TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

By Chris Meadows

You know that “print vs. e-books” debate we’re always covering here? The New York Times has an interesting article looking at it from a novel new angle: what happens in households where one person favors print and the other prefers e-books.

In looking at these little “toilet seat up or down” style disputes, the article is often rather amusing.

“[My wife] talks about the smell of the paper and the feeling of holding it in your hands,” said Mr. de Halleux, 32, who says he thinks the substance is the same regardless of medium. He added, sounding mildly piqued, “She uses the word ‘real.’ ”

The e-book device industry is taking note of these mixed couples, and trying to figure out how to convert the print-book-only holdout to an e-reader, too (“One of us! One of us!”) or else fit both parties with a single deal, e.g., print-plus-e-book bundling.

(more…)

By Chris Meadows

We’ve mentioned ReCAPTCHA a time or two—the security effort by Carnegie Mellon researchers that took two problems and made them solve each other: how to make a “CAPTCHA” (an automated Turing test meant to prove that a human wants to access the website rather than a spambot) that couldn’t be solved by a computer optical character recognizer, and how to digitize words in old documents that a computer’s OCR couldn’t puzzle out.

By feeding these unrecognizable words to web users, paired with words the computer knew already, it both tested whether they were real people and told the system what those words that were immune to OCR were. It was used to digitize the 130-year archives of the New York Times, one word at a time over the course of a series of millions of web interactions, and proved so successful that it ended up being bought by Google.

However, technology does march on. At DEFCON 18, a researcher presented an paper claiming that he had devised an algorithm that would solve ReCAPTCHAs 30% of the time. While that is only about a 1 in 3 success rate, when solving one ReCAPTCHA fails a website generally pops up another, so a bot using this algorithm would only need to keep trying until it eventually got one right.

The researcher’s website is a little hard to read (it was formerly black on red, and the researcher in a fit of pique at complaints of unreadability changed it to an equally hard-to-read black on grey) but includes links to the paper, the powerpoint he presented at DEFCON, and a flash video of the decoding in action.

(more…)

By Chris Meadows

The Australian reports that the developers of the Pulse RSS reader app for the iPad were invited to address News Corp App World, a private news industry conference held two weeks ago in California. The Pulse reader, you might recall, sparked a minor controversy last month when the New York Times complained about it using the NYT’s feed while charging $3.99 for the app.

The article quotes an unnamed News Limited executive making a similar complaint about paid news aggregator apps:

"It’s quite controversial when someone takes the RSS feed and sells the app," the executive said.

"We’re not too enthusiastic about letting people charge for our content when they’re getting it for free from us. There would have to be a shared arrangement."

Oh really? I wonder how they feel about the web browser Opera, which charges money for an application that can, among other things, read their papers’ websites? Of course, they do give a version away for free—but with banner ads built in. Does that mean it would be okay for an aggregator app to make money with advertising but not with direct sale?

(more…)

By Chris Meadows

Here’s an odd reversal. We’ve written a number of times about Apple pulling or rejecting apps from its store for fairly shaky reasons, but yesterday a story broke about Apple actually standing up for an app when the New York Times wanted it pulled down.

The app in question is Pulse, an iPad RSS feed reader that has been getting good reviews, both at our sister blog Appletell and elsewhere. Steve Jobs praised it at WWDC yesterday, and even the New York Times itself gave it a glowing review.

But apparently someone in the New York Times legal department objected to the fact that Pulse, a commercial app which costs $4.99, features the New York Times RSS feed as one of its defaults, and also didn’t like the way Pulse handled links to articles (though it’s not all that different from how other RSS readers such as Google Reader handle them). They asked that the app be pulled, and Apple briefly did so.

The app’s developers uploaded a new version of the app with the New York Times removed from the default feeds…but then Apple reinstated the original version of the app, with the New York Times included, just a few hours later.

It’s kind of like the Murdoch vs. news aggregators thing all over again—each side thinking the other is getting the better end of the deal. It remains to be seen whether the New York Times will press its objection, or object to other RSS readers on the same grounds.

By Chris Meadows

Because kids are adept at adopting new technology before they’re even old enough to talk, does that mean the next generation is going to grow up using that kind of technology in different ways than we do today?

It’s a good question, and it’s one that I’ve seen a number of articles addressing. Most recently, this piece from Advertising Age talks about how the writer Mike Henry’s 18-month-old son is already actually using the iPhone and iPad. Not just hitting buttons at random, but actually choosing the specific apps he wants to play with.

Here’s what we’ve found most interesting: While our son still has some tolerance for passive video watching on a television or mobile device, when given the choice, he almost always chooses the interactive experience. His own desire for engagement, combined with new technology that’s so easy a 1-year-old can use it, has already built strong media consumption preferences that will dramatically affect his long-term relationship with what we call "television."

From that, Henry infers that his son’s generation is going to demand much more interactivity in his media than the current generation, which in turn means that advertising is going to have to adapt.

I’m a little more skeptical. I think we’d all like to believe that the next generation is going to be made up of media geniuses, but one swallow doesn’t make a summer. There are a lot more factors involved with shaping the creation and consumption of media than our tastes from when we’re toddlers.

And on the other side of things, the multitasking media mindset may not be all positive. I wrote an article a few months back about the possibility that multitasking was affecting our minds in negative ways, relating to dopamine and the “seeking center” of the brain. Now here’s a lengthy piece in the New York Times again looking at that possibility.

(more…)

By Chris Meadows

The Gizmodo “4G” iPhone prototype story continues to get play in the blogosphere. Dan Gillmor posts a look at Apple’s behavior—apparently prompting a police raid on Gizmodo editor Jason Chen’s house—and New York Times columnist David Carr’s editorial about it.

Gillmor quotes Carr casting the raid as only the latest of a number of hostile actions by Apple toward journalists, then Gillmor asks the same questions he did in another column I covered a month ago:

When I read that, I thought, Aha, now he’s going to address his own organization’s flagrant questions of integrity involving Apple — and look at an issue I and a number of others have raised about Apple and journalism. Namely: Why are news organizations, creating iPad apps at a rapid rate, throwing themselves into the arms of a company that unilaterally reserves the right to reject or remove the journalism from its platform if it doesn’t like what it sees.

Surely this would be worth raising an eyebrow? You won’t find a word in Carr’s column even wondering if journalism organizations are violating basic principles this way.

This ties in with an interesting point from the last story I posted, about Steve Jobs’s unhappiness with the New York Times iPad application. A detail from the Gawker story I did not bring up there was that Jobs’s unhappiness apparently moved Apple not even to list the New York Times’s iPad application in its app store’s News section until relatively recently.

What if Apple decided it didn’t want the Times to have an app in its store at all?

By Chris Meadows

Gawker’s “Valleywag” section reports on an intriguing development in the world of iPad newspaper applications.

When the iPad launched, one of the first applications to be spotlighted was an early version of the New York Times iPad app. Jobs had a Times executive come up on stage and demonstrate it.

But almost nobody is happy about the final version of the app that the New York Times ended up producing—“NYT Editors’ Choice”, which leaves out much of the paper’s content, including content available free on-line. One of those unhappy people, Gawker says, has been Steve Jobs, “and his displeasure has been made known to senior Times Company executives, according to a source close to the paper.”

The reasons behind the lack of a full-content iPad app are fairly complicated. Part of it has to do with the Times’s agreement with Amazon, which apparently has the same “most favored nation” status Amazon puts in its e-book contracts—the Times can’t release a cheaper version for another tablet.

Also, there is disagreement between the paper’s departments as to whether an iPad version should be expensive (so as not to “cannibalize” print sales) or cheap (so more people would buy it).

It’s a pity that one of the most anticipated apps for the iPad turned out so poorly, but it does serve to illustrate how complicated digital publication of newspapers can be.

By Chris Meadows

It’s been just over a year since Amazon bought Lexcycle, makers of Stanza, and as I reviewed Stanza the other day I glanced back over some of the old blog entries TeleRead writers made back then. I thought it would be interesting to look at a couple of those predictions or opinions in light of how the past year has gone.

David Rothman wanted Washington to see the acquisition as a signal to investigate the e-book industry for possible monopoly practices:

Washington often bungles things, but at least we can vote the bastards out of office. No one elected Jeff Bezos to boss the book business. Significantly, Stanza includes not just e-book-reading capabilities, but also online cataloging ones, which could well be weakened eventually to thwart Jeff’s competition, regardless of any promises to the contrary that Amazon may have made to Lexcycle, Stanza’s developers. Amazon is trying to become the Comcast of the e-book business, the gateway to most everything, and books could become more TVish as a result if, wittingly or not, the company doesn’t give a fair shake to the more adventurous smallfry.

While David’s hoped-for investigation hasn’t happened yet, the danger of Amazon “bossing” the e-book field has at least been lessened since then by first Barnes & Noble and then Apple getting into the game. On the other hand, this has led to some of the acquired smaller fry (most notably Fictionwise and, yes, Lexcycle) showing signs of being stifled.

(more…)

By a TeleRead Contributor

This is an update to the earlier Amazon plays hardball to keep lower pricing option which gives a lot of details with sourcing of statements.

Today, FAIR (a media-watch organization established in 1986) comments on the New Yorker article by Ken Auletta titled “Publish or Perish: Can the iPad topple the Kindle, and Save the book business?”

That title will give a clue to the focus of the New Yorker Magazine’s article (or maybe The New Yorker itself, which is sharing the financial plight of other publishing organizations).

“Can they… CAN they? “topple the Kindle” (Keep Hope Alive?) followed by, can they also “save” the book business – the two thoughts in tandem there. But the idea of toppling another type of device came before the idea of saving the industry (or in connection with it).

Already, many columnists have pointed out that the iPad and Kindle are two different animals — one is a dedicated e-reader and the other has a multiple focus with an altogether different technology, dazzling for multimedia, but with an e-book reading display that many feel can fatigue the eyes in the long-form, serial reading area (from direct light to the eyes, not from refresh-rates), not to even mention the variance in Size and Cost.

But these are factors raised by other authors when writing about the possibility of “toppling” another, altogether different device. (more…)

By Chris Meadows

Back in December, David Rothman speculated that a tablet might be a good next move for Google. In February, Google showed some conceptual images of what a Google tablet might look like.

Now the New York Times reports that a Google tablet is imminent:

Eric E. Schmidt, chief executive of Google, told friends at a recent party in Los Angeles about the new device, which would exclusively run the Android operating system. People with direct knowledge of the project — who did not want to be named because they said they were unauthorized to speak publicly about the device — said the company had been experimenting in “stealth mode” with a few publishers to explore delivery of books, magazines and other content on a tablet.

The article covers other companies’ tablet plans as well, but Google’s is the big news. It’s a natural fit, given Google’s vast library of public-domain and impending library of in-copyright titles. And Google may be one of the few companies that could go head-to-head against Apple.

On the other hand, its Android phones have not captured anywhere near the marketshare of the iPhone yet, and a similar fate might be in store for a Google Android-powered tablet. Certainly there are a number of other Android-powered tablets either planned or already available, and none of them has set the world on fire yet.

By Chris Meadows

Last week, we covered Cory Doctorow’s rant against the closed nature of the iPad. Lately, a number of responses have emerged to Doctorow and others who hold similar opinions: “You may not like it, but it’s progress.”

Steven Johnson, author of a forthcoming book Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, has an essay in the New York Times in which he considers the matter.

Johnson points out the strange contradiction that, in a world where open development platforms are regarded to be the best “generative” environment for diversity and innovation, the closed iPhone/iPad platform has turned out to be one of the most innovative platforms ever.

Those of us who have championed open platforms cannot ignore these facts. It’s conceivable that, had Apple loosened the restrictions surrounding the App Store, the iPhone ecosystem would have been even more innovative, even more democratic. But I suspect that this view is too simplistic. The more complicated reality is that the closed architecture of the iPhone platform has contributed to its generativity in important ways.

In particular, Johnson points to the simplicity and ease of purchasing having a single authorized chokepoint brings: consumers don’t have to worry about typing their credit card information multiple places on that tiny little thumb keyboard. It makes impulse buying easy and safe. (Amazon has done the same thing with its Kindle, which I often consider to be the most brilliant thing about the platform even as I continue to detest some of Amazon’s other behavior.)

(more…)

By Chris Meadows

Since I posted my article on the OS 4.0 event yesterday, which mentioned that Steve Jobs claimed 600,000 iBooks e-books had been downloaded so far, a number of people have been chiming in on the comment thread questioning the usefulness of those numbers.

Brad Stone at the New York Times’s “Bits” blog has taken notice as well, puzzling over how many of those books are public domain titles. He does answer one question some people had:

An Apple spokeswoman at least clarified one question: she said the number did not include the free copy of the A.A. Milne classic “Winnie the Pooh” that was given to everyone who downloaded the iBooks app.

And he points out that Jobs is hardly the first to play the numbers game, listing a number of Jeff Bezos’s Kindle statistics of dubious utility. He also links to Kindle blogger and occasional TeleRead contributor Stephen Windwalker’s own lengthy entry about what Jobs’s numbers might mean.

I’m not so sure those numbers really matter in the overall scheme of things. Since Jobs didn’t say how many times the iBooks app itself had been downloaded, there is no way to know how many of those iPad owners are planning to read with it, or even guess at how many books each might have averaged.

There’s also no way to know how many of those e-books will actually end up being read. People are a lot more willing to download free stuff than necessarily to use it.

By Chris Meadows

Dan Gillmor at Mediactive raises an interesting question of ethics in his look at the New York Times’s dealings with Apple.

Apple has been featuring the Times very prominently on the iPad page on its website, brought out a Times exec at the iPad launch back in January, and in fact Apple and the Times have been getting very cozy with each other in general.

It makes sense: Apple wants big media franchises to appear on its iPad to drive the device’s sales, while the Times is trying everything it can to monetize itself as ad revenues fall. (For instance, the recent announcement it was going to raise its electronic subscription prices to $19.99.)

What Gillmor wonders is whether the Times paid Apple for its prominent placement, and more importantly whether there is a conflict of interest here—and why the New York Times hasn’t attempted to address it.

What matters is the Times’ seeming indifference to the way this looks. Even though I don’t believe there was any quid pro quo, I do believe that someone who doesn’t know the players could reasonably ask if an arrangement did exist.

Another question Gillmor is asking that no one seems to be answering is whether Apple could remove the New York Times’s (and other media organizations’) e-reading apps if those media organizations say something Apple doesn’t like.

(more…)

By Chris Meadows

Last month, I wrote about using mobile hotspot solutions to “retrofit” 3G coverage to wifi-enabled devices such as the wifi-only iPad or third-party wifi-equipped e-book readers. It would seem like the ideal solution: not as difficult as tethering, compatible with any wifi-enabled device, and remarkably convenient to wherever a user might be.

However, Kevin C. Tofel reports on GigaOm that sales of personal hotspots such as the MiFi fell 28 percent in 2009 over the previous year, according to a recent Infonetics Research Report. The report does expect sales to return in 2010 and beyond.

One problem Tofel cites is that many people simply don’t know about the MiFi yet. He wonders whether carriers might be intentionally keeping quiet about them, preferring to sell multiple single-use 3G devices rather than one connection that can cover several devices.

(more…)

By Chris Meadows

TechCrunch reports that the New York Times is raising its rates for electronic delivery. The “E-Edition” of the paper is going from $14.99 to $19.99 per month, and the Kindle version is going from $13.99 to $19.99 per month for new subscriptions and starting in 6 months for existing subscriptions. Presumably, the iPad edition will be at the same $19.99 monthly rate.

PaidContent points out that this is still less than half the cost of having the print edition delivered ($46 per month), but it’s still a hefty bump for people used to the older pricing.

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal has announced the price of its iPad edition will be $17.29 per month—whereas subscriptions to the print and on-line edition are currently only $11.67 per month and the on-line only rate works out to $8.62 per month. Rupert Murdoch must really hate iPad users.

(more…)

By Chris Meadows

As the iPad launches, so too do the tech-maven reviews. Here’s one from the Wall Street Journal and AllThingsD’s Walter Mossberg, who makes no bones about the fact that he really likes the gadget.

My verdict is that, while it has compromises and drawbacks, the iPad can indeed replace a laptop for most data communication, content consumption and even limited content creation, a lot of the time. But it all depends on how you use your computer.

Mossberg found it excellent for viewing media (including reading e-books), surfing the web, and light typing tasks such as e-mail. He found the virtual keyboard easier to use than some laptops’ physical keyboards, and also found that Jobs had understated the device’s “10-hour” battery life—while watching videos with wifi enabled and the screen fairly bright, he got 11 1/2 hours out of it.

(more…)