it disappears…

I posted about invisibility a couple of weeks ago. It seems that David Carr from the New York Times gets it too. In a PBS chat about the iPad, he makes the following point:

On the iPad: “One thing you have to understand about this gadget is that the gadget disappears pretty quickly. You’re looking into pure software.”

And as the app store has shown us, the only limit to the software appears to be our own imaginations…

(via Daring Fireball)

Now he’s convinced…

There’s been lots of nonsense on the web in the last week or so about whether the iPad will fly – and I’ll add to the hubbub shortly, but for the moment, here’s a link sent to me by a sceptical friend with the words “now I’m convinced…”

Kindle Thoughts

So I bought a Kindle a couple of weeks ago. It’s a birthday present for my partner, so I had to keep it wrapped up for a few days (after Amazon very efficiently got it across the world in 3 days, and then the local courier couldn’t find my office for 3 more…). Anyhow, she unwrapped it to great excitement on Monday and whilst I’ve only had time for a quick play, here are some thoughts…

The Good

• The bookstore. Finally an easy way to buy books without having to fuss with USB connections etc. And I *love* the idea of invisible international 3g connectivity. Not sure what network its roaming on here in Oz, but it’s fast enough and seems to work transparently.
• Combined with newspaper subscriptions, I can see a terrific way of keeping up with English language news when travelling. Pity there’s no Oz newspapers, but when we spend our (planned) time with the in-laws in France, I can read the Guardian without having to track down the international print edition or paying huge data roaming fees to read on the iphone.
• The Screen is pretty snazzy. All the attributes of e-ink, and it *seems* snappier than the Sony. The screensaver book cover images are pretty neat too…

The Bad

• The bookstore.The browsing experience is not amazing. Not only is the Australian list less than comprehensive (it’s amazing how quickly you get to the project gutenberg type PD titles) but the slowness of the screen (and probably the connection) make the experience a bit clunky. And unbelievably, the recommended title thumbnail illustrations are impossible to decipher. I mean impossible.
• The interface is better than the sony – it seems a more natural device to hold (even if the keyboard is a waste of space most of the time). But I’ve hated mini-joysticks since the first of the thinkpads and I haven’t changed my mind. It always feels like I’m selecting rather than navigating or vice versa, which is especially disconcerting in the store.
• And the screen is still too slow. It’s OK for reading, but it’s still way too slow for interactions any more complex than mere page turning…

I have to admit these impressions are based on a grand total of ten minutes of fiddling and there’s lots more to consider. So why buy one? Well, the partner had been using kindle on the iphone since the app went international and she seemed to be pretty happy with the range of kindle titles in her favourite genres. And I needed to find *something* to get her for her birthday. With the price of paperbacks in this country on the wrong side of $30, the kindle hardware doesn’t cost much more than 8 or 9 books. Or a dinner for two at Rockpool !!? (warning: pdf link)

I think the kindle will come into its own when we travel – having a bookstore in the backpack is a killer app. But the jury’s still out the rest of the time…

MacMillan v Amazon update

It appears that Macmillan titles are available on Amazon again. From the kindle community blog:

We have expressed our strong disagreement and the seriousness of our disagreement by temporarily ceasing the sale of all Macmillan titles. We want you to know that ultimately, however, we will have to capitulate and accept Macmillan’s terms because Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles, and we will want to offer them to you even at prices we believe are needlessly high for e-books. Amazon customers will at that point decide for themselves whether they believe it’s reasonable to pay $14.99 for a bestselling e-book.

As Gruber says on Daring Fireball:

Just me, or does it seem like an Apple device that won’t ship for another 53 days already upended Amazon’s Kindle business? What kind of sense does it make to accuse a publisher of having a “monopoly” over its own titles?

Lot’s more commentary on the topic at Techcrunch, GigaOm, Silicon Alley Insider, Boing Boing, Unqualified Offerings and via John Scalzi and Charles Stross.

(Disclaimer: I bought my partner a kindle for her birthday today. More on that later…)

Macmillan v Amazon in eBook price wars

It appears that Amazon has pulled MacMillan titles from the kindle store in a ruckus over pricing. From the New York Times:

I’ve talked to a person in the industry with knowledge of the dispute who says the disappearance is the result of a disagreement between Amazon.com and book publishers that has been brewing for the last year. Macmillan, like other publishers, has asked Amazon to raise the price of electronic books from $9.99 to around $15. Amazon is expressing its strong disagreement by temporarily removing Macmillan books, said this person, who did not want to be quoted by name because of the sensitivity of the matter.

On the surface it seems that MacMillan has negotiated terms with Apple for its iBooks store and offered those same terms to Amazon – who don’t appear to be too happy about it

On the bright side, at least in the ebook world, pulling titles from the virtual shelves is a helluva lot easier than trying to remove them from real shelves. Same goes for putting them back, so this kind of brinkmanship shouldn’t be surprising!!

(Disclaimer: I’m currently under contract with Pan MacMillan for a forthcoming title in progress)

iBooks = iPad + ePub

Finally got around to watching the video of this morning’s Apple event. E-Book stuff begins at the 52 minute mark for about 5 minutes. And yes, eBook format is ePub…

Apple iPad early questions

So the iPad it is. Lots of coverage all over the internet, so I won’t go into details here. I just want to ask a few e-book centric questions that will no doubt be answered in the next little while.

• What format does iBooks use? (my guess is something like Apple’s extended LP format to allow for ‘interactivity’)
• Is there DRM on those eBooks? (probably, with similar restrictions to Apps)
• Does this mean an iBooks store for every country? (probably)
• Will there be an iBooks for Macintosh? (I guess)
• Will there be an iBook developer tool? (probably already is, see iTunes LP)
• Will there be a kindle App for iPad? (if so, then the iPad becomes the only e-reading device you need for all your bought content)
• Will there be Stanza for iPad? (see previous question, for epubs)

It’s clear though that the iphone was a trojan to get us comfortable with touch interfaces. Whilst the iPad is *only* a big ipod touch/iphone, we shouldn’t forget that the ipod touch is actually a small computer. Which makes the iPad a slighter bigger small computer – with a touch interface that has been adopted by tens of millions of people. And this time, Apple has put books as a highlight of its ecosystem.

99 years ago…

Technologizer links to a 1911 prediction from Thomas Edison that saw books having way more pages than paper would allow:

What it was: Among the numerous brainstorms and predictions that Thomas Alva Edison shared with Cosmopolitan readers in an exclusive interview was his vision of 40,000-page books that would be two inches thick and weigh a pound–because their pages would be made of metal, not paper:

“Even the pages of books may be made of steel, though Edison regards nickel as a better substitute for paper…”Why not?” asks Edison. “Nickel will absorb printer’s ink. A sheet of nickel one twenty-thousandth of an inch thick is cheaper, tougher, and more flexible than an ordinary sheet of book-paper…”

Not quite a kindle but even then the limitations of paper were apparent to some

The invisible e-book

I’ve been putting off a post about the rumoured apple tablet because there’s so much noise already out there. Even in the book space. And I reckon I’ve resisted pretty well, until now. Some background: When I was writing the book, it was a different world. The Sony reader had only just been released after a couple of years in Japan as the libre. Publishers were still recovering from the first generation of ebook readers. Gemstar, rocket ebook etc anyone? In the other corner were the PDA readers with dedicated fans of a plethora of formats and stores catering to a readership of a few dozen. Back then, then was no kindle and the second wave of ereaders was something that I expected to happen, but hadn’t yet.

But even then, at my first meeting with my publisher, she said “you’ve got to think that when ebooks take off, apple will be there.” She knew that I’d agree and I did. After all I was and still am a dedicated apple watcher. But we were basing our observation on the success of the iTunes store and the iPod. Remember the iPhone and the app store only existed in secret labs in Cupertino at that stage. So it was partly an expectation and partly a hope. The iPhone took us one step closer to fulfilling both the expectation and the hope.

The rumoured tablet is the next step, but its importance is not the technology itself. That’s something that apple naysayers don’t get. The iPod and the iPhone were both dismissed by geek experts as not being as feature-rich as they should have been. But that’s missing the point totally. What iPod and iPhone managed to trigger was cultural change. The first tapped into a way to buy and listen to music that literally revolutionised an industry. The second changed the way that ordinary people used used their phones. In both cases, what begins as a new toy becomes an indispensable part of one’s everyday life.

But why did ipod and iphone change everything when diamond rio and nokia n9000 didn’t? In both cases the actual hardware was only a small part of the picture. What was more important was that both ipod and iphone represented significant steps in making (in this case small) computers invisible. Ipod users don’t need manuals. The scroll wheel removed the barriers between people and their music.

Multitouch does the same for everything else. For most iPhone users, the interface is second nature, it’s invisible. That’s why apple’s tablet, should it actually appear on the 27th is important. Kindle does the job in a workmanlike manner, but e-ink is not responsive enough so the interface just gets in the way. Remember, printed books are a technology too. It’s just that over several centuries they became second nature and invisible. Whatever replaces print needs to easily gain those same attributes.

In the last decade or so, apple seems to have understood that cultural change is hard. And that one way to get people to change the habits of a lifetime is to make the new way appear totally natural – as if it’s the way things should always have been done. When technology becomes invisible, cultural change can happen.

Roll on the 27th…

Some of us are buying more books

Supporting the anecdotal stories I get from those who have e-book readers (particularly kindles) comes a LEK survey that suggests that people with e-book readers not only read more, but buy more books. GigaOm reports:

The study by L.E.K. Consulting shows that while e-reader owners are still a relatively small proportion of the population, almost half of them say they are reading more books. And a large number of those books are new books — in other words, books they would not otherwise have bought or read.

I know my partner can’t stop herself buying kindle books because it’s so convenient (and relatively cheap) even though she doesn’t have a kindle – she uses the kindle app on her iphone.