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Biblion: The Boundless Library (for iPad) The New York Public Library's surprisingly entertaining Biblion app transports the library stacks to the iPad and captures the unique historical moment of the 1939-40 World's Fair.

Biblion: The Boundless Library (for iPad)

MSRP
$0.00
  • Pros

    Free. Breakthrough interface unfetters print, photo, and video material. Excellent content choices. Highly polished design.

  • Cons

    No bookmarks or search tool.

  • Bottom Line

    The New York Public Library's surprisingly entertaining Biblion app transports the library stacks to the iPad and captures the unique historical moment of the 1939-40 World's Fair.

Biblion: The Boundless Library (Free), an iPad app from the New York Public Library and developer Potion, addresses an age-old query: If your head measures 34-inches around, do you qualify as an oddity? (The answer: Yes, with caveats). Drawing from 2,500 boxes of photographs, press releases, and correspondence related to the 1939-40 New York World's Fair, the first installment of Biblion captures the curiosities of an unique historical moment—the "Great White Way" of oddities, a Coney Island paratrooper ride, a contest that celebrates the "typical" American family—and opens a window into a city, and nation, at the cusp of the second World War.

Biblion features a daring new UI that organizes information conceptually, in metaphorical stacks, and enables users to experience stories through an "infoscape." You can start with an excerpt, tilt your iPad to portrait to read the full story, or jump to a related story and wind up in an entirely different place. While Biblion's content—the 1939-40 World's Fair—may be bounded, the approach is anything but: Books have bibliographies, websites links, but Biblion encompasses parallel streams of information. For addictive reading, exceptional fit and finish, and a playful show-off-your-iPad interface, download Biblion today.

Wandering is Mandatory
The structure of Biblion encourages wandering. The app opens with a collection of metaphorical stacks built around themes, ranging from "A Moment in Time" to "Beacon of Idealism." It should come as little surprise that I started with "Enter the World of Tomorrow."

Once you click "View Stories," however, you enter the "infoscape," the spine of Biblion. NYPL organizes stories by theme, and displays a scrollable list of stories, laid out horizontally to accommodate interspaced red, blue, orange, and yellow bars. Each bar represents a different kind of contextual pathway: audio and video (red bars), images (blue), documents (orange), and connections (yellow). While the first three times of pathways weave into the text, adapting as you scroll, "Connections" opens a right-hand sidebar, containing a synopsis to the connection and the option to read more. What's fantastic about the infoscape view is that it subverts thematic boundaries. As you scroll through stories, the barriers between categories fall away and encourage exploration.

When you click a story, essay, or image gallery holding the iPad in landscape, it opens to an image and abstract, perfect for determining whether to read on. If you want more, simply tilt your iPad to portrait, or, what Biblion terms "Book View." Now you have the complete story, essay, or gallery in a format that closely resembles an essay, only, once scroll down, new content reveals. Yellow text lets you slide open the Connections sidebar. Images and YouTube-based video arrive as you scroll. There's even a sort of visual table of contents pinned to the left hand side of every page: Similar to the horizontal representations from the "infoscape" page, each story has its own touchable legend, complete with interspersed color-coded bars. Instead of scrolling through long stories, you can simply tap the visual TOC to jump to a point of interest.

My only complaint with the app relates to its nomadic tendencies. Because there is so much content, I would welcome a way to either flag favorite stories or search by story title. The machinery is already there: When you open the app, there's a homepage that retains "Recently Viewed" articles as well as unread stories ("Check These Out"). I would love to see Biblion add a search field and "Favorites" section to this page.

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