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 rapid price drop of the Kindle led some to speculate that, if prices kept falling at the same rate, it would be free by the end of this year. It doesn’t look like that is going to happen, but the prices sure have fallen, haven’t they?

Rumors have long been with us about free Kindles. In 2010, Mike Arrington heard from someone claiming Jeff Bezos was considering giving free Kindles to all Amazon Prime subscribers. More recently, Amazon reps told an AllThingsD reporter that they still couldn’t work out the economics of such a givewaway (though that was before the latest price drop).

A couple of years ago, the Alley Insider estimated that, if the New York Times stopped printing the paper edition of its paper, it could afford to give all 830,000 print subscribers two free Kindles every year. Back then, the price was $359, and now the cheapest model runs considerably less than that. Indeed, at $79, you could buy five Kindle Classics for the cost of the original $399 device.

On Memeburn, columnist Martin Carstens wonders whether the decreasing price of the Kindle might make it more economical for newspapers to consider going that route: giving subscribers free Kindles in exchange for being able to reduce the amount of physical papers they have to print.

I wonder, if in fact, we should be looking to content creators and large institutions like the New York Times rather than Amazon to answer our question [whether the Kindle will ever be free]. When the economic logic of going purely digital becomes sound, news institutions like the New York times could be the key to forcing a free Kindle.

When that happens, it could be a pivotal moment in history, the final death knell to the traditional print newspaper, as digital devices become the new standard for consuming news

Of course, as I pointed out when I covered the Alley Insider’s calculations, the fly in the ointment is print advertising revenue. Print advertising still makes up the bulk of newspapers’ revenues, and if they eliminated print they’d also eliminate that advertising revenue. Of course, they’d also eliminate a lot of expenses. The question is whether the papers could also eliminate enough costs by giving away the devices to be able to continue making a profit on what they had left.

Sooner or later, newspapers will have to figure out how to make the transition. And if the Kindle keeps getting cheaper, the question might not always be a theoretical one. How low will the price be by the end of next year?

It’s probably going to be a while before anything gets decided in this matter, but the Lodsys cases are definitely ones to watch—the outcome could have some big implications for the future of mobile app development.

The app was fixed sometime on Tuesday, and presumably subscribers are now happier, but this points out an important rule paywall app developers need to remember: if people are paying for access, make darned sure they get what they pay for. Free riders might grumble, but paying customers will kick up an unholy fuss if they feel they are not getting their money’s worth.

(Found via Slashdot.)

Out of 26 national paper sites, most had already completed their print run—only 6 were able to print updated copies. 7,000 copies printed in Queens had to be destroyed, and 165,000 extra copies were printed. And the New York Times website, even with its much-vaunted paywall, was having trouble:

With the world now alert that something momentous was under way, user traffic to NYTimes.com was mounting and the servers that handle news articles were “gasping for air,” Mr. Roberts said. Ms. Cooper’s short story first was posted as an article but, with the servers under duress, it had to be shifted over to a different set of computers that serve up Times blogs. Now it appeared not as an article but as a post on the blog The Lede.

As far as I know, it’s pretty rare that a story this huge breaks this late in the evening, so I’m not sure whether needing to stop the presses is as common anymore. But it is certainly an area where the immediacy of the web can trump the once-a-day production of printed papers—assuming that the web sites can handle the traffic. I wonder what lessons the New York Times will take from this?

So far, the Times paywall seems to be reasonably porous. And certainly, the idea of offering free access to subscribers via e-reader devices makes sense—especially if the combined benefit is enough to induce fence-sitters to sub on the Nook or Kindle. Either way, the Times gets more money.

Those who read via the web (and aren’t already paid NY Times subscribers) get 20 article views per month for free—certainly more articles than I’ve ever read in a month. And as if that weren’t enough, redirects from search, blogs, and social media don’t count against the total. (This led one person to set up a free New York Times Twitter autofeed, perfect for adding to Flipboard, which the Times asked Twitter to take down—but it turns out this was not because of its tweeting their articles wholesale, but rather because it was using a “T” logo that the Times felt could lead to reader confusion (much to Cory Doctorow’s consternation).) In a letter today, Times publisher Arthur Sulzburger did mention that there would be daily limits on links from search engines, however.

The most recent development is an Amazon announcement that Kindle owners who subscribe to the NY Times on their devices will get access to the New York Times website at no additional charge. Not too much of a surprise, given that home delivery and other subscribers will get that free access, too. (Found via TechCrunch.)

As paywalls go, this one seems to be reasonably well thought-out. If there are a handful of specific articles you want to read, there are ways for you to do so, even if you’ve already used up all your twenty articles that month. The pay requirement seems aimed at the sort of person who would be likely to pay to subscribe to the paper anyway, or at least would feel like they got their money’s worth if they ponied up. The heaviest users, in other words—the ones who use the most bandwidth on the site.

I still don’t like paywalls in general, but I suspect I’ll hardly even notice this one. And if the New York Times thinks this will keep it from going under, they have every right to try and see what it gets them.

Times CEO Janet Robinson has said that the paywall will provide a limited number of articles per month free, with heavy users required to pay a subscription fee. She has not said how many articles would be available free.

Certainly a <$20 monthly subscription would be a bargain compared to the cover price of the print paper, which costs about $50 per month. (And a lot of magazines and papers are charging their full cover price for the electronic versions, particularly on iPad.) But print subscribers will also get web access at no extra charge, so it’s perhaps not as big a difference as it appears.

Of course, it remains to be seen just how successful a paywall can be in the long term.

Ironically, thanks to the presence of long-established paper book sales-tracking survey BookScan, it is currently significantly harder to quantify sales of electronic books (which should create a digital record with each single sale) than it is to track paper ones.

As e-book sales grow, so the market has become increasingly opaque. Amazon’s figures are a master-piece in self-interested obfuscation, and I’ve seen nothing from Apple, or Sony that suggests they are likely to have a damascene conversion to openness anytime soon.

This necessitated some of the same sorts of guesswork that preceded BookScan for the paper book selling world for FutureBook to come up with an e-book bestseller list of its own for the launch of a weekly email newsletter.

I wonder how the New York Times and Nielsen are going to gather accurate sales figures if the e-book stores are so reticent to give them out. Will they come from the publishers themselves?

A number of fine dining restaurants have begun replacing their traditional menus and wine catalogs with iPads equipped with the information in digital form. Establishments like them because they can incorporate multimedia in ways that old media couldn’t, and can easily be updated without necessitating an entire new printing; customers like them because they are interactive and easily searchable, and can contain far more information than the old printed form to help them make a decision.

“If they build one that can open up a bottle of wine, I’m going to be scared to death,” said Fred Dame, one of the country’s 105 master sommeliers and president of the Guild of Sommeliers Education Foundation. “When I saw this thing and saw the applications, I said, ‘Oh, man, that’s the end of the print shop.’ ”

Restaurants trying the devices out have also seen their wine sales increase significantly, even converting beer and cocktail drinkers who spend time with the iPad.

Of course, buying dozens of iPads for a restaurant is a considerable investment, so it’s not something that every establishment is going to be able to do. But as tablet prices fall considerably, so will the barriers to adopting cheaper devices to do much the same thing. And it’s also possible that restaurants will start making their menus available as downloadable apps so that people can use them on their own devices.

(Found via Tim Carmody at Wired.com.)

Mike Masnick on TechDirt

The review, and Masnick’s review of the review, focuses on predictions of techno-apocalypse throughout history:

The locomotive riled 19^th-century Great Britain, which feared that engines would blight crops, terrify livestock, and asphyxiate passengers with their high speeds (greater than 20 miles per hour). The numbskullery continues. Gutenberg’s press was going to destroy the clergy and destroy the state. Television was rotting the public’s brain. Comic books were corrupting our youth. Similar predictions and warnings about the bicycle, the radio, the automobile, the airplane, the washing machine, and the microwave were sounded.

The book casts the panics of the present-day, such as the aforementioned Internet attention span crisis, in the light of these previous ones that never came. It talks about where the current rapid pace of change might be leading, and how we can deal with it.

A sample excerpt consisting of the introduction, part of the first chapter, and the epilogue is posted on Scribd, and it makes for some interesting reading. In the part of the introduction I’ve read so far, Bilton talks about how his love affair with the print edition of the New York Times waned over the years in favor of the electronic version, and how he got into trouble when he told Wired reporter Ryan Singel that he did not read the print version of the Times himself anymore.

And Bilton is using QR codes in the printed book to link to a section of his website where discussion and supplemental material is posted. This includes videos, such as the one embedded below.

I might just have to ante up and buy the e-book, which is available for Kindle for $9.99 or, oddly enough, for Nook for $13.45. There is reportedly a free iPhone/iPad app, too, though I couldn’t dig up the link in the time I had.

Nick Bilton – I Live in the Future & Here’s How it Works from Nick Bilton on Vimeo.

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.

The article quotes Mike Shatzkin on the more emotional attachment people often feel to printed books, and provides a few examples in that vein of the odd, irrational way that books vs. e-books affects some people.

“I brought a book with me and I barely read it,” said Ms. Muskat, a media consultant. “We used to go to the beach and we’d both take out books, but [my husband] had an iPad, and it was almost distracting because it didn’t feel like he was reading with me.”

It highlights the uphill battle that e-book vendors have in some way—it’s easy to come out with feature after feature, and even tell the customer how a feature actually benefits them rather than just enumerating what it is (a sales technique I learned about in the sales classes that went with my tech support position). But it’s hard to fight an irrational attitude because by its very nature it simply doesn’t respond to logic.

It may well be that e-books will never fully take over until the adulthood of today’s younger generations, who will have never known life without them.

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.

Perhaps a little amusingly, on July 21, just before DEFCON, the researcher notes:

I cracked the old one at 10% and wrote a research paper on it, then they changed it a week before my presentation at DEFCON 18, so I recracked it. Only this time at 30%. I will post detailed information on how to properly crack it after the conference.

On recent ReCAPTCHAs I encountered, I had noticed there were some changes—the words were distorted, or parts of them had been flipped to negative view. I had wondered if something like this might have happened. It’s both a little sad and kind of ironic to ponder the spectacle of having to make words a computer formerly couldn’t recognize even harder for it to recognize.

I wonder if anything in the crack—presented in full as it was at the conference—could be adapted to help book-scanning OCR systems crack those hard-to-decipher words as easily as the researcher could crack the ReCAPTCHAs?

(Found via Slashdot.)

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?

For that matter, I’m pretty sure there must be RSS readers for the PC and other platforms that cost money—if there weren’t, this About.com listing wouldn’t need separate lists for “Top 10 Free” and “Top 10” Windows RSS readers—but we haven’t seen any complaints about those.

When a paper (or anyone else) gives away its RSS feed, their control over how customers view it ends at the point where they make it available to the public. Like a webpage (which, basically, it is a specialized form of), it can be viewed in any application that knows how to handle its format.

Some people give apps away free; some people charge for them. Charging for the app doesn’t mean you’re charging for the free content that can be viewed with it.

Related: iPad RSS reader review: Reeder vs. Pulse

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.