In our second edition of start-up stories we chat with Dublin based company Woopie. If you have bought the digital versions of our recent Insites: The Book you will already be familiar with their work. They were kind enough to help us out with the development of our epub and .mobi versions.
Co-founded by Martha Rotter (MR) and Stewart Curry (SC) Woopie do a lot more than produce digital books. Their innovative platform is designed to allow publishing across multiple platforms from one source.
I recently chatted with Martha and Stewart about their company, their ambitions and the problem they are solving with Woopie.
Firstly, tell us a bit about Woopie - both the app and the company
SC: Woopie is short for Write Only Once, Publish It Everywhere. Woopie lets people create beautiful digital publications and publish them to many different devices, without compromising on design. We’re located in Dublin, Ireland.
We’ve been bootstrapping since late January 2012 but just this month joined an accelerator programme called Wayra, which is an international programme. We’ve gotten funding and amazing offices right on the Liffey River in Dublin.
The team consists of me Stewart Curry and Martha Rotter. I do the design and front-end stuff, and Martha does the back-end stuff.
What were you and the team doing prior to starting Woopie?
SC: Before Woopie I was working as a designer in a digital media agency, doing web design stuff for a variety of clients. Things like marketing websites, banner ads (I’m so sorry internet!) and web apps. It was great work but the time came to try and go out on my own.
MR: I moved to Dublin from Seattle in 2007 as a job transfer with Microsoft. In 2010 I left to go and do freelance development work and build some of my own projects.
One of those projects was Idea Magazine, which I roped Stewart in to helping me with, and that’s where we discovered the need for a digital publishing tool.
What problem are you solving with Woopie?
SC: The big one is that it’s too difficult and time-consuming to create a digital magazine, and getting it onto different platforms (like e-readers) is a total pain.
Most current solutions assume you already have a print version (and you may not) and then try and force that into an app or a page-turning web view – neither of which are great in my honest opinion.
We think trying to recreate the printed page for digital devices isn’t the best way to get magazines online. There’s so many devices and platforms out there, with so many different capabilities, and trying to shoe-horn a replica page onto them is a sisyphean task.
What we do with Woopie is abstract the content from the presentation and then send it to templates especially formatted for a responsive web view, eReaders, etc.
MR: I noticed with one of my clients that the digital publishing solutions that are there are difficult to learn and not intuitive. Watching people’s frustration in trying to use these tools made me want to create something that was tailored to them and focused on the experience. Publishing is stressful enough without having to learn new tools and processes constantly.
What are the barriers to entry and how does Woopie reduce them?
MR: For many would-be publishers, the barrier is cost. Tools are expensive to license and time-consuming to learn.
SC: If you’ve been working a lot in web you don’t have to go back and learn InDesign and all that goes with it – we want to make creating a magazine as easy as Tumblr is for websites. Then there’s ePub. To say the spec is strict is an understatement. So many hair-pulling moments with that monster.
You are publishers yourself too, tell us a bit about “Idea” and how the process of creating and publishing it influences your product.
SC: When we started making Idea Magazine, there was no really appropriate solution for what we wanted to build. That’s where Woopie came from - we couldn’t find what worked for us, so we decided to build it ourselves!
What’s been great is that we can add a bit to each issue as we build upon what we have – social sharing, navigation shortcuts via swipe or keypress, better contents etc. Plus the feedback has been great for telling us what people want from a digital magazine.
Ultimately what we’ve been able to do is go from 90% graft (the boring stuff – linking pages etc) / 10% craft (cool designer stuff) to the reverse – now all the heavy lifting is done and we can focus on making the magazine look good, spend time doing custom illustrations, etc.
We want designers to spend their time doing interesting things and pushing boundaries instead of trying to mash their product into a bad format.
MR: Now that we are able to build on top of our own product, we have learned a lot about digital publishing, the various formats and tricky pieces. We are lucky in that we can try new things all the time and if it works, build it in to the platform for others to use.
You are very much part of the Start Up culture in Dublin which appears to be thriving. Why do you think it’s such a hotbed at the moment?
SC: For me it’s pretty simple – it’s thriving because Twitter let people find others with similar interests, and regular meetups & talks help develop a sense of community. Then there’s the people – we’ve some incredibly smart, interesting & friendly people who share what they know, organise get togethers, and sponsor free beer!
MR: People in Dublin are just nice! Well that’s been my experience in my five years of living here. They love to connect and the community is fantastic and incredibly supportive.
Tell us a little more about how you create the .epub and .mobi versions – what’s the process?
MR: You can see some screenshots covering a bit of what our process looks like at http://Woopie. Our process is essentially design the templates, input the content, style it and export to the formats we need. It’s a lot like a Tumblr or WordPress workflow.
Text and images go in, styled publications come out. Then we do a lot of testing to make sure things look as we expect on various devices, apps and browsers.
Were there any major challenges taking our content and turning it into digital formats?
MR: Well the first challenge with this and with any of our projects is getting our templates right. We wanted to make sure we matched the feeling and style of the book as closely as possible.
Once the template works, then it’s a matter of checking features on various platforms. One of the interesting pieces for us on Insites: The Book was footnotes actually! Since we’ve been working almost exclusively on magazines so far, we hadn’t gotten to do footnotes before and getting them right in all the platforms was interesting. But I think they turned out quite nicely in the end!
Are there inconsistencies across devices that cause problems
MR: Short answer: YES!
It actually reminds me a lot of the browser wars. In the browser wars you had differences depending on both operating system and browser. In publishing, we have the same thing except it’s with the hardware or device or app plus the format.
All of the different versions require slightly different content and formatting. .mobi takes html, epub takes xhtml for example, Then there are CSS differences as well as HTML attributes which are accepted in some formats, ignored in others, and actually break the page in others.
It’s time-consuming and difficult to learn all of these idiosyncrasies, and they change too. If that isn’t confusing enough, we now have vendors adding in their own formats too: Amazon, for example, just announced a new format they’ll be using in Kindles called KF8. And you’ve probably heard of iBooks Author from Apple. It’s confusing today, so it’s no wonder many tools have a difficult time keeping up.
What’s the roadmap for Woopie looking like?
SC: Right now we’re working with our alpha customers to make sure we’ve the right product fit and are focussing on the right features. From there it’s opening it out to the public, refining and enhancing what we have to offer so people can make beautiful things.
How can people find out more about what you are up to?
SC: They can visit our website at Woopie and follow us on twitter – @makewoopie, @irishstu, and @martharotter.