Biblion: The Boundless Library (for iPad)

Biblion: The Boundless Library (Free), an iPad app from the New York Public Library and developer Potion, addresses an age-old query: If your head measures 34-inches around, do you qualify as an oddity? (The answer: Yes, with caveats). Drawing from 2,500 boxes of photographs, press releases, and correspondence related to the 1939-40 New York World's Fair, the first installment of Biblion captures the curiosities of an unique historical moment—the "Great White Way" of oddities, a Coney Island paratrooper ride, a contest that celebrates the "typical" American family—and opens a window into a city, and nation, at the cusp of the second World War.

Biblion features a daring new UI that organizes information conceptually, in metaphorical stacks, and enables users to experience stories through an "infoscape." You can start with an excerpt, tilt your iPad to portrait to read the full story, or jump to a related story and wind up in an entirely different place. While Biblion's content—the 1939-40 World's Fair—may be bounded, the approach is anything but: Books have bibliographies, websites links, but Biblion encompasses parallel streams of information. For addictive reading, exceptional fit and finish, and a playful show-off-your-iPad interface, download Biblion today.

Wandering is Mandatory
The structure of Biblion encourages wandering. The app opens with a collection of metaphorical stacks built around themes, ranging from "A Moment in Time" to "Beacon of Idealism." It should come as little surprise that I started with "Enter the World of Tomorrow."

Once you click "View Stories," however, you enter the "infoscape," the spine of Biblion. NYPL organizes stories by theme, and displays a scrollable list of stories, laid out horizontally to accommodate interspaced red, blue, orange, and yellow bars. Each bar represents a different kind of contextual pathway: audio and video (red bars), images (blue), documents (orange), and connections (yellow). While the first three times of pathways weave into the text, adapting as you scroll, "Connections" opens a right-hand sidebar, containing a synopsis to the connection and the option to read more. What's fantastic about the infoscape view is that it subverts thematic boundaries. As you scroll through stories, the barriers between categories fall away and encourage exploration.

When you click a story, essay, or image gallery holding the iPad in landscape, it opens to an image and abstract, perfect for determining whether to read on. If you want more, simply tilt your iPad to portrait, or, what Biblion terms "Book View." Now you have the complete story, essay, or gallery in a format that closely resembles an essay, only, once scroll down, new content reveals. Yellow text lets you slide open the Connections sidebar. Images and YouTube-based video arrive as you scroll. There's even a sort of visual table of contents pinned to the left hand side of every page: Similar to the horizontal representations from the "infoscape" page, each story has its own touchable legend, complete with interspersed color-coded bars. Instead of scrolling through long stories, you can simply tap the visual TOC to jump to a point of interest.

My only complaint with the app relates to its nomadic tendencies. Because there is so much content, I would welcome a way to either flag favorite stories or search by story title. The machinery is already there: When you open the app, there's a homepage that retains "Recently Viewed" articles as well as unread stories ("Check These Out"). I would love to see Biblion add a search field and "Favorites" section to this page.

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Biblion for iPad: Stumbling through the stacks

May. 18 2011 - 7:00 pm | 360 views | 0 recommendations |

Remember the early days of the Web, when every business in the world rushed to claim a corner of what we were then calling Cyberspace? The result was a glut of incoherent, overbuilt ?sites that did nothing to burnish the brands behind them. ?We’re at more or less that stage right now in the life of tablet-based media, and the latest entity to fall victim to the “Gotta get there” mania is The New York Public Library. What’s surprising, at least to me, is the enthusiasm that’s greeted the release of the NYPL’s Biblion app for iPad. The ecstatic press may have to do with the affection a lot of tech-savvy people feel for the 1939-40 World’s Fair, the subject of the app’s first issue, or maybe it’s just the understandable desire to cheerlead for a worthy institution. It’s hard to believe anybody could warm up to the app itself, which manages to wrap some of the NYPL’s coolest Fair-related holdings in a baffling package that’s almost impossible to use.

Duly noted: I’m in the minority here. The Atlantic asks admiringly if the library has built “the magazine app of the future”; The New Yorker’s Book Bench blogs the release in a post slugged “Biblion Roars To Life On The iPad.” The trouble is, The New Yorker is right: Biblion does roar to life, with a whooshing mock-3D array of images suspended in “space.” (Or… Cyberspace!!!) Then it blows right past and leaves you scratching your head. And say, did somebody say “multi-linear immersive experience”? Oh, right: That was the library, in a press release, and if that doesn’t set alarm bells ringing you need to get your ears checked. Here are some of the ways in which Biblion’s multi-linear experience is immersive: Content is presented in “stacks,” which is great if you want to metaphorically represent the holdings of a great library, but lousy if you want users to be able to navigate them. Sub-content is keyed to an indecipherable colored grid and studded throughout the main entries in a way that annoyingly interrupts the flow of the narrative; controls are reduced to a cryptic array of unexplained symbols at top and bottom. It’s next to impossible to figure out how to jump from story to story. Overall, the NYPL has built a near-perfect example of what tech writer John Gruber once called an “uphill” user interface — one that makes you feel like you have to fight the app to get anything done. (For a corresponding “downhill” app, look at Flipboard or Zite.) The fact that Biblion is crash-happy, like so many 1.0 releases, is just the cherry on top.

I’m a sucker for the ’39 Fair and an enthusiastic early adopter of new apps, so I couldn’t quite believe what a chore Biblion is to use. Figuring that maybe I was just having a bad hair, day I contacted oral historian Jeff Kisseloff, author of “You Must Remember This,” one of the essential books on New York City history. Kisseloff nailed what’s so frustrating about the app: “I suppose it’s possible to use it,” he said, “but it’s not especially enjoyable. They just had no clue how to take advantage of the iPad.” That about sums it up. Like the early settlers of the 1990s Web, the tablet team at the NYPL rushed in without having a clear idea of how to get where they wanted to go. And now, God help them, they’re lost in the stacks.

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