In an interview with The Toronto Review of Books, app designer Chris Stevens talked about how losing his job led him to making one of the most successful book apps out there.
He and another unemployed friend took the public domain Alice in Wonderland book and built an interactive book app, Alice for the iPad. The interactive book became an overnight sensation, as it has already sold about 500,000 apps. Within days of the app’s release Stevens was in a meeting with HarperCollins.
He said in the interview: “For a while they thought I had the key to the future of publishing—they thought that if they could extract the secret to what made Alice a success, they could revitalize the market. The excitement surrounding the iPad led a lot of publishers to suspect that Apple might be able to bolster the industry, but—just as it always is—great content, not technology makes a popular app. I told them what I did, but they didn’t seem to get it.”