got my kids favorite feature in a storybook app - the ability to record themselves

—The iPhone Mom, Dec 18, 2009

Magazine publishers are taking a mulligan. After letting the Internet slip away from them and watching electronic readers like the Kindle from Amazon develop without their input, publishers are trying again with Apple iPhones and, especially, tablet computers...

But the iPhone edition that Esquire expects to release alongside its January issue will offer robust interactive features, and it won’t be free. The price, $2.99 a month, is small, but it is a big statement… The developer, ScrollMotion, translated magazine layout into the app by, for example, replacing a sidebar article on cars with a small button inside an article. When the reader touches the button, the sidebar page appears. ScrollMotion includes the digital equivalents of turning a page, tearing out an article or circling a favorite quote.

—The New York Times, Dec 15, 2009

Children’s books are evolving in the digital age, but the representation of titles for the youngest readers has thus far been a bit of a challenge…

Meanwhile, ScrollMotion is set to release a new ereader before Christmas. The device will feature customizable elements, including the ability for parents to enlarge text in a picture book, ScrollMotion cofounder Josh Koppel told Publisher's Weekly. "These are things you're going to see this year," he said.

—School Library Journal, Oct 1, 2009

Aptara, an international developer of content conversion, authoring and management systems, is teaming up with iPhone applications developer ScrollMotion to create a streamlined and comprehensive system to transform book content into interactive e-book material for the iPhone.

In ScrollMotion CEO John Lema's view,"Aptara delivers the absolute highest-quality e-book conversion capability," and emphasized that the new partnership will allow "publishers to work with Aptara to convert their content and with ScrollMotion to monetize it."

—Publisher's Weekly, Sept 23, 2009

The industry has been aware of such portable readers' potential for years — major newspaper companies such as Hearst have even invested in their manufacture. But only within the past year or so have consumers taken hold of the concept, and now there's a gathering buzz about e-readers...

New York-based ScrollMotion released a new iPhone app called the Iceberg Reader, with which people can download from a list of 170 daily newspapers.

—Editor and Publisher, Aug 27, 2009

"We're really going after the kids' space in a big way," said Josh Koppel, co-founder and chief creative officer for ScrollMotion, the iPhone book-app developer, which will launch a new kids' e-book reader app this fall that will bring enhanced kids' picture books from major publishers to the iPhone...

Curious George's Dictionary is hard to classify—it's more than an e-book: a bit like a game, and a bit like an educational tool. And according to Koppel, it offers the kind of experience we can expect to see more of soon: "If you look at Curious George, you'll see there's going to be a lot of functionality."

—Publishers Weekly, Aug 24, 2009

Many magazine brand applications will be rolling out in coming months. Developers like NearbyNow and ScrollMotion are working with a number of magazines to mobilize print.

—Min Online, Aug 24, 2009

Are comics made to be read on cell phones, Kindles and iPods the new pulp of pop culture?...

New York-based ScrollMotion is testing its own viral app called "First Things Last," which reads much like a silent film. Josh Koppel, the company's co-founder, believes the technology "offers a totally new way to imagine what a graphic novel is. We built it for graphic artists to make the next generation of comic media."

—CNN, Aug 12, 2009

Everybody expects Apple to announce the launch of a 10-inch touch-sensitive tablet next month. The device will likely look and act like a big iPod Touch, but the larger screen is obviously drawing comparisons to the Kindle, Amazon's e-book carrier...

The tablet would obviously have color, which would make graphs and pictures clearer and could open up a new market for e-magazine features like Scrollmotion.

—The Atlantic, Aug 4, 2009

In a move that could rattle the wireless industry, Verizon Wireless is gearing up to challenge Apple (AAPL) in the market for software applications that are downloaded to cell phones

Still, some developers remain skeptical. Josh Koppel, co-founder of ScrollMotion, a New York-based startup that has developed a hit electronic reader for the iPhone, says it plans to develop more apps for the iPhone, RIM's BlackBerry, and Google's (GOOG) Android system. Yet while he says the Verizon joint venture sounds exciting, he is not convinced the carriers have the software and design expertise needed to pull off such an enterprise. "Every company is suddenly making a mad scramble to make an app store," says Koppel. "It doesn't mean they know how."

—BusinessWeek, July 23, 2009

Who says “they won’t pay for content online?” They, if we mean consumers, do indeed pony up their credit cards regularly for online content – yes, even content from magazine brands

5. People Celebrity News Tracker: One of the smartest things People did with their $1.99 iPhone app is not to call it a mobile magazine. We would argue that the well-designed app of star news and celebrity indexes and images is just that, a magazine, but the “Tracker” label gives it the patina of utility. The company behind the platform, ScrollMotion, has partnered with Hearst, Harvard Business Review and Conde Nast to bring numerous other magazine brands to the iPhone, and almost all will involve a paid component.

—Min Online, July 9, 2009

Yesterday Scrollmotion and Little, Brown Book Group launched digital U.K. editions of Stephenie Meyer's bestselling Twilight series, a breakthrough for international distribution of digital versions of Meyer's work.

According to the release, U.K. readers can now download "Twilight," "New Moon," "Eclipse," and "Breaking Dawn" via ScrollMotion's Iceberg Reader. The Iceberg Reader works with the iPhone and iPod Touch.

—Media Bistro, June 30, 2009

The new iPhone 3.0 operating system, which adds loads of features and functionality to all iPhones, is available for free. (iPod Touch users can download it too, but it'll cost them $10.) Here are four of our favorite new apps that take advantage of iPhone 3.0's advanced functionality

ScrollMotion Iceberg Store, free (books cost extra)

The ScrollMotion e-book store isn't new to the iPhone app game, but each e-book was sold as a separate application. Now, users can download a single centralized app and purchase as many books as they please.

—New York Post, June 28, 2009

iPhone software developer ScrollMotion is partnering with dozens of book, magazine and newspaper publishers to create new digital content for the iPhone

ScrollMotion, which created the Iceberg Reader, has partnered with many publishers over the past eight months. Among the features it can add to e-books are allowing users to move through "pages" with the swipe of a finger; animated graphics; and the ability to copy, paste, notate and e-mail passages of text.

—Publishers Weekly, June 23, 2009

With 50,000 apps available and a new iPhone operating system on its way, a new kind of software hero has emerged—the app-trepreneur. In the reading space, a tiny New York-based company called Scrollmotion stepped into the spotlight last week at Apple's World Wide Developers Conference as Josh Koppel bounded on stage to promote the company's new Iceberg reader.

Iceberg is different from other reading apps in that it puts a premium on the experience of reading: the type size and style, the flow of pages from one to another, and the overall simulation of a tactile reading experience. Instead of focusing on the quantity of books, magazines, and newspapers available through its reader, Scrollmotion has concentrated on creating a full-featured touch-screen reading experience. It has a sophisticated set of navigation features that allow the reader to manipulate the type and presentation without losing the book's pagination or one's place in the book. You can even annotate and export those notes.

—The Big Money, June 22, 2009

ScrollMotion, a mobile app developer spotlighted at Apple's recent developer conference, formally announced agreements to bring additional books, magazines and newspapers to its e-reader application for the iPhone...

ScrollMotion CEO John Lema [...] says the company is trying to use "all the functionality of the phone."

—Media Post, June 22, 2009

Esquire, Harvard Business Review and Bon Appetit are among the magazine titles that will launch iPhone applications in coming months through a partnership with developer ScrollMotion, which also created the new and very successful People magazine app

"What we never had before was a good enough device that rivaled what it was like to read in the magazine space," says ScrollMotion co-founder Josh Koppel. "The iPhone is a game changer, a whole new type of interaction. With touch screens it is a magic slate."

—Min Online, June 22, 2009

Friday's launch of the iPhone 3GS could usher in an innovative and lucrative new era for those who create applications for the popular device, developers and industry observers say...

ScrollMotion plans to introduce an upgraded version of its Iceberg reader, which will allow iPhone users to download more than 50 magazines, 170 newspapers and 1 million books to their devices for reading on the go

"We love the new 3.0 functionality," said Josh Koppel, a ScrollMotion co-founder, who also believes the phone's copy-and-paste feature will help students and other readers get more use from the Iceberg app. "A new way to monetize on this magical device ... is the best thing we could have asked for."

—CNN, June 19, 2009

Apple on Monday unveiled a faster iPhone and dropped the price of the existing model to $99...

Apple offered the stage to several developers, who demonstrated a range of new Apps...

An e-reader app, Scrollmotion, will have 170 daily newspapers, 1 million books and 50 magazines for sale, via its App. Additionally, it will offer textbooks, and use the cut and paste features for research.

—USA Today, June 9, 2009

Let's follow the logic. Apple iPhones can now buy movies and TV shows just like a computer. What about magazines? Maybe them too: an application called Scrollmotion says it hopes to offer on the iPhone "50 major magazines, 170 daily newspapers and 1 million books," possibly including Esquire and Bon Appetit. Is the stage set for iPhone to cash in on that grand-daddy of journalism life preservers: The iTunes of Journalism?

—The Atlantic, June 9, 2009

Despite the litany of Apple announcements at the opening keynote speech of the company's developers' conference, what could turn out to be more interesting than the new products it named is what Apple didn't say Monday...

Several of the companies that trooped up to the stage to show off their new applications had an educational bent to them: ScrollMotion's Josh Koppel talked about a new e-book reader and e-book store.

—C-Net, June 9, 2009

Apple has slashed the price of the iPhone 3G to just $99 from today as it unveiled the new iPhone 3GS which will be available on 19 June in the UK. The announcement came at Apple’s worldwide developers’ conference, which opened today in San Francisco, and attracted 5,200 programmers from 54 countries...

ScrollMotion unveiled an app that turns the iPhone into a competitor to Amazone’s Kindle e-reader. With more than a million books, 50 major magazines, 170 daily newspapers already in the App Store, they were now negotiating with textbook publishers.

—Computer Weekly, June 9, 2009

The past few weeks mark a good time of year for the technology magazines and websites. However, for the past year or so, Apple’s WWDC has marked an important moment for the publishing community as the release of the App Store turned the millions of iPhones into eReaders and instantly created the largest built-in audience for eBooks outside of the computer ecosystem...

What came as a shock yesterday was not that someone (in this case ScrollMotion, makes of the standalone Iceberg applications) had made such a fully realized eBook store, but that Apple had decided to include that Application as one of the demonstrations during the Keynote. Yes, Apple demonstrated an eBook reader in one of the most heavily covered news events of the year, and in doing so, Apple sent a bold shot across the bow of Amazon’s Kindle.

—Fiction Matters, June 9, 2009

As if to prove that the Brits are on the right track, Apple gave a shout-out to Scrollmotion's Iceberg Reader app during the iPhone 3.0 OS launch this week. With the Kindle app, Iceberg, and individual book apps, the iPhone is becoming a credible alternative. Now all we need is an Apple reading platform that is bigger than a vanity mirror.

—The Big Money, June 9, 2009

Apple offered its devoted fans their periodic supply of catnip on Monday with a new version of the iPhone, called the iPhone 3G S. Apple announced some things that were characteristically Apple: more, better, faster features on its smartphones and computers. It also announced something that was not: lower prices…

ScrollMotion, a start-up based in New York, unveiled an application at the convention called Iceberg, a digital bookstore that will let users purchase best sellers from within the application without having to open a browser.

—The New York Times, June 8, 2009

Apple showed off a bunch of new apps that other companies have developed for iPhone…

Another is an e-reader application from ScrollMotion that promises to offer 50 magazines, 170 daily newspapers and 1 million books on the new iPhone platform.

—Newsweek, June 8, 2009

Steve Jobs didn't appear, but an iPhone chock full of new features and a new MacBooks—soon to sport a spanking new operating system—went on display at Apple's (AAPL) World Wide Developers Conference in San Francisco on June 8...

Along with the new phone comes an update to the iPhone's operating system. Among its many new features is the ability to initiate transactions within an application. This will be especially popular among game developers, but others will take advantage of it as well. One company, Scrollmotion, said it will offer 1 million books for download, including textbooks, plus 50 magazines and 170 daily newspapers, thus putting the iPhone and iPod touch in competition with Amazon's Kindle digital reader.

—BusinessWeek, June 8, 2009

It doesn't take a particularly creative publishing executive to imagine a big opportunity in the new iPhone software Apple showed off today… A startup called Scrollmotion demonstrated from Apple's stage its forthcoming reader software and boasted it would offer 50 major magazines, 170 daily newspapers and 1 million books. Esquire, ESPN and Bon Appetit were pictured inside the app.

—Gawker, June 8, 2009

iPhone 3.0 demos: ScrollMotion’s iPhone book store — Contains over 500 best-selling book, 50 major magazines, 170 daily newspapers, and 1m books. Whoa. Take that Kindle!

—ZD Net, June 8, 2009

Perhaps the most overlooked boost to e-books this year — and a challenge to some of the standard thinking about them — came from Apple’s do-it-all gadget, the iPhone... ScrollMotion, announced this week that it would begin selling e-books for the iPhone from major publishers like Simon & Schuster, Random House and Penguin.

—New York Times, December 23, 2008

While there's plenty of e-books for the iPhone already, ScrollMotion has two advantages over its rivals: A gorgeous, feature-filled e-reader app called Iceberg and deals with several major publishers, including Random House, Simon and Schuster, Houghton Mifflin, Penguin, and Hachette.

—Silicon Valley Insider, December 23, 2008

ScrollMotion, a New York mobile app developer, has concluded deals with a number of major publishing houses, and is in talks with several others, to produce newly released and best-selling e-books as applications for the iPhone and iPod touch. Publishers now on board include Houghton Mifflin, Simon & Schuster, Random House, Hachette and Penguin Group USA. Having these big names is a big step forward for iTunes itself in becoming an e-book shop and the iPhone in becoming a legitimate e-book reader and competitor to products like the Kindle and the Sony E-Reader..

—Wired, December 22, 2008

The minute you meet ScrollMotion co-founder Josh Koppel, you know you’re in the company of a visionary. Intense, smart, and unpretentious — quick-thinking and quick-talking — Koppel is a writer whose unconventional memoir appeared just after September 11, 2001, and in short order wound up in a landfill.

The experience would have left many authors furious and devastated, but it got Koppel thinking.

He was convinced that the odd size and and strange format of the volume, which seemed out of place on traditional bookshelves and booksellers’ tables, were part of what sunk it. In fact, he realized, it felt like he’d written a book for a medium that didn’t exist yet.

On coming to this conclusion, most aspiring writers would have slunk off to a desk job, pulled out a razor, or at least resolved to write more traditionally. But Koppel’s been experimenting with ways of telling stories by hacking existing media ever since. And when one door has slammed shut, he’s shrugged his shoulders, moved down the hall, and pushed his way through a different one.

—Maud Newton, December 22, 2008

Tired of lugging around paperbacks, but don’t feel like dropping the extra change for a standalone e-book reader when you already own an iPhone?ScrollMotion has announced that they’ve partnered with Random House, Simon & Schuster, Houghton Mifflin, Penguin Group USA and Hachette to begin selling e-books repackaged as iPhone applications, or “books-as-apps”.

—Tech Crunch, December, 2008

"We’re a full-service development shop with serious technical and creative capabilities. We have patents as well as very specific design processes that help us work well with our clients, no matter what their data looks like. We want to make detailed, beautiful little things for what is probably the most beautiful consumer device ever created..."

"We’re great at marrying our clients' core business objectives with the exciting possibilities inherent in mobile computing... We focus on usability, design and fun..."

"Most of our partners are companies or brands that have a lot of content they’re looking to extend into mobile. Information becomes inherently more interesting when you add the Where and the When."

"That's the main question in building iPhone apps: How do I make an experience more compelling when I put it into the physical world, when I add locality."

—Josh Koppel, interviewed by the Apple Gazette, June 18, 2008

"Josh Koppel, who runs New York-based ScrollMotion, says he's seen so much interest in ad-supported iPhone applications that he's brought on extra developers... 'We’ll be building out [iPhone] applications for the next two years,' [Josh Koppel] says."

—Olga Kharif, "Getting Set for the iPhone App Store,"
BusinessWeek, June 9, 2008

Small Screens, Big Dreams

"Koppel says: 'We need to bring this to where the music lives, which is the iPod' – and ultimately, the mobile phone. To that end, Koppel has hacked the iPod... to create another application, ScrollMotion... It's a flipbook for the digital age, harnessing Apple's genius for simplicity... 'I want people to think of their devices as more than a jukebox or a phone... We're trying to make the next platform for visual storytelling.'"

—Jeff Howe, "Small Screens, Big Dreams," Print, August 2006

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