We know you’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover, but what about by its spine? On the Scholastic “On Our Minds” blog, Jessica writes about the common misconception that kids won’t read books that are too lengthy. But she notices there is significant evidence that this is a misconception. Look at some of the titles being read by kids and teens.  Besides the Steve Jobs book weighing in at 656 pages, the smallest book in the Twilight series clocked in at just fewer than 500 pages.  The rest of them were bigger.  The...

I’m not sure whether you can really call this “ironic”, as misused as that word often is, but it’s certainly amusing. Apple has notified some purchasers of the Steve Jobs biography e-book on iBooks that they should delete the current version and download a new version at no charge, Macworld UK reports. Apple confirmed to Macworld that the emails were genuine and the instructions were to fix formatting problems suffered by a small number of customers who had downloaded the iBook. No changes have been made to the content. Of course, this sort of...

Steve Jobs has been dead for a few weeks, and so it’s time for everyone to start prognosticating what Jobs really wanted, what he really thought about things, and what he had in mind for the future. Easy to do that when the man isn’t around to speak for himself. Much of this comes from Jobs’s authorized biography, which has been released to newsmedia in advance of its actual publication. Most of it isn’t really on topic for discussion here, but the New York Times mentions that Jobs was planning to hire textbook writers to create digital versions of...

News sites all over the Internet are carrying the news that Steve Jobs has passed away. There are plenty of eulogies, looks back at his life, and links to videos or texts of speeches he made or interviews he gave at one time or another, and since you can hardly turn around without finding them right now I don’t see the need to repeat them here. I will note that Poynter has an interesting article about “How Steve Jobs changed (but didn’t save) journalism” that is well worth reading in keeping with our own subject matter. I gather Jobs...

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...

On PaidContent, Charles Arthur brings up one of the important facets of Steve Jobs’s legacy that tends to get overshadowed by Jobs’s hardware successes. Quite apart from all the gadgets Jobs designed, he also designed a new business model for the music industry: the 99-cent song. The headline of Arthur’s article suggests that Jobs’s great success was “persuading the world to pay for content,” but the article itself seems to take the opposite tack: the world was ready to pay for content, but Jobs’s success was in persuading the content-owners to sell it digitally. Arthur explains that...

We had to expect it sooner or later, and sooner or later turned out to be today. Just a couple of hours ago, Steve Jobs announced he is resigning as CEO of Apple. He will be succeeded in that position by Tim Cook. However, Jobs is not going into retirement just yet—he will take up the position of Chairman of the Board, and continue to be very involved in the new product development process. As ever, Jobs was notoriously tight-lipped concerning his reasons for the move. The closest he came to explaining was in the first paragraph of his...

That’s the provocative theory put forward by Sue Zoldak in an opinion piece on The Daily Caller blog. She starts out by noting that in some cases hardcover prices are lower than e-book prices (something I’ve mentioned before myself), and points out that—unlike the iTunes deal that lowered the price of music when sold digitally—Jobs used publishers’ fears of Amazon to negotiate a rise in e-book prices. This came at the expense of Amazon, who was using exactly the same model to sell Kindles that Jobs had used to sell iPods. The real question...

Wired’s satirist Lore Sjöberg applies his trademark sarcasm to Apple’s in-app subscription requirement and the resulting uproar. Many publishers reacted to the announcement by saying the terms would force them out of the digital-content business and back into print publishing, which is extremely profitable and will never become obsolete. He explains that Apple is able to get away with this because its competition is essentially ridiculous, and compares Steve Jobs to an ancient god of wealth and the underworld. Definitely hilarious....

Gizmodo and TechCrunch have confirmed that Apple has begun sending out invitations for their March 2 event, and the fact that the logo shows a calendar day peeling off to reveal the corner of an iPad behind it, it seems pretty obvious what it’s going to be about, doesn’t it? On Wired’s Gadget Lab blog, Charlie Sorrel has posted his wish-list of iPad 2 features: in short, cameras, speakers, SD card slot, a better connector, and a better case. He also wouldn’t mind a screen that he could dim further, so it’s easier to use in low-light settings. ...

The rumors have been flying fast and furious about Apple lately. Is Apple going to produce an iPhone that is smaller, cheaper, or both? Does Steve Jobs only have weeks to live? Who knows? What we do know is that TechCrunch reports that rumors from analysts that the iPad was going to be delayed until June or September sent Apple’s stock prices into a tizzy, and it wasn’t long after that that another rumor began to circulate—the ever-present “people with knowledge of the matter” who weren’t supposed to talk to the press nonetheless leaked the fact that Apple’s new...

Our sister blog Gadgetell points out that it’s been just over a year since we first saw Steve Jobs come on stage with his clipboard-sized wonder tablet the iPad and show us for the first time just what it was capable of and how much it cost. Since then, the device has proceeded to redefine what we thought of as a tablet—certainly there had been tablets before, but none of them exactly set the world on fire. The iPad, on the other hand, did set the world on fire, opening up new possibilities for reading not only e-books, but...