t here are more than one hundred thousand mobile apps for the iPhone, andAndroid is quickly catching up to that number. Universities have apps, sportsteams have apps, authors have apps—everyone seems to be in the app market, and for obvious reasons. Unlike the previous generation, which didn’t mind waiting to get their information when they got home, today’s generation wants their information on the go. In many respects they could be called Generation Mobile, because for the fist time, there is a group of people who can have everything they could ever want in the palm of their hand. What’s alarming, however, is of the hundreds of thousands of mobile apps available for phones, the amount of apps that librarians have built for libraries can be counted on one hand! The District of Columbia Public Library has an app to help you fid books in its catalog. By the time this book is published, a few other libraries will likely have joined in, but the number isn’t anywhere near where it should be. What does this mean? That there’s an entire generation that’s being overlooked. Businesses have successfully found a new generation of clients simply by promoting services to them in ways that speak to a new type of user: the mobile user. They have proved that successful apps work and should not be overlooked. For as long as computers and the Internet have been around, libraries have been on the cuttng edge of implementing them; perhaps for the fist time, libraries are lagging, and it’s time to catch up. Mobile app development has become a prett lucrative business; it’s a fair statement to say that it is the twenty-fist century’s equivalent of a gold rush—upstart companies are making millions. In 2010, a developer for the Android phone reported that he was making $10,000 a month on an app that helped people fid where they had lef their car. He’s not alone. It’s not in libraries’ best interest to go into app development with the intention of making money, but still, there is a huge market for mobile development. Mobile websites allow patrons to avail themselves of library services no mattr where they are. The sites can be set up to allow patrons to reserve books, to surf the card catalog, and more. Mobile websites, however, are a much diffrent interface from the sites that you’re used to seeing on the Internet. There are a lot of reasons libraries have, by and large, stayed away from phone apps. One of the biggest reasons, however, is that the skills needed to successfully build them have historically been greater than what most libraries can affrd; an app programmer can cost several hundred dollars an hour. Building a phone app using the phone’s native programming language can be hard work and can take hundreds of hours. Fortunately, new open-source softare has made it easy for people with more limited programming skills to take advantage of apps. Using the technologies available, it’s possible for any library to create an app at a low cost and to offr patrons a way to access the wealth of knowledge and entertainment stored in every library facility. The point of this book is to show you what an app is, how to build one, and how to successfully market your app to library patrons. In the forthcoming chapters, you will learn not just how to build an app with relatively no programming skills but also the best practices for marketing the book to your target audience, as well as both free and paid services that are available to make going mobile even simpler and seamless. There are many challenges ahead for any library attmpting to enter this new form of development—and the challenges are among the biggest roadblocks for many libraries interested in extending their library services into the mobile market. I address some of the problems and challenges in this book, but the main point is to offr cost-effctive solutions to library staf who are interested in experimenting with building an app for the library.

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