TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘smartphones’ Category

By Chris Meadows

The closed nature of the Apple platform has let it in for a lot of criticism, especially when that closed nature affects e-books or e-book applications. For example, Apple famously made David Carnoy change a swear word in his first iteration of the Knife Music appbook (though let it through in a later version), and rejected an e-book app for being able to access the public domain Kama Sutra e-book. And let’s not forget the great mature app purge, which probably caught some e-book-related apps as well.

A number of people have been touting cell phones based on the competing Android operating system for their greater degree of “openness”. The Android operating system is open source (excepting for certain apps that Google keeps to itself) which means that users and coders should have a greater degree of freedom over what they can do with it, right?

Wrong, says TechCrunch’s MG Siegler. The OS may be open, but fly in the ointment is that this very openness also gives carriers freedom to mess with it in ways that they can’t mess with Apple’s iPhone.

(more…)

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.

(more…)

By Chris Meadows

Bill Stiteler at our sister blog Appletell has posted a piece looking at the possibility of Apple adding Facetime to the next generation of iPod Touch (as I did here).

He does mention a couple of points that I didn’t consider. One is that turning the iPod Touch into a wifi VoIP phone would allow Apple to offer phone service of a sort without having to put up with the complaints about AT&T’s service or the external cell phone antenna.

Another is the possibility that the iPod Touch will only have the front-facing FaceTime camera and not the rear-facing photo/video camera. I hadn’t thought of that; I’d just assumed it would come with both. On the other hand, having just the Facetime camera would lower the manufacturing cost, and might also placate phone companies who might not be too pleased about Apple moving to make them less necessary.

I still wish that it was possible to get an iPod Touch with iPad-like 3G data connectivity. Of course, people would use it as a voice-over IP phone, which is less convenient to do with the bulky 3G iPad.

But then, in this era of high-speed Internet data service, charging separate rates for voice, text messaging, and Internet data is making less and less sense. Unlike with landline phones, where voice is analog and DSL is digital, everything that goes over a cell phone line is data. The only reasons cell phone companies continue to charge for these things separately are tradition and that they can.

(more…)

By Chris Meadows

We reported in May on rumors of a possible Blackberry tablet device flying around. Lately, those rumors seem to have solidified. Our sister blog Gadgetell reports that Research In Motion, makers of the Blackberry, has acquired the domain name “blackpad.com” from the previous owner, who had owned it since 2002.

CNet ties together some other reports, including a post from Bloomberg in which anonymous sources claim the device is going to be Blackberry’s crack at killing the iPad, having similar specs and pricing to the wifi-only version, and will launch by November.

The tablet will be called the Blackpad, according to Bloomberg. Its touch screen will measure 9.7 inches, similar to the iPad, and the price will be "in line" with Apple’s tablet, the cheapest model starting at $499.

It will rely on wi-fi and Bluetooth to connect to the Internet, rather than 3G, and might well be meant more as a companion device to the Blackberry for people who already own one than as a true standalone.

Either way, Gadgetell notes that RIM and AT&T are planning some kind of special event in New York on Tuesday, August 3rd, and it might well be a natural place and time for such a tablet to be announced.

The Blackberry has had a number of e-book reading apps, including the Mobipocket reader that the iPhone ecosystem still lacks, but has not generally had the multimedia-friendly reputation of the iPhone. Can it turn this around with a Blackberry tablet? Will the tablet, unlike the iPad, run Flash?

Perhaps we’ll get some of the answers on Tuesday.

By Paul Biba

iPad sales are through the roof, Kindle and ereader sales are climbing, but what about reading on phones? My strong suspicion is that this is the place where the majority of ereading will, and maybe does, take place.

Look at the continual growth of Wattpad, especially in third world countries. Phones are ubiquitous, even there.

What made me think about this is an article in Unwired View about smartphone use in the UK. 73.5% of the UK market was made up of smartphones in June. This is up from 55% in the first quarter of this year and from 66.7% from the second quarter.

The article also discusses the increase in Android growth in the UK. Up 350% from Q1 to Q2 of this year. As to the US, I don’t have the numbers to hand, but just go into any phone store – AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile- and look at the dramatic increase in smartphones on the counters.

As to reading, the iPhone, 3 or 4, makes an excellent reading platform, the new Samsung Galaxy series does as well, and also the Droids. It’s too early to tell yet, but my suspicion is that the real hype should be about smartphones, not tablets or dedicated readers.

By Chris Meadows

I reported in February that the BBC’s plans to launch smartphone apps based on its news sites had caused some controversy among British newspaper publishers. The publishers were upset because they already regard the BBC as a publicly-funded competitor to their private businesses, seeing it as unwanted government competition to private industry. They thus protest anything new that the BBC does, fearing it might negatively affect any similar efforts of their own.

In response to their concerns, the BBC elected to delay the release of the apps until the BBC Trust had the chance to consider them further.

Now, according to Paid Content, the BBC Trust has ruled that the BBC smartphone applications can go ahead as planned. The Trust found that such apps do not represent any significant change from the way the BBC already makes its content available free over the web.

Personally, I also feel the impact of the apps will be limited because smartphones and tablets—especially the iPhone and iPad—already have perfectly serviceable web browsers, and it’s a lot easier to go to a website as part of your normal browsing experience than it is to close the browser and tap a separate icon to launch an app that may not even have as much functionality as a well-constructed website to begin with.

By Chris Meadows

Last month, I mentioned Ubimark’s publication of a print edition of Around the World in 80 Days with “e-footnotes”—QR codes that can be scanned by a free iPhone app to turn into links to webpages with additional content. Now Tools of Change reports that Ricoh Innovations is set to allow publishers to do the same thing with no QR codes required.

According to Jamey Graham, Distinguished Research Engineer at Ricoh, RI’s technology is similar to that of QR codes, but uses the natural patterns of an object or a page as opposed to a barcode. "Over the last few years we’ve developed algorithms for indexing & recognizing visual patterns. Using an Android or iPhone device, readers can snap a picture of a region on the page (text or images, or a combination) and they will be presented with online material just as if they’d scanned a barcode."

Their first app will be paired with Matt Stewart’s novel The French Revolution from Soft Skull Press, but Ricoh has loftier goals in mind than just adding on-line annotations to novels.

TOC reports the company hopes to work with the Gates Foundation to create an app for Where There Is No Doctor, a village health care handbook, and distribute a smartphone containing the app along with a physical copy of the book to villages that have no doctors themselves.

By Chris Meadows

When I saw the article in Google Reader, I had already clicked “mark as read” before going, “…what?” and hastily going back to see if I’d read what I thought I’d read.

Ars Technica has a piece on the Overbite Project, an open-source effort to bring the Gopher format to modern computers which already has an alpha release for Android devices.

Gopher is the hypertext network protocol that was in use before the development of the World Wide Web. I still remember using it back at college in the early ‘90s to find information on the ‘net—mostly e-books such as The Haunted Bookshop by Christopher Morley, or sample chapters of Del Rey paperbacks.

Yes, that’s right: there is an effort underway to modernize a network protocol that was last used to any great extent nearly twenty years ago—an eternity in “Internet time”. But the developers think that the low-bandwidth, textual nature of the format would make it perfect for use on mobile devices.

"Frankly, I think that Gopher’s niche in the future may be in the mobile space," [lead developer Cameron Kaiser] told me in an e-mail. "Rather than coming up with things like WAP, why not go with a protocol that already exists, is simple to implement, is not constrained by licensing, and already has content out there to peruse? Particularly for feature phones and the like, the menus that service providers foist on users as ‘the Internet’ are pretty much the same things Gopher offered in 1993!"

Personally, I think it may be about ten years too late—Gopher would have been great during the heyday of “dumb” phone web browsing, but now a lot of people are moving to smartphones which offer full graphical capability. Why would anyone want to go back to a textual interface with those?

Still, the Internet is made up of people working on projects that a lot of other people can’t see any use in. And a lot of those projects turn out to be more useful than their critics would have imagined. So who knows? Maybe it really is almost time for Gopher to pop back out of its hole.

By Chris Meadows

Publishing Perspectives has an interesting piece from young-adult publisher Jacob Lewis on why he has decided to create an on-line community called Figment where teens can write and share stories.

Lewis was inspired by the way teens have adopted cell phones in Japan for many and more general purposes than they are usually used in America. But there was more to it than just wanting to see how well that would work over here.

One aspect of the Japanese model that is particularly compelling is the intimate relationship created between writer and reader. Delivered to a cell phone, a story may be psychologically on par with a private email or text message. There is an immediacy implicit in the distribution mechanism alone. Fans of cell-phone fiction rightly see themselves as the peers of the writers they admire, and they follow that author and their work as if they were friends. The storyline is beside the point.  It’s the community, the technology, and the belief that something powerful will emerge.

Teens, Lewis says, naturally create communities with each other, and were doing so well before the rest of us discovered Facebook or Twitter. This is what he is trying to tap into with Figment.

I find it fascinating how many on-line writing communities are springing up these days; even folks like Elizabeth Bear or Neal Stephenson are discovering the appeal of building such communities and inviting their readers in. As I pointed out in my series on “Paleo E-books”, such things have been around for pretty much as long as there was an Internet; they seem to be a very natural form for writing and reading with others.

By Chris Meadows

The Adobe Reader PDF viewer is now available for Android (requires version 2.1 or higher). I don’t use Android so I don’t know how well this reader works versus whatever PDF viewing capabilities already existed for the platform, but if any reader wants to send in a review we would be happy to run it!

Speaking of Android, apparently a Verizon employee left a next-generation Motorola Droid Shadow in a corporate gym. Gizmodo has the details and some tech specs (though they didn’t get to buy and disassemble this one). With a 4.3” screen and 16GB of internal storage, it could make quite a decent little e-book reader. There sure have been a lot of next-generation smartphone leaks going around lately, haven’t there?

Also from Gizmodo, Apple is once again offering a free iPod Touch to students who buy a Mac, from now through September 7th. Buy a Mac using an educational discount, and get a free 8-gig iPod Touch thrown in. If you’re a student in the market for a new computer and wouldn’t mind receiving a free e-reader and mobile browser device, don’t miss out!

And on the subject of Apple, the 2-year-old 8GB iPhone 3G is no longer available from Apple’s website, and Wal-Mart has dropped the price on the 16 GB iPhone 3GS to $97 (with contract, of course). Signs and portents point to the new high-definition iPhone hitting the market Really Soon Now.

(more…)

By Chris Meadows

In observance of the announced-for-summer Kindle Reader for Android, CNet’s Josh Lowensohn takes a look at the existing Kindle Reader versions for other platforms and compares how well they come off. My own review only compared the PC, iPhone, and iPad versions; it is interesting to learn more about the Blackberry and Macintosh versions.

Gizmodo has spotted the Kindle in a slightly unusual place—being used by the evil lizard-aliens on the V revival. Amusingly, the Kindle in question is very blatantly displaying an “empty battery” screen. Gizmodo makes much of the fact that a Kindle, not an iPad, got featured in the show—but as commenters below the article point out, the episode would necessarily have been shot well before the iPad was available.

MobileRead is giving away an iPad (depending on its availability in the winner’s native country) to one lucky participant in a brief e-book device survey the site is running. MobileRead is taking answers through the end of Friday, May 21st, and pledges not to share personal information, including e-mail addresses, with any third party.

(more…)

By Chris Meadows

TechCrunch reports that a Kindle app is coming to Android devices sometime this summer. It will require version 1.6 or later and an SD card, and will offer many of the same features as the other Kindle apps—instant download of books and free samples from Amazon as long as you have a working net connection, Whispersync to keep your reading place synchronized across multiple devices, and so on.

Like other Kindle apps, it will not support newspapers, magazines, and blogs. However, unlike the Kindle apps for iPhone and iPad, it will allow purchasing books directly from Amazon without leaving the app itself.

For (a little) more information, see the Amazon page for the Android Kindle app.

By Chris Meadows

Our sister blog Gadgetell summarizes a Crackberry.com post about rumors of a Blackberry tablet that have been flying around. There really isn’t a lot of solid information, just speculation. It isn’t even clear whether such a device would run the same OS as Blackberry handhelds, or Android.

As Gadgetell points out, RIM (Research In Motion, the makers of the Blackberry) started out with a business focus and has been aimed primarily at the enterprise ever since. Apple, on the other hand, has had to retrofit all the enterprise features that users have asked for—and even then they won’t be out until OS 4.0. With that in mind, a potential Blackberry tablet could have a significant edge over the iPad when it comes to business adoption even if it doesn’t catch on with consumers.

But at the moment, nothing about the potential device is clear, so it seems largely to be a case of “wait and see.”

By Chris Meadows

Worried about losing your e-book reader? (Or iPod, iPhone, laptop, netbook, or other expensive device?) Our sister blog AppleTell reports on a service that might offer a solution—or at least provide a little peace of mind.

TigerTag is a registration service that lets you tag your devices with individual serial numbers that can be used to tag your items so that any potential good samaritan who finds them has only to look your ID up on the website to find out how to get it back to you. You can order sheets of serial-number stickers for basically the cost of shipping and handling.

While relying on the kindness of strangers is no guarantee you’ll get your lost or stolen device back, it’s at least better than not doing anything at all. I might just have to look into this service myself.

By Chris Meadows

Last year, I covered an article from Wired that turned out to have been badly researched, claiming the iPhone was not popular in Japan. Since then, it has become clear that, far from being unpopular, the iPhone has done very well there.

TechCrunch has the latest evidence to this effect, citing a Japanese study showing that the iPhone commands a 4.9% market share in the entire Japanese cell phone market, with estimated sales of over 3 million units. Considering how cell phone crazy the Japanese people are, and how many fancy Japanese phone features the iPhone does not have, that is even more impressive.

The iPhone might very well be the perfect e-book-reading machine for the space-conscious Japanese. Certainly larger e-book readers have had a tough time of it so far.

Related:

• Amazon talks Kindle with Japanese publisher
• iPad could shake up Japanese publishing industry like Perry’s ‘black ships’

By Chris Meadows

Remember the Intel Reader, the $1500 handheld device that acts as a hand-held portable scanner/OCR/text-to-speech device for the blind?

A company called LookTel is in the beta stage of bringing something similar to Windows Mobile camera phones. The device will speak aloud text (package labels or street signs) or identify currency within its field of vision; snapshot-OCR magazine articles, book pages, and so forth; and allow adding voice tags to patterned labels that can be applied to containers and other objects without speakable text.

According to the article, it will even allow the user to provide a remote feed of the camera to someone else to get assistance.

The three-minute video showing the software in action (embedded below the jump) is pretty impressive. This could be one of the first really affordable handheld assistance devices for the visually-impaired.

(more…)