“The Cinderella story isn’t new, but Nosy Crow’s developers use the app platform in new ways to make this an entertaining experience with extremely high play value and a long engagement time,” said the Publishing Innovation Awards judges of the Juvenile App category. “Clever design decisions, excellent navigation, and enhanced content allow young readers to play in a very natural way with the story. Readers can stay on a page as long as they like and will be rewarded for every tap, tip, or swipe.

While I doubt appbooks will replace regular books or even regular e-books, there is certainly room for well-created apps that can help the learning process. This $7.99 app (with a free lite version) looks like a good example—as well as a great example of how stories in the public domain can be put to commercial use.

It looks like it might be fun to try out, but I don’t think it will fix one of my biggest annoyances with having a 1st-generation iPod Touch—the way that many of the apps I formerly relied upon are no longer available to me because their latest versions require iOS 4 or 5. I can no longer use Meebo or FourSquare because I lost the versions of the app from my iPod in a crash, the versions in iTunes are the more recent ones that work with my iPad, and I can’t download the older ones. I can’t download the latest version of Facebook, either.

The article discusses what this means in terms of the one million unskilled laborers FoxConn currently employs, and unskilled labor versus automation. A survey this year found that “53% of US manufacturing firms believe that less than 50% of their human workers have the skills and work ethic required to do high performance work.” In order to “move up the value chain,” unskilled workers will need to be retrained in those skills. Kirkpatrick writes:

It may soon come to the point, if it hasn’t already, where the supply of and demand for skilled labor become imbalanced enough that the market value of skill building shoots through the roof.

He discusses a few on-line learning startups such as Rypple and WorkDay that might offer promise in this area.

I don’t know, maybe I’m just too foggy to understand the premise he’s expressing here, but it seems to me that the question of what to do with unskilled laborers when their jobs are taken by machines has been asked again and again ever since the invention of the cotton gin. I remember reading a satirical mid-20th-century science fiction story (I wish I could remember the title and author) in which the rise of robotic manufacturing had led to such a surplus in consumer goods that "poor" people were forced to live in huge mansions while "rich" people were able to simplify down to one- or two-room houses. What’s changed?

Certainly there are a lot of tools now to help educate people—not just those startups, but also free general-purpose tools like Khan Academy. Will unskilled laborers be able to use those kinds of tools to become skilled enough to “move up the value chain”? Will employers really be interested in helping them do that rather than just looking for new workers who already have those skills? It should be interesting to find out.

Now it seems like Apple wants to make it so people can wear their iPhone on their wrist, and perhaps interact with it with Siri. And Google may be working on something similar. This all might lead, in the next ten years, to real “Google goggles”, or otherwise computerized glasses, that use the smartphone as their processing hub. Wouldn’t that be an interesting way to read e-books, having the text floating in front of your eyes?

But Kevin Fogarty on the IT World blog says not so fast, pointing out that the New York Times obtained this information from anonymous and unidentified sources. Without knowing who they are, it’s impossible to gauge such sources’ reliability—or their motives for revealing what they do.

No matter how convenient, cool and wearable our computers become, they’ll still only be a conduit for the information we get through them.

If more and more of that information comes from "people" hiding their identities and touting products they hope they’ll eventually be able to produce and sell, we might be better off sticking with the old, clunky technology we have to stick in a pocket instead.

The children’s series is Paddington Bear, the adventures of a small, talking bear named for the London railway station where he was found. The series already has a £3.99 (US $6.23) multimedia iPad/iPhone app, which among other things will let parents record video readings of the story, and children take photos of themselves “with” Paddington to send to family and friends.

HCB said the digital adaptation had been done "carefully" to ensure the rhythm of the story is not interrupted with the interactivity. Digital publishing manager Tom Conway said: "This is not just an electronic version of the book—it’s a new way of telling, and sharing, a much-loved story."

E-books for all Paddington titles are to be available in early 2012.

The other is the 12-book Flashman series, by the late George Macdonald Fraser, based on a minor character from an 1857 novel by Thomas Hughes. The books chronicle the adventures of a self-confessed scoundrel who, through a series of coincidences, gains fame and renown as a great hero of the Victorian era.

The Financial Times is known for its successful paywall strategy in which it allows readers eight free articles per month but requires they subscribe beyond that. It recently launched an HTML5 app for iOS devices and other tablets that allows it to interact directly with subscribers and bypass Apple’s 30% app store cut.

The news that its online revenues are set to overtake ad revenues suggests that the future of newspapers may not necessarily be so tightly bound to print after all.

For example, lots of children like to play games on their parents’ iPhones or iPads—but since those children can’t have iTunes accounts of their own (due to child-protection laws that place limits on what information Internet sites can collect from children under the age of 13), that leads to their games cluttering up their parents’ accounts. And even when older children get their own accounts, those games they bought earlier remain stuck to their parents’ accounts.

And as for Amazon, the combination of e-book DRM and separate accounts means that most books can’t be lent between family members without passing over the device.

Sure, some Amazon books can be lent to others. But so far, only one of the nine Kindle books I currently own have this option. As for the one that I can lend, I can do that once. After that, no more lending, to my understanding.

Lending is entirely up to the publishers, and the publishers, despite charging real book prices, aren’t providing real book benefits, such as the ability to send the book to whomever you want, much less resell the book.

Of course, a family could share an account for communal reading—but that could mean that the kids would have access to adult books.

Sullivan also points out that, though computers allow the same machine to be used by different people with different accounts, tablets and e-readers don’t. There’s no way to secure specific apps on an iPad against children, and there’s no way to share a family-owned Kindle among several Amazon accounts without deregistering it from one account to register it to another.

He concludes:

The ideal solution is that if you buy an app or an ebook, you also buy the right to permanently transfer that purchase to someone else. That’s how things work in the real world; in the digital world, where the physical costs are less, why shouldn’t the same rights apply?

At the very least, I wish Apple and Amazon would think more about the concept of family accounts, so that a purchase could be delivered or registered to one of several designated “family” devices, especially for when you’re dealing with younger children.

I find it a bit unlikely that digital transfer rights will ever happen. Among other things, it would enable a “used” goods market for digital media, and publishers already despise the one that exists for physical media. One of the “benefits” of e-books, from their point of view, is that there’s no way to resell them.

Of course, one of the commenters to the article comes up with the best solution available at the moment: “As soon as I buy a book from Amazon I strip the DRM from it. That solves all the lending problems!”

The 32-page books feature a 16-page story divided into English and the language being taught (so far, French or Spanish), with read-aloud buttons to hear a native speaker read the story aloud in either language. The books are available as appbooks on the iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch.

[b small Managing Director Catherine] Bruzzone said, “Here at b small we’ve always sought a bright, fun, colorful and personal approach to supporting parents who want to bring foreign languages into their homes. These versions, with their bright illustrations, exciting stories and in-built bilingual audio, are the perfect package. I’m especially excited by what this could mean for other languages close to our hearts for which UK print quantities are often quite low, such as German, Italian, or even Chinese. These languages could easily be made available in this digital format with a native speaker.”

I wish they’d had something like this around when I was learning high school French. It seems like an excellent and eminently sensible use of multimedia technology for learning, and the digital nature of it means that it can easily be sold worldwide from just the one app store.

The last go-round resulted in six exemptions, including allowing circumvention for incorporating clips into new works for purpose of criticism or comment, including educational purposes. (Apparently the MPAA’s suggestion that professors should just point a camcorder at the screen didn’t go over very well.) It also permitted jailbreaking iPhones, and cracking e-book DRM if and only if no other method existed to use screen-reading of text-to-speech with the DRM-locked version.

Of course, all those things will have to be argued again this time around, and the MPAA and other content lobbies have historically been quite willing to step up and argue against them—and perhaps they learned something from their failures last time around.

The whole process will take several months; if last time was any example, we won’t know the results until late July—but look for reports on both sides’ antics in months to come if any prove to be worth mentioning.

While I’m a bit “iffy” on the utility of stand-alone appbooks, I have to admit that this one has some interesting features. Some of them, such as the “original music score” or “buckets of gory animation”, sound like needless gimmicks, but I am intrigued by the way the app incorporates both the “And Zombies” version and the original novel, Pride and Prejudice. When held right-side-up, the device displays the zombified work; turned upside-down it displays the original, and held in landscape it displays both side by side for a comparison.

This does sound like a case where the interactivity of an electronic platform adds something more than just portability to reading. I’d like to see more of this kind of thing.

But have you considered whether it’s a sanitary habit?

The Guardian’s books blog reports that one pediatric gastroenterologist was curious enough about the practice to issue a survey on the matter. Some doctors point out that the process can lead to germs from fecal matter being transferred to the medium you’re reading, which means they could then be transmitted to others.

Microbes don’t fare too well on absorbent surfaces, and might survive only minutes on newspaper. But plastic book covers and those shiny, smooth surfaces of Kindles, iPhones and iPads are more accommodating, and it’s likely bugs can live on those for hours. A recent study by Curtis suggests that in Britain one in six mobile phones is contaminated with faecal matter, largely because people fail to wash their hands after going to the toilet.

But the study on toilet reading suggests that it’s probably not a major issue—most people do it at home or work with their own reading material, not something that’s likely to have been contaminated by prior restroom users.

The intent of the survey was to determine whether toilet readers had an easier time going than non-readers, but the results were largely inconclusive. Regardless, people will undoubtedly continue to see literature as something convenient to do while they doo-doo.

Data that can be downloaded again or regenerated should be stored in the <Application_Home>/Library/Caches directory. Examples of files you should put in the Caches directory include database cache files and downloadable content, such as that used by magazine, newspaper, and map applications.

The problem is that iOS 5 now “cleans” out the Caches and tmp directories when the device gets low on space. That means that if you tend to keep your device mostly full, adding that one more e-book or magazine could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back: suddenly all the content you had on your iOS device is gone.

A common scenario: an Instapaper customer is stocking up an iPad for a long flight. She syncs a bunch of movies and podcasts, downloads some magazines, and buys a few new games, leaving very little free space. Right before boarding, she remembers to download the newest issue of The Economist. (I think highly of my customers.) This causes free space to fall below the threshold that triggers the cleaner, which — in the background, unbeknownst to her — deletes everything that was saved in Instapaper. Later in the flight, with no internet connectivity, she goes to launch Instapaper and finds it completely empty.

(Last week, almost this exact scenario happened to one of my customers.)

Ament explains that there is, at present, no place to store files that shouldn’t be backed up but also shouldn’t be randomly deleted.

Because e-books are so small, I tend to keep my entire library on my iPod Touch and my iPad at any given time. That’s hundreds of books, that took a long time to load on there the first time I synced them. I don’t like to think about them suddenly all disappearing again.

And Ament points out that the first impulse of readers who have this happen is going to be to blame not the operating system but the developers of the app.

Hopefully Apple fixes this problem quickly—but sometimes it’s hard to know whether it’s even paying attention. (Does this restriction affect Apple’s own e-book and magazine apps, I wonder?)

(Found via Jeff Kirvin.)

Quittner explains that he was drawn to Flipboard by the changes that are taking place in the context of magazines. Flipboard represents a chance to break out of the traditional one-size-fits-all template magazines have used for years, and also a chance to “save” journalism by creating a sustainable digital model.

He talks about the experimentation Flipboard has been doing in its first couple of years, including starting an advertising program with Condé Nast.

What we’re going to do is put on the brakes there and really study it, because what’s not needed is another unsustainable advertising model in new media. What is needed is a really smart way of turning advertising from a nuisance into a service. We have a very real chance of being able to do something like that.

He also discusses the fears that Time executives had that social media and electronic reading devices were going to cannibalize its print product. Quittner feels that the key to success is not depending on a single monetized product, but on figuring out how to earn revenue from content wherever it appears.

Going forward, my belief is that Flipboard is going to be a very powerful revenue stream for these companies: not only will you be able to monetize through us, but also you will be able to use [Flipboard] to bridge to your other kinds of content. So for instance, look at Oprah or Wired or The New Yorker on Flipboard–aside from their regular advertising they are also advertising their iPad apps because it’s a way of bringing content to people and getting them engaged in ways that may be difficult in other media.

He also mentions the forthcoming iPhone version of Flipboard, though he doesn’t discuss it in any detail except to say it will work differently from the way the iPad version does. (I’ll be interested to see it, but am 99% sure it won’t work on my old first-generation iPod Touch.) He also notes that Flipboard isn’t thinking in terms of “responding” to the competition from the copycat social magazine apps that have sprung up in the last year, because “it’s far more important to beat your own best” than to be pulled off-course into responding to what someone else does.

There was no new iPhone 5, though the iPhone 4S is basically that in everything but name. It includes the new Siri voice-command technology, and is also compatible with both 3G and CDMA networks—so for the first time you could take your iPhone from one carrier to the other without needing to buy a new device. (The lack of an “iPhone 5” nonetheless caused Apple’s stock to drop by 5% after the show, however.)

The (old-style display) iPhone 3GS is now going to be available for free with contract, with the 8GB iPhone 4 costing $99 and iPhone 4S going up from there. That could get e-reading capable devices into a few more hands, too, though I’d tend to call the 3GS a bad bargain—when you compare the overall price of a 2 year contract, you’re really just saving a pittance, and getting a low-resolution screen out of it.

iOS 5, a free download on 10/12 to those with devices that can support it, will include Apple’s new e-magazine and newspaper store, Newsstand, though given that we knew this was coming already it’s not exactly news. iCloud will give everyone 5GB of cloud storage, with extra space available for yearly fees, and will allow PC-less wireless syncing—PCs will no longer be necessary to own iOS devices, it seems.

There’s also a new AppleCare+ plan for $99 that includes coverage of accidental damage—so if you drop your iPod Touch and break the screen, you’re covered.

Contrary to expectations, Apple is not killing off the iPod Classic yet, so people who need to carry 160 GB of media in their pocket are safe for another year.

Those who want to view the keynote for themselves can find it in a Quicktime stream on Apple’s web site. CNet has a slide show covering all the changes in the iPod line and their current pricing. TechCrunch has a great set of articles covering the entire keynote, too.

If anyone can think of any implications for e-books that I’ve missed, I’d definitely like to hear about them.

Yesterday Gizmodo took a look at some of the complaints and erroneous predictions of low sales surrounding the original device, and pointed out a CNet review by Elliot Van Buskirk predicting that descendants of the iPod might replace the PC.

The funny thing is, even Van Buskirk didn’t get it quite right. He was focusing on the way that the iPod could also act as a 5 gig portable Firewire hard drive, allowing people to schlep huge files around easily. Van Buskirk saw the iPod as being a precursor to a bigger portable hard drive that people could connect to any device they wanted in order to use the files therein: “If I’m right […], people will use one comprehensive iPod-like storage and connectivity unit in combination with every specialized peripheral you can think of.”

And while the iPod did indeed see some of that sort of use (most notably, it was used for transferring digital copies of footage from New Zealand to England for special-effects work on the Lord of the Rings movies), its contribution to the “replacement of the PC” really came when it transformed into the iPhone and iPod Touch, which eventually led to the iPad and the rise of the tablet that followed.

As for portable hard drives, we now have USB thumb drives with many times the capacity of that original iPod at a much smaller size, and they don’t come with the vulnerability of physical hard drives to shock and jostling that leads them inexorably to fail sooner or later. But those don’t show any sign of “replacing the PC”.

And now the iPod Classic is apparently ready to follow its originator Steve Jobs out the door. It seems kind of fitting, in a way, that the Classic goes out at the same time as the man who transformed Apple when he introduced it to the world. I can’t wait to see what the future looks like.