Since the unfortunate demise of Noble Beast, I’ve gone back to the drawing board in search of a technology platform for Statisticity. There appear to be four broad categories to choose from, each with its own set of pluses and minuses. A quick summary:

Ebooks

The “traditional” ebook is the original digitized book. The main advantages include ease of creation, inexpensive production, and readability across platforms. The main disadvantage is that, apart from very basic features like hyperlinked table of contents, ebooks offer very little of the functionality I hope to incorporate into Statisticity.

Enhanced Ebooks

Also called Fixed Layout Ebooks, these are basically new versions of Epub and Kindle that incorporate additional features like audio and video. There are a few startups that provide authors with tools and services around these formats. The main advantages include ease of creation (no coding skills required), inexpensive production, and readability across platforms (although more limited than traditional ebooks), along with the aforementioned features. The main limitations are the slow adoption of these new formats and the limitations on look and functionality when contrasted with applications.

Standalone Apps

These custom-made applications (also called Native Applications) allow the author to incorporate just about any feature imaginable. However, they come with a host of disadvantages. First, they are expensive to make, and require advanced coding skills. Next, they generally work on only one platform, and must be updated every time that platform undergoes significant change. Finally, distribution is difficult and can generally be done only through specific app stores.

Web apps

This form of application is generally coded in HTML5, thus avoiding some of the disadvantages of native apps (including the single-platform restriction, difficulty of distribution, and need for regular updates). However, web apps are still expensive to make and require advanced coding skills, and they’re more limited than native apps in the features they incorporate.

Noble Beast’s platform was a standalone app framework that could be customized for each new project’s content, along with a dedicated team that promised to remove many (but not all) of the disadvantages of this approach. With NB out of the picture, I’ve been flirting with the idea of using their platform anyway. But the difficulty of doing so has already become clear, and I am now leaning towards one of the enhanced ebook formats that are gaining currency. Ultimately, this shift may prove to be a blessing in disguise…