Peter Kafka at All Things D’s MediaMemo has an interesting piece looking at the size problems with Condé Nast’s magazine iPad apps, such as the ones for Wired and the New Yorker. Wired’s app weighs in at half a gig for a monthly publication, and the New Yorker is 173 megabytes for a weekly. Kafka explains that the blame can be placed on Adobe’s magazine app, which “essentially functions as an image reader”, turning each magazine page into “several big photos” rather than presenting it as text. The problem with presenting it as text in HTML, New Yorker...

Speaking of Apple and closed-vs-open, Apple has occasionally been known to reverse controversial decisions, eventually. Such a reversal happened today. Earlier this year, Apple’s refusal to allow the use of third-party development platforms to create iOS applications touched off a minor furor (and an FTC investigation). Among other things, this meant that Wired Magazine would have to create an entirely separate version of its tablet magazine app for the iPad, instead of being able to create one version in a Flash-based Adobe development environment and export it for multiple platforms including the iPad. Today, Apple has changed...

ReadWriteWeb has an article on this today. They look at two examples and compare the user experience (not the business model), Wired and Zinio. I still prefer print magazines from a user experience perspective, although I like the experimentation of Wired and others. However, overall I prefer iPad magazines due to speed of delivery, cheaper price and ability to access a whole archive from one app. ...

Ars Technica’s Ryan Paul has a look at three upcoming or recent Android e-book readers, including the Cruz Reader, the Pandigital Novel, and the SmartQ T7. Velocity Micro’s Cruz Reader looks particularly impressive. Paul writes: The device has a seven-inch color LCD touchscreen with a resolution of 800x600. It runs Android 2.0 and will come bundled with the Borders book store. Even though it is designed as an e-book reader, users will still have access to the underlying Android environment and will not have to hack the device in order to sideload and run...

Internet humorist Lore Sjöberg has been paying attention to the furors over “dying” industries that have been erupting lately—including one I haven’t covered here, since it didn’t have anything to do with e-books. A proposed deal between the RIAA and the National Association of Broadcasters/musicFIRST would see cell phone manufacturers required to put an FM tuner in every cell phone they make. Sjöberg thinks this is a great idea, but why stop there? He proposes some similar restrictions in the name of saving newspapers, mapmakers, and travel agents. (The newspaper one involves parakeets.) Related: ...

Chris Anderson has finally posted the article I mentioned Gawker’s post about a few weeks ago: “The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet” (though it’s actually a pair of related articles—one by Anderson, the other by Michael Wolff). It’s certainly interesting and worth reading, and perhaps my Chris Anderson vs. Prince article was a little unfair. The thesis is that consumers are moving away from the web and toward apps (such as those on the iPhone or iPad) because the apps can present specialized information in more convenient formats, while the media companies are moving in...

Wired’s “Gadget Lab” blog has an article (or had an article, anyway; though it’s still in my Google Reader feed, it has vanished entirely from the Wired website—the link to the original article returns a 404) looking at how much publishing business arcana are unexpectedly turning out to matter in the new world of e-book publishing. After touching upon the Wylie/Amazon and Amazon 1984 imbroglios, the Gadget Lab staff mention talking to former book distributor and digital publisher Don Linn about it. Publishing metadata, for instance — things like ISBNs, trim size, etc. —...

Gawker’s Valleywag section posts a tip it’s gotten, that Wired editor Chris Anderson is reportedly preparing a cover story for the magazine in which he declares that “the Web is Dead”. He will apparently argue that content is moving to more restricted corners of the ‘net, such as iPad and iPhone apps. According to Valleywag, this comes at a time when there is a “cold war” on between the print Wired Magazine and the on-line Wired Digital (Wired.com/Reddit) divisions—Anderson has reportedly called Wired.com a “business failure, generating little cash for publishing company Condé Nast” (though he claims he was...

Never one to pass up a chance to poke fun at an easy target, Internet humorist Lore Sjöberg has written a hilarious “Alt Text” column for Wired on “Library of Congress Rulings That Could Have Been”. Other rulings give users the right to copy videogames for the purpose of researching the quality and type of security measures embedded therein — obviously the main reason people copy videogames — and the right to turn your electronic book into an electronic audio book, assuming there isn’t a legal audio book version already on the market. ...

As the iPad emerges as a powerful force for e-reading, the fate of dedicated e-book devices is either dim or bright, depending on who you talk to. Last week, Jeff Bezos made a lot of sound and fury about how well the Kindle is selling, but since he keeps all sales figures close to his chest it’s not at all certain what it signifies. Now Wired has a story about how the iPad is killing off some of the shakier e-reader companies, whose prospects were unclear even before its launch: Audiovox, iRex, Plastic Logic, and Cool-er have all...

Charlie Sorell of the Gadget Lab takes a look at this potentially highly useful gadget. Full report here....

Sports Illustrated is the latest big-name magazine publisher to offer an iPad edition. It's a nice looking product, btw. The app itself is free and it includes a sample of what's to come. It joins the likes of Time, Wired and Newsweek...but they all currently have the same limitation: You can only buy individual issues, not sign up for a one-year subscription. Worse, most of them seem to think they can charge the full print cover price for each iPad edition. I bought the initial Wired edition for $4.99 but I'm not buying the second one. ...