Is The Atavist the real disruptor to journalism?

Today I  discovered the just released application The Atavist who by their own description is a boutique publishing house producing original nonfiction stories for digital, mobile reading devices.
Basicly, they are like a bookstore for long-form articles.

I’m already a Longform.org-junkie, constantly adding enough articles to Instapaper than I can handle or read unless the train comes to a sudden halt and gets stuck for an hour or two. In which case all my fellow commuters start swearing while I switch on the iPad and starts reading to the sound of hummingbirds in my head. We all handle delays differently.

But, back to Atavist. The articles are available for the iPhone, iPad, Nook and Kindle and while the app is free you pay $2.99 per article.
Each article is laced with photography, videos and sound where appropriate and the text is according to The Atavist fact-checked.

Video and photos might be nice but what really gets me going is that every article contains an audio-book so you can listen to it while driving or doing the dishes. This is what makes me cough up what might sound like quite a lot of money for an article I might be able to find on Longform a couple of days later.

If you’re an author of articles and feel you want to try a new method of distributing your content through a revenue-share model that probably is 50/50, The Atavist brings something completely new to the table.

As a swede the first article I bought was of course Lifted – The robbers had a helicopter, explosives, and inside information on a $150 million cash repository. But the police were onto them. Inside one of history’s most elaborate heists, and the race to unravel it. Evan Ratliff tells the story about the robbery in Stockholm that probably will render at least one Bruckheimer movie, a couple of inspired by – novels and one of BBC documentary starring Kenneth Branagh, due to the spectacular use of an helicopter to perform the robbery.

For my almost 3 bucks I get a small book packed with a great story, photos, videos from the security cameras on the premises documenting when the robbers landed on the roof and cut their way to the money. It’s excellent told and I couldn’t stop reading.

The only bad thing was that I bought it on my iPhone and it seems I can’t download it for free to the iPad but have to buy it again. Not a lot of money, but still.

The app is impressive and I’ll definitely keep using it as long as they keep the quality. The only negative so far is as stated above regarding using it on different devices and that I can’t opt out getting the audio-book since it takes quite a lot of time to download.

What the app means for long form writers still remains to be seen, but this is definitely something worth looking into for both other markets and languages and for traditional media. It’s not that big a difference from buying an online movie and it’s quite logic that someone eventually would have done an app like this. Still, it’s definitely a breath of fresh air in an otherwise quite oldfashioned business.

Update: Shorly after this post was published I received a mail from The Atavist explaining that only one purchase is necessary for all iOS-devices. I clearly had made a mistake and when trying again I realized that if you buy it on – as in my case – the iPhone and uses the same account on the iPad you can download it for free to the the other platform. That’s of course totally awesome but not as awesome as the fact that they noticed my tweet and took the time to mail me. The Avatist – you’ve got yourself another fan. Thanks.