Andrew Whitson approaches the Cogito project with an e- book in mind

Cogito as a book in hard copy and digital formats. ( Chapter 1 )

A couple of years ago as I was beginning to put together the roughs for Cogito I was very much aware of the changing face of the publishing industry. One of the major changes was obviously the introduction of the e- book. Apps were also being introduced at a rapid rate to the Apple Apps Store  and we decided to explore this avenue rather than the e-book one as a possible way forward for our publishing model. The Apps avenue appeared to offer a lot more possible interactive choices than the  equivalent e-book avenue, especially within the picture book format. We were very much aware of the Kindle for novels and this seemed fair enough, but what way could we present our content in a new way that was interactive and engaging without detracting from the quality of the visual and narrative content that had been (and still is) the mainstay of hard copy picture books?

Coding 

As we began to explore how to do this, it quickly became apparent that we did not have the essential skills to build this kind of product. This was mainly due to the fact that we had no knowledge of how to code. For anything to happen on the screen either through a tap or swipe or pinch for instance...there had to be a code in place to allow the specified action to take place. We began to hunt for how to do this and soon came up against terminology such as Sprite sheets, Physics actions, Lua Language, Objective C, and so on and before we knew it we were faced with a major decision:

Begin to learn these new coding languages or employ a third party company which would take the whole project on and construct it digitally as a partner. This is where things soon became expensive!

As we did not relish the thought of spending a year or so mastering the fine principles of a new coding language we were going to have to opt for the second option, or of course just not bother to make an app at all.

Employing the third party coders

We decided to employ a third party to come in and work with us on the project after we had secured funding from the Northern Ireland Arts Council. I must stress, this funding was crucial in allowing the project to go ahead at all as the costs would have otherwise been prohibitive to a small publishing house such as An tSnáthaid Mhór. We spent some time looking for partners who could offer this sort of service and opted for a Hollywood based company called Origin Partners which seemed to have the infrastructure in place to deal with this sort of project.Once we had settled on this partnership we began to have meetings for the way forward for this project and this is where the hard work began.