If you look at the history of written communication and the types of symbol languages used, you notice that phonetic based symbols have flourished. Phonetic symbols represent sounds that we make in everyday speech. Before phonetic symbols became the de-facto standard for written communication, more abstract, artistic, and meaningful symbols were used. However, they were often complex and inaccessible to people who lacked the basic cultural knowledge of the society that authored them.

Hieroglyphs are a perfect example. The combination and relative position of the different elements of a hieroglyph can signify a multitude of deep meanings. The depth of meaning in a single hieroglyph can be akin to tens of thousands of phonetic symbols or multiple print books. Despite their abstract nature, these hieroglyphs are effective tools for communicating deep knowledge between members of that society. However, for people from other cultures or distant time periods who do not have the same base knowledge or cultural understanding, these hieroglyphs are hard to understand. The underlying information is not easily deconstructed, and the information they contain is not readily accessible.

Imagine if hieroglyphs were digital. What if you could deconstruct them into their various elements and access the underlying information that they represent? What if anyone could browse the underlying information that makes up a hieroglyph while filling in any gaps of understanding using culturally relevant elements and phonetic symbols in the reader’s native language? For a hieroglyph inscribed on a stone surface this would not be possible, but if we transition the hieroglyph to the digital world these barriers disappear and a new world of possibilities emerge. In a digital medium, other forms of symbol-based communication become accessible, efficient and potentially more meaningful than phonetic symbols. The digital medium enables us to explore, understand and reconstruct these digital glyphs to transform how information is communicated and stored while making it accessible to different cultures.

When you enter the digital world and depart from relying on phonetic symbols many other pervasive problems can be solved. With the volume of symbols necessary to communicate something in a phonetic symbol language, layout, organization and sequencing becomes a challenging problem. If you abandon the constraints of phonetic symbol language and the print-based paradigm, you start to realize that your screen can be a viewport into the digital world. A viewport that enables you to browse an infinite space that contains digital glyphs that can be deconstructed, where the relationship between information can be explored, re-structured, expanded and shared.

From demoing our prototype iPhone app to authors we realized that the business proposition was limited. Although people were enthusiastic about the experience, distribution was always at the center of the conversation when asking authors about considering our iPhone app for releasing their books.

This led us to think about how we could solve the distribution problem. At first, we wondered if the experience our app provided would be enough to attain a large distribution in a relatively short time period. We all agreed that it was very unlikely. That’s when we asked ourselves what prevented us from enabling authors to distribute to leading marketplaces such as Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, Kindle and Nook while providing a next generation content experience.

We began to see a few trends among leading eBook readers. Most supported ePUB, a leading eBook format. From our research, we learned that ePUB was focused on a print-based reading paradigm and wouldn’t support the types of experiences we wanted to provide to readers. We also learned that many popular eBook readers often placed limits on the number of other ways a book could be distributed.

As a result, we soon realized that the content industry would be plagued with a large number of mediums, platforms and devices competing to become the leading technologies in the future. If we could be an unbiased technology solution that enabled authors to distribute content anywhere they wanted, while also providing a better reading and authoring experience we would have a unique and compelling value proposition.

While exploring this concept, we came across talks about the application of Transmedia Storytelling (coined by Henry Jenkins while at the MIT New Media Lab) to the movie industry. We realized we were applying similar concepts to the publishing world, and thus adopted the use of Transmedia Publishing.

As we further refined our conceptualization of Transmedia Publishing, we settled on a central authoring experience that would optimize content products for delivery across multiple devices, platforms and mediums to maximize reach, engagement and monetization.

With the rise in popularity of smartphones, and the multitude of devices entering the market, we had to address the technical challenges associated with the fragmented and ever-evolving mobile space. The biggest debate was choosing between native apps and HTML5 Web Apps. The native app proponents claimed that it was the most effective way to provide a rich experience. The web app proponents were primarily concerned with the overhead of supporting multiple code bases for different smartphone operating systems and espoused the new abilities of HTML5/CSS3 and Javascript.

With the readers’ experience and distribution at the center of our value proposition, we faced a tough decision. We could go native, make it easier to achieve a rich experience, and accept the incredible time and resource burden of having to maintain multiple codebases; or we could bet on cross platform web technologies. In the end, the more meaningful technology solution, as well as forward thinking strategy, was to push the envelope of web technologies to achieve a rich, cross platform user experience that minimized the need to integrate with different smartphone operating systems.

The motivation for creating DigiGlyph came from our disappointment in the current generation of eBook readers. Kindle and Nook were just starting to gain momentum and new eBook readers were being released every month. We noticed that almost all eBook readers were trying to recreate the print medium in the digital world. This seemed to make sense. It reduced the barriers to adoption for users who were accustomed to a physical book turning physical pages, thus helping make the transition to eBooks easier for readers.

We were fascinated by this emerging trend in the publishing industry and asked ourselves the question: What will the reading experience become once society has been weaned off print and adopted a fully digital medium?

We hypothesized that the reading experience of the future would be a multisensory, socially collaborative experience that breaks past the confines of a “book” and engages readers on a deeper level, allowing them to contribute to the overall experience. Just as an aging book gives you a sense of its previous owners, digital content of the future will hold the impressions of its readers.

Our first prototype was a multisensory iPhone application. We built an audio-book reader capable of reading a book’s contents to the user in the author’s own voice. The written content within the book smoothly scrolled across the screen in sync with the author’s voice; however, users were free to take control at any time and explore the content at their own pace, bringing them back to a more traditional reading experience.

In an effort to allow authors to easily compose such a reading experience on their own, we developed DigiGlyph Author – a friendly tool which provided a basic word processing experience, plus the additional capability of recording synchronized voice-overs for the text. Once completed, a content title was automatically packaged into an iPhone application at the click of a button.

Next, we tackled the social story. We knew that the experience had to be similar to commenting on blogs. However, we wanted context-based conversation, making it easier to discuss specific pieces of content instead of an entire chapter. We augmented our prototype app by allowing readers to flick off-screen at any time and view a comment stream for that specific section. We believed that having context-based conversation would improve the ability of readers to discuss and interact with the underlying information within that section, ultimately adding value for both the reader and the author.

After demonstrating our prototype to authors and avid readers, we realized that authors wanted to maximize distribution and releasing a book as an iPhone app alone wasn’t enough. We had to step back and ask ourselves how our iPhone app, even with its next generation reading experience, could compete with the Amazon print marketplace, Kindle or Nook eBook marketplaces, or even other iPhone eBook readers. Book enthusiasts also told us they enjoyed the experience but lamented not having the book physically present, saying that having real pages to touch was something they loved and wouldn’t want to give up any time soon.