TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘Apple’ Category

By Chris Meadows

As the new iPod Touches (iPods Touch?) have been announced, are pre-ordering, and shipping in a week or so, it’s also time to look at the “shadow market” that trails the new devices—the last-gen refurbs, for those people who don’t mind going a generation or two back in search of a bargain.

While it’s true that last-gen iPod Touches won’t have the nifty new Retina Display, their screens have been “good enough” for e-reading up to now, and won’t be made any worse by something better coming out except by comparison. And looking at the Apple Store’s refurbished iPods page (which is subject to change after this is posted, due to people buying iPods or sending them back in), I see a 3rd-gen 64GB iPod Touch refurb listed at $319, which is down $30 or $40 from what it was when I checked it a few days before the Apple event.

There’s also a 32GB 2nd-gen for $249, and a 32GB 3rd-gen for $229. (Yes, that’s right. The 3rd-gen is actually cheaper than the 2nd-gen. Perhaps someone accidentally got the prices reversed?) At the top of the page in the “Featured Products” section is an 8GB 2nd-gen for $149.

Another interesting thing to me is where it says “save (some amount)” under the refurb pricing. For current-generation iPods, adding the savings to the price equals the list price of a brand new version of the item. Doing this for older-gen refurbs generates some interesting theoretical list prices that are only theoretical, because Apple doesn’t actually sell new units of anything except the current generation. So if a 3rd-gen 64GB model would cost $369 new ($319 + $50 “savings”), it doesn’t really mean anything because you can’t get the “new” version, at that price or otherwise.

Taking a few moments for a quick unscientific survey of eBay, it looks like prices are about the same to a little higher as the refurbs on the Apple store. In some cases people are bidding more than $400 for a 3rd-gen 64GB model, which doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, but hey, auction site.

Anyway, if you’re interested in saving a little money on an older iPod Touch, there hasn’t been a better time to buy than now (and there probably won’t be for another year until the next generation comes out).

By Chris Meadows

Ben Kunz at Bloomberg Businessweek has an interesting post on Apple’s pricing practices. Kunz posits that Apple uses psychological pricing tricks such as reference prices and price “decoys” to boost sales of more expensive items. I can’t say I agree with all of his points, but he brings up some interesting things to consider.

Kunz first discusses price decoys, items that don’t really look like very good deals in order to make slightly better items look much better. He suggests that the rumored 7” iPad is such a price decoy, to make a 10”, more featureful version look like a bargain and defend against the impending tidal wave of lower-priced tablets from competitors.

Decoys explain why Apple often sells each gadget in a pricing series, such as the new iPod Touch’s $229, $299, and $399 price points for different storage capacities. You may gladly spend $229 to get a hot media player, thinking it’s a deal vs. the highest-priced version … and not blink that you could instead buy an iPhone 4 at the lower price of $199 with more features. The $399 "decoy" has clouded your judgment. Apple wins the best of both worlds—stoking demand for products that look like bargains and for all the decoys it sells at much higher prices. Yes, some people will spend $399 for a music player with slightly better technology—and Apple makes even fatter margins.

Here Kunz brings up a point he will hammer on a couple more times over the course of the article: that the iPod Touch is more expensive than the more-capable iPhone, therefore Apple must employ eeeevil pricing tricks to sell it. I’ll come back to that in a bit.

A couple of Kunz’s other points have to do with setting a reference price—introducing something at a high price, then discounting it quickly so that it looks like a bargain compared to its original asking price (as Apple did with the originally $599 iPhone). Of course, Apple is not alone in this; Amazon has done something similar with its Kindles, though over a bit longer period of time.

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By Chris Meadows

Steve Jobs had some interesting things to reveal today. In the iPod line, the Shuffle, Nano, and Touch get refreshes. No mention at all of the Classic line; I suppose they’ve had their day.

The Shuffle moves forward by taking a step back—the new one resembles a smaller version of the second in form factor, bringing back the buttons everybody missed from the third, but with the Voiceover and other nifty features that people did like from the third.

The Nano loses the physical controls and goes multitouch, looking like a smaller version of the iPod Touch (but without apps). Now we know what that mysterious small square touchscreen we mentioned in an Apple rumor post I don’t have time to dig up right now was for.

And the Touch is about as expected. Slimmer than ever, Retina Display, A4 chip, Facetime camera, and rear-facing HD video camera. No mention of photographic capability, so presumably it’s a video-only camera like the one from last year’s Nano. If it can’t take photos, that’s a bit disappointing (especially with the new HDR photo capacity in OS 4.1), but on the whole it’s still a considerable improvement over the previous generation. Price points remain the same $229/$299/$399; it is available for pre-order today and ships later this month.

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By Chris Meadows

A couple of further notes about Apple’s event, due to start in just over an hour. Leander Kahney at Cult of Mac has an exclusive tip from an insider who explains that the streaming process is going to serve as a stress test for Apple’s new server farm, which will later be used to stream a version of iTunes for iOS devices.

Kahney notes:

Some have speculated that Apple is streaming the show to thwart livebloggers, who may have sabotaged Jobs’ iPhone 4 keynote at Apple’s WWDC event in June. Problems with the venue’s WiFi network ruined Jobs’ FaceTime demo and forced him to ask bloggers in the audience to shut their laptops to reduce the strain on the wireless network.

He dismisses the suggestion of some that Jobs wants greater control over the delivery of the news, but notes that if Apple livestreams future events it could mean an end to the considerable traffic that the events bring sites that liveblog them.

Meanwhile, MacRumors explains the limitation of Apple’s livestream to iOS devices only, and suggests a possible workaround for viewing it without Apple products. Apple is using its new HTTP Live Streaming technology, which has been proposed as a standard but largely implemented only by Apple so far. Among its advantages include that it avoids router/firewall issues since the stream goes out over standard http.

Non-Apple-owning viewers might be able to watch the event anyway, to some extent, as long as they keep manually refreshing the stream’s playlist file.

And that should be the last I’ll say on the subject until after the event! I may livetweet it under the #teleread hashtag, however.

By Chris Meadows

Katie Gatto at our sister blog Appletell has made a post explaining how to determine which e-books in your iTunes listing are DRM-protected and which are DRM-free. It is a useful little tutorial for those who are not sure (or, for that matter, bother to purchase iBooks titles in the first place).

However, annoyingly, Gatto repeatedly conflates DRM with copyright. She begins the article with “If you want to know which of your ebooks are DRM free and which have been protected by copyright,” then mentions that this process “will let you know if a book has DRM protections or if you’re free to share it with others,” and says that if a book is listed as protected, “it has a copyright attached.” She then concludes, “Use accordingly to avoid lawsuits.”

Of course, if you use according to her advice, you probably won’t be avoiding lawsuits. It should be needless to say that plenty of non-DRM-protected e-books (such as those sold by Baen, or posted online by Cory Doctorow) are fully copyright-protected—meaning that while you might be able to share them with friends, you are not necessarily legally free to unless the holder of the copyright allows it.

Might a decreased understanding of copyright be one of the casualties of the media industry’s reliance on DRM? I didn’t think the fact that everything is copyrighted under current copyright law (including books, e-books, Internet posts, and even scribblings on the backs of napkins) was that hard to understand, let alone that foregoing DRM does not mean you are foregoing your right to protection under the law.

Or perhaps peer-to-peer is to blame for this “anything not strictly forbidden must be permitted” attitude. It seems to be very much of a piece with the “innocent infringement” defense that one target of a RIAA lawsuit is assaying:

Whitney admitted to using KaZaA as well as downloading and sharing music over the P2P network, but said she didn’t realize what she was doing was wrong. Her technological illiteracy and age [of 16 years] made her incapable of intentionally infringing the record labels’ copyrights, she argued.

Either way, that a technology blogger should make the same mistake is irritating both from a standpoint of lacking accuracy in reporting, and because it gives more ammunition to the proponents of DRM: “If we don’t protect it, they’ll think they’re permitted to pirate it.” That kind of confusion we can do without.

By Chris Meadows

Sometimes we get accused of becoming an Apple blog, we post so much Apple-centric stuff, but there’s a reason for that. Apple might be obnoxious in its app approval behavior, closed in its development platform, and prudish in its gatekeeping, but there’s no denying that they make some damned fine e-book reading devices. My iPod Touch was my sole e-reader for most of the two years I had it, and I still miss it badly.

Matt Buchanan makes a similar point on Gizmodo, where he says that if the rumors are true about the new iPod Touch that will (presumably) be revealed tomorrow and it ends up with the same retina display, Facetime camera, and 5-megapixel rear camera as the iPhone, it has the potential to be a device “serial killer”—replacing just about every gadget one would carry around (iPod, point-and-shoot camera, motion picture camera, notepad, gaming device, etc.) except the phone.

Buchanan says:

Inexplicably, there’s never been a credible iPod touch competitor. The Zune HD doesn’t run apps (the handful it’s got don’t count), so it’s limited in what it can do—it’s simply a very good music player. Android is still a miserable place to be when it comes to media, and on top of that, all of the Android "tablets" have been thoroughly mediocre. There’s nothing out there that’s remotely like the iPod touch. And obviously, there’s a demand for it, since it’s the only iPod whose sales are still growing.

The iPod Touch has basically taken over the ecological niche vacated when PDAs evolved into smartphones, in much the same way as rats or cockroaches might evolve to replace humans after we kill ourselves off. There haven’t been any real competitors, perhaps because most tablets are larger and most devices the same size are smartphones.

Of course, it does get a boost from being an iPod, given that the original iPods rapidly became the 800-lb gorillas of MP3 players, but it’s nonetheless interesting that not even Palm who first made the PDA format successful has tried to make a wifi-only pocket device since the Palm TX. The iPhone might be only one of many smartphones, but the iPod Touch stands alone. (I made a similar point in a post exactly one year ago today, in fact.)

And depending on what gets unveiled in less than six hours, it might just stand more alone than ever.

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By Chris Meadows

Well, this is a first.

Rather than waiting to post the video until several hours after the event, Apple will be livestreaming its presentation this morning…at least, to those with Macs, iPod Touches, iPhones, or iPads.

Apple® will broadcast its September 1 event online using Apple’s industry-leading HTTP Live Streaming, which is based on open standards. Viewing requires either a Mac® running Safari® on Mac OS® X version 10.6 Snow Leopard®, an iPhone® or iPod touch® running iOS 3.0 or higher, or an iPad™. The live broadcast will begin at 10:00 a.m. PDT on September 1, 2010 at www.apple.com.

I really like how in one sentence they say it’s “based on open standards” and then in the next say that viewing requires one of their devices. That’s Apple for you. Non-Apple-device-owning Windows users are apparently going to have to make do with the liveblogs.

I don’t usually get up until about 1:00 these days, but I’m going to be setting my alarm an hour early so as not to miss this.

(Found via Engadget.)

By Chris Meadows

Only one more day remains until we discover the newest things Steve Jobs has up his sleeve, and our sister blog Appletell has a roundup of all the recent rumors

I’ve already looked at the rumors that the iPod Touch is going to gain cameras, Facetime, and the Retina Display here and here, suggesting it may become not only a better e-book reader than ever before but also a better communication tool—essentially, a wifi-only cell phone without the cell.

And it will even get the “cell” back if it is paired with an unlimited 3G-to-wifi plan such as the prepaid plan offered by Virgin Mobile for $40 per month with no contract required—not only does that cost less than an iPhone voice + data plan, but it also foregoes AT&T’s iPhone bandwidth cap.

And now it comes out that Clearwire, the “4G” unlimited-bandwidth wireless ISP I mentioned in my first post about “retrofitting” 3G to wireless readers, is launching its own contract-free, pay-as-you-go wireless broadband plan. It will cost slightly more than Virgin’s, at $50 per month, and will be limited to use in Clearwire’s 49 markets—but on the other hand, it will offer download speeds of 3 to 6 megabits per second, somewhat faster than 3G can provide.

It’s going to be interesting to see what Apple announces tomorrow. What does the acoustic guitar logo mean? Are any other bombshells going to drop? Will there be “one more thing”?

All the usual suspects will be liveblogging the event, and I’ll try to post a summary soon after it ends.

By Chris Meadows

A Forrester Research survey of about 4,000 consumers reports that 14% plan to buy a tablet computer within the next twelve months—ahead of the 13% who plan to buy a laptop or 11% to buy an e-book reader, PC World reports. Forrester thinks that this is encouraging news not just for Apple, but for its competitors in the tablet form factor as well. (Found via Gadgetell.)

But that tablet probably won’t be a Dell Streak. The LA News Monitor notes that reviews of the $300 cell contract-bound 5” tablet are largely negative. Even though the device is “also a phone”, it suffers from a bulky size that makes it difficult to carry in one’s pocket. Worse, it only runs Android 1.6, not the 2.2 that comes standard with most new Android devices these days—meaning that the device can’t run a number of newer applications.

And meanwhile, Daily Tech reports that Apple has severed ties with engineering design firm SurfaceInk, a company that has been doing design work for Apple for almost ten years. Though it’s no secret that it has also worked for Palm and Hewlett-Packard during that time, apparently Apple was upset enough by a 12.1” tablet prototype that SurfaceInk demonstrated at a trade show to end the relationship.

Samsung’s Android-powered Galaxy Tab tablet (pictured above) is set to be formally unveiled at IFA on Thursday, but leaked details have been showing up revealing a 7” 1024×600 screen, a “CDMA” label that suggests it’s launching in the US, and a number of iPad-like accessories. It is unclear how well it will be able to compete with the iPad given that rumor has put Samsung’s production capability at only 100,000 units per month—well under the iPad’s throughput. (Found via Gadgetell.)

No matter what those 14% of consumers buy in the coming year, unless it’s an iPad they probably won’t buy it during in the rest of this calendar year. John Biggs at TechCrunch reports on a Shanzai analysis that notes Apple is in no real danger of tablet competition this year.

Why? Because no one will have product in pipeline for the holidays and thus the only things selling in the slate form factor will be the Kindle, Nook, and iPad, in that order, and you’ll note that two of those items aren’t tablets.

Biggs is also concerned that, once products do start to ship, it could lead to balkanization of the tablet market as everyone produces tablets that run on different operating systems or with different requirements. If Apple is a walled garden, at least you know that if you buy an app it will run on their tablet.

By Chris Meadows

A New York Examiner blog post looks at the continuing order backlog on the Kindle 3, quoting a post from Amazon’s Kindle Community Forum in regard to shipping schedules:

• Orders placed before 8 p.m. Pacific Time on August 1st will still ship by the August 27th release date.
• Orders placed before 10 p.m. Pacific Time on August 5th will ship on or before September 4th.
• Orders placed before 12 p.m. Pacific Time on August 12th will ship on or before September 8th.
• Orders placed after 12 p.m. Pacific Time on August 12th will ship on or before September 12th.

The bottleneck in this case, the post states, is PVI, the company making the Pearl e-ink screens. It is not able to keep up with current demand, especially given that other e-reader companies are ordering Pearl screens as well. Given that it is unlikely PVI is going to be able to ramp up production for the Christmas season, there may very well be a dearth of Kindle 3s under the tree save for those that were ordered early.

But on the other side of things, 9 to 5 Mac notes that the shipping date on the iPad has, over the last few weeks, dwindled from 7-10 business days to “within 24 hours” as of August 27th. Is this because Apple has ramped up production to meet demand? Or has demand simply fallen off, especially as consumers have been more impressed by the higher-resolution iPhone 4?

Of course, I know that the two products are aimed at different demographics, and someone who wants one wouldn’t necessarily want to settle for the other instead. But all the same, it’s interesting to note that anyone who might be frustrated with the long shipping wait for the Kindle 3 can now get an iPad faster than ever.

By Paul Biba

From Munsey’s Technosnarl:

Apple, with its new “epub” export feature in word processing software Pages, just sent a shot across Amazon’s bow. Y’all may have heard, there’s a bit of a bottleneck for publishers getting their titles into the Ibookstore. I’m still in the 30s, with more “pending.”

Short version of why that’s happened is, well, Apple’s only had two months working with smaller presses. Things go wrong. Longer version ties into history: everybody who launches, Amazon on down, has problems integrating titles.

Of course, the fact that Apple was relying on a supposed standard (Epub), that… works in theory but not practice, even if valid, didn’t help matters. There are certain parallels with the history of Mobipocket, another firm that initially relied on “standard inputs” when it launched, before loosening up a bit and taking over the world.

With Pages, you’ve got Apple making its own tools for Epub export that I suspect will fly in the Ibookstore, alongside Apple making certain improvements in Producer (NDA), and would-be Apple publishers no longer dependent on half-assed Adobe software or 3rd-party integrators.

This will get interesting.

/If it matters, sales of my 30-odd books in the Apple store are already equal to sales of around 500 books in the Kindle store a year ago, and the growth is fast. Ya might call it unprecedented. Though of course, I don’t expect all, or even a third, of Olympia will be there.

//Hurray for a return to side-loading and DIY mobile interfaces.

By Chris Meadows

The iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad make great educational platforms for youngsters; we’ve run many stories on their potential in that respect. But Danial Donahoo from Wired’s “GeekDad” blog wonders if there may now be too much of a mediocre thing.

The iPhone app development model, Donahoo notes, has led to a kind of “gold rush” mentality, in which everyone develops obvious apps as quickly as possible hoping to be the first (or fifth, or twenty-fifth) to market and “strike it rich.”

Consequently, there are a lot of apps for kids that are not well thought through, not developmentally appropriate, or simply way too generic! And, in my professional life and personal life having reviewed and played a lot of these games I think it is time to ask developers to start focusing on quality, rather than quantity.

He points to a screenshot of “News & Noteworthy” education apps, 19 out of 20 of which teach ABCs. Do we, he asks, really need that many alphabet apps?

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By Chris Meadows

CNet reports that Apple has released an e-book-related update to its iWork productivity suite. Pages 4.0.4 now includes the ability to export into EPUB files, and Apple has posted a support document to its web site providing tips for creating EPUBs:

Documents exported to ePub format will look different than their Pages counterparts. If you want to get the best document fidelity between the Pages and ePub formats, style your Pages document with paragraph styles and other formatting attributes allowed in an ePub file. A sample document is provided on the Apple Support site that features styles and guidelines to help you create a Pages document that’s optimized for export to the ePub file format, which you can use as a template or a guide. To learn more about using paragraph styles in Pages, see the topics under the heading “Working with Styles” in the Pages built-in help.

As CNet points out, this is useful for more than just authors—it provides an easy way for people to read their own documents on their iPad even if they don’t plan to publish them. As for authors, they will find it helpful to have access to easy EPUB creation right on their Mac.

It’s interesting to note, though, that it doesn’t seem to say anything about whether EPUBs created in iWork will meet Apple’s exacting standards for EPUB posting to the iBookstore.

By Chris Meadows

I didn’t notice this David Pogue article from August 12th until Techdirt and Slashdot pointed it out just the other day. Though most of the article is about other cool features offered by iOS 4 (unified contacts, Facetime tricks), in the last section Pogue talks about the VoiceOver “spoken books” feature on the iPad and wonders why the Authors Guild and publishers hasn’t freaked out about it. I previously looked at the matter back in March; you’d think they would have had time to speak up by now.

Yes, this is exactly the feature that debuted in the Amazon Kindle and was then removed when publishers screamed bloody murder. But somehow, so far, Apple has gotten away with it, maybe because nobody’s even realized this feature is in there.

Why is it all right for the iPad to read books aloud, but not the Kindle? Because it’s more obviously part of an overall accessibility system for the blind, whereas the Kindle’s was meant for the convenience of the sighted (and indeed, the rest of it proved to be so inaccessible to the blind that colleges were prohibited from adopting it for textbooks), perhaps? Or is the Authors Guild more willing to give Apple a pass since it helped them stand up to the “man” on the matter of e-book pricing?

Since Pogue explained how to do it, I went ahead and gave it a try myself. It read a little fast to be understandable on the default setting, though that is adjustable by slider. The odd emphases and pauses also didn’t help understandability, and I didn’t really like the way it changed the device’s default gestures. It’s not going to replace a talented audiobook actor any time soon.

Still, I did like how loud and fairly easy to understand the individual words were, and it’s good to have the capability available even if it’s not one I would ordinarily choose to use.

By Chris Meadows

If you’re interested in a used iPhone or iPod Touch for e-reading, you’ll soon have another option to buy it. Target is rolling out a trade-in program for mobile electronics such as iPhones, iPod Touchs, or other cell phones—or used video games. (As Engadget notes, its timing is remarkable considering the current controversy over used game sales.) In return, customers get Target gift cards that range from "a few dollars up to more than $200 per item depending on the product and its condition."

Target already has an online service through its website where customers can trade in DVDs or used electronics. As for the store trade-in centers, it has opened them at stores in northern California but plans to expand to 850 stores by the end of the year.

Between single-use codes and DLC, it’s hard to imagine that the used video game market has more than a few years left. I suppose Target and other big-box retailers starting to offer similar programs think they should get in on it while they still can.

By Chris Meadows

UPDATE: Subsequent articles, such as this Tech Trader Daily posting, note that the date is going to be September 1, not September 7th.

Buried within a Bloomberg article on Apple pressuring media companies to offer 99 cent TV rentals is this little tidbit:

Apple plans to hold a San Francisco event Sept. 7, two weeks ahead of the start of the new prime-time TV season, to unveil the [TV episode rental] service and an updated line of entertainment products, two people said.

The article goes on to suggest that Apple will introduce its new high-res iPod Touch at this event, and the $99 iTV set-top box meant to let people stream content from iTunes. Apple and the TV studios refused to comment.

So we now have a date for the new iPod Touch revelation. And it seems reasonable that the TV box will come out at the same time. But will there be any mysterious “one more things” that Apple has been better about keeping under wraps?

Looks like the only way to find out will be to tune in.

(Found via Engadget.)