TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘iPad’ Category

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

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 Paul Biba

This looks like a fantastic idea. Sena, who is known for the quality of their cases, has developed an folio case for the iPad that includes a bluetooth keyboard.

It comes in black, orange, red and brown and is currently only available for pre-order. The case will sell for $150, but the price on pre-order is $130. They say that the shipment date will be October 7.

By Paul Biba

ReadWriteWeb has an article on this today. They look at two examples and compare the user experience (not the business model), Wired and Zinio.

I still prefer print magazines from a user experience perspective, although I like the experimentation of Wired and others. However, overall I prefer iPad magazines due to speed of delivery, cheaper price and ability to access a whole archive from one app.

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

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

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 Paul Biba

From Campus Technology:

As the centerpiece of a new mobile computing initiative, Monterey College of Law (MCL) in California is distributing Apple iPads to all students enrolled in a supplemental curriculum program that helps them prepare for the state’s bar exam. According to information released by the college, all entering first-year students signed up for the program within the first week, as did 70 percent of the remainder of the student body.

The college said the impetus for the program, which launched last week, was a perceived need to create studying opportunities outside of the classroom for its students, who, with a median age of 38, are typically full-time workers attending school in the evening. MCL has 36 incoming first-year students and a total of 105 students this year in its doctor of jurisprudence program.

More in the article. Thanks to Michael von Glahn for the link.

By Paul Biba

It looks as if the Japanese are in the forefront again. According to The Mainichi Daily News, personal digitization is catching on and services are springing up to cater to the need. Digitization of personal books is permitted under Japanese copyright law.

In June, Internet research company Macromill Inc. surveyed 300 iPad owners and found that 20 percent of them had digitized their own books, while roughly 30 percent were interested in doing so. Reasons people gave for digitizing their books themselves included that digital versions of the books were not available and that it was easier to read the digital versions of books that paper books whose pages had faded. The trend has resulted in a boon in sales of related products. Former scanner models could handle only one side of a page at a time, but now models that can scan both sides in one pass have started to appear at affordable prices.

Lots more info in the article.

By Chris Meadows

Shane Richmond, Head of Technology (Editorial) for Telegraph Media Group, has an editorial in the Telegraph about the way that DRM breaks up even the same file format of e-books into a Tower of e-Babel. He tried to open Adobe-DRM EPUB files in iBooks and of course was told that wouldn’t work.

Richmond writes:

Can we pause for a moment to remind ourselves just how absurd this situation is? It’s been a problem for so long that sometimes it’s easy to take it for granted but we are being sold products that work in one set of circumstances but not others. And there’s no good reason for the distinction. It’s not as if this is a piece of software that needs to be re-written for each new platform – it’s just text.

The limitation is artificial and it’s only there to prevent unauthorised copying but it’s a wasted effort because anyone who intends to share these books can remove the DRM in no time. As always with DRM, it’s the law-abiding customer who gets punished.

He goes on to explain how he used txtr to get around the Adobe DRM by uploading the e-books to its servers and then downloading them into the iPad app. He isn’t wholly satisfied with that solution, but supposes that “it’s a choice between that or nothing.” (He apparently didn’t investigate far enough to find one of the cracks that allow Adobe DRM to be removed while keeping the book in EPUB format, which would have allowed loading them directly into iBooks.)

Richmond compares the current situation of having his books spread across multiple e-book apps to “having bookshelves in four different rooms and not being allowed to move books between them”—a situation with which I can sympathize, given that I’m now having to diversify my own e-library since eReader and Fictionwise can no longer carry the titles I want to read.

Ironically, Richmond says, all content industries vow not to repeat the digital mistakes of the music industry—but the music industry has actually been getting its act together, while books, film, and TV continue to make it hard for consumers to enjoy their products.

None of this is exactly new, of course, but it is still nice to see it continues to be said. Maybe if enough people speak up, the content industries will begin to pay attention. It probably won’t happen, but we can dream, can’t we?

By Chris Meadows

One more thing about that iPad People Magazine app, the one that has reportedly been the target of a paparazzi controversy: it’s going to be the first ever iPad translation of a print magazine that is going to be free to subscribers of the print magazine. Ad Age reports that the wrangling with Apple over implementing this offer was the real reason the app has been delayed, not the photographer dispute.

In other words, a “subscription” to the app will literally cost exactly the same as a subscription to the print magazine—putting it one up on those other magazines that cost same as cover price, with no possibility of a subscription yet (though in the case of Sports Illustrated, it’s not as if they haven’t wanted to).

This seems like such a sensible plan, using the iPad version to promote sales of the print magazine—after all, if you want to pay to subscribe, you’ll get both anyway—that it’s a wonder other magazines haven’t thought of it, too. (Or perhaps they have, and People is just the first one to get Apple to agree to it.) It does seem to be a handy way around Apple’s apparent prohibition on external subscription mechanisms. I wonder if other would-be subscribable appmags such as Sports Illustrated will follow suit?

By Chris Meadows

Chris Anderson has finally posted the article I mentioned Gawker’s post about a few weeks ago: “The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet” (though it’s actually a pair of related articles—one by Anderson, the other by Michael Wolff).

It’s certainly interesting and worth reading, and perhaps my Chris Anderson vs. Prince article was a little unfair. The thesis is that consumers are moving away from the web and toward apps (such as those on the iPhone or iPad) because the apps can present specialized information in more convenient formats, while the media companies are moving in that direction for the greater degree of control they have over what consumers can do with apps.

But the pushback is just as interesting, including a debate piece running on Wired simultaneously with the article itself in which Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle debate the issue with Anderson.

Over on BoingBoing, Rob Beschizza recasts the somewhat misleading graph Anderson presents in a more meaningful light: while the percentage of overall traffic represented by the web is decreasing, the amount of actual traffic is still increasing—it’s just that other traffic has increased more.

And at Gawker, which originally broke the story about Anderson’s impending story, the headline is worth mentioning all by itself: “Wired Says ‘The Web is Dead’ — On Its Increasingly Profitable Website”. It points out a number of ironies in the article, such as that it was released on the web before the print or iPad editions, or that the website has been getting more profitable while the iPad edition’s circulation is reportedly dropping.

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