phillryu

Thanks! Have to say the idea of paid downloads has always been gross to us, definitely hurts the ecosystem and tips things over in favor to companies like EA who have cash to burn. We work pretty hard to pick up new fans, then produce apps that they'll actually find cool and pick up on their own :)

We were actively developing the app for over a year and a half, in part due to a reboot midway. (The safe, prize and much of the game didn't exist until midway through!)

I just want to note that I am listed as co-creator of this app for a reason, and marketing was an afterthought with Classics after creating a really great reading experience.

That having been said, I sympathize with your disbelief. Yeah, what we did was obviously a direct port of reading real books. But you have no idea how much crap we took for doing exactly that – what I considered the obvious. To a lot of people apparently things like a page flip port seemed completely idiotic. To me it was an integral part of the enjoyment of reading books that had been lacking in most ereader experiences.

We did reap the rewards too, so ultimately I can't really complain, and we always joked that Apple would eventually rip off the page flip since it just makes sense. All those TV ads Apple featured Classics in now seem strange in retrospect though, presuming iBooks was designed and under developed before our app's release.