Yesterday, when pondering whether newspapers might eventually use free Kindles to rid themselves of print costs, I was reminded that advertising revenue is one of the major issues tying newspapers down to the print format. Which is why I found it interesting when I noticed a Reuters report that the Financial Times expects its online content sales revenues to equal or exceed its print advertising revenues in 2012. 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...

On the Daggle blog, Danny Sullivan asks the question, “Why do Amazon & Apple hate families?” He points out that a number of the products services the companies offer are not exactly family-friendly—not in terms of inappropriate content, but because they make it harder for families to share devices. 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...

Publishing Perspectives has a brief piece on UK publisher b small publishing (which, like danah boyd, eschews capital letters in its name), which is producing multimedia parallel-text bilingual e-books to help young students learn foreign languages. 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...

It’s time for the tri-yearly circus to kick off again. Ars Technica reports that it’s just about time for the Library of Congress to consider granting exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s DRM anti-circumvention provisions. This process comes every three years, and the exemptions last only until the next exemption granting—which means that even already-granted exemptions have to be requested and argued again. 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...

I mentioned Pride and Prejudice and Zombies a couple of years ago as a great argument for the usefulness of the public domain. Over on eBookNewser, Nate Hoffelder noticed that the e-book now has an interactive iPhone/iPad app available for $4.99 in the app store. 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”...

Have you ever read on the toilet? I know I have. Indeed, the one-handed form factor of the iPod Touch means it’s perfectly suited for me to read with my right while I wipe with my left. And indeed, people have been reading on the toilet in real life and literary works for decades or even centuries. 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...

Marco Ament, the developer of Instapaper, discusses a critical problem with iOS 5 that will affect any application that stores its own content—including e-book readers. It has to do with iOS 5’s iCloud backup system. Apple wants to reduce the amount of data that has to go out over wifi, and is asking developers not to store such data in Documents folders within the app itself that would get automatically backed up. Instead: 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...

CNet has an interesting, fairly long interview with Josh Quittner, who was formerly the director of Time Inc.’s digital magazine strategy as well as Time.com’s editorial chief before quitting to take a job as editorial director for Flipboard. Quittner is a veteran tech journalist and editor, which makes it all the more fascinating he would take a position at such a young startup. 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...

From an e-reader point of view, the Apple event today was a bit of a disappointment. The iPad is the best-selling tablet ever? We already knew that. One bright spot is that the entry-level iPod Touch price will drop by $30 to $199, basically equivalent to the price of the Kindle Fire which it outspecs in a few ways (camera, microphone, motion sensor, etc.). I wonder whether the new iPods are enough of a change from the old that the old will get an additional refurbishment discount when they launch. I wouldn’t mind having one of those retina display screens…...

Ten years ago, the original iPod came out, changing Apple inexorably from a snooty little computer company whose best days were seemingly long behind it to one of the greatest powerhouses of the consumer electronics industry. Today it seems likely Apple is going to kill off the last vestige of that original hard-drive-and-music-player-only device. 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,...

Lest we forget, there’s one more e-reading-related company whose name starts with “A” that is about to make major product announcements in the next week or so. Apple’s iPhone and iPod show is coming up, and rumor has it that Apple will be killing off the iPod Classic and Shuffle lines altogether this year. Ars Technica looks at the rumor and finds the reasoning behind it sound. Thanks to the emergence of cloud-based services, there is no longer as much need to carry a 160GB hard drive full of music around in your pocket. ...

The next Apple event is set to take place on October 4th, and the invitation going out to journalists is captioned, “Let’s talk iPhone”. This caption has led to speculation on the part of tech journalists that the new iPhone will include advanced voice-recognition features that have been in the offing since Apple bought Siri 18 months ago. They also speculate that Apple will just be introducing only one new phone—and not the rumored “low-end iPhone” that some investors have been expecting. Rather than a new low-end model, Apple can just continue to keep last year’s iPhone around as...