I first met David Smith of Traveling Classics at iPhone Dev Camp DC. He wound up winning a spot to give a talk and actually built an iPhone app, as a tutorial, in front of the group. Later, I learned that the fastest he’s ever built an app and submitted to the App Store was in 106 minutes. Not too shabby.
We kept in touch since then and started doing some work together. Dave had already had a very successful book app called Audiobook (Download Edition), which has been firmly entrenched in the top five book category. Audiobook is exactly what it sounds like – an audio book player for the iPhone. Initially, his goal was for me to help improve that app but in our collaboration, we came up with a fresh, new idea – AudioBookShelf (iTunes link).
AudioBookShelf was built with a much broader audience in mind. Unlike the first app, which has a massive catalog of books available from the LibriVox project, we wanted to focus on the top books his audience were enjoying. So, we dug through some of his data, came up with a list of the best books with the best readers, did some editing, and finally, overlaid a really cool experience.
One element of the visual that we wanted to hit was to make AudioBookShelf feel like a real bookshelf. Many book apps stack books vertically or show them as they would be in a bookstore. We wanted to create an experience that allowed a person to browse a bookshelf.
AudioBookShelf just went live yesterday and we are already getting a good response. We expect great things from it and hope that you are able to enjoy the fun experience, quality audio books, and full feature set. For more information, check it out on iTunes, the re-launched AudioBookShelf website, or the Traveling Classics’ blog.
