The holidays are a great time to hide away from visiting relatives and enjoy a good book. Fortunately, when it comes to tech-centric books released this year, there’s a great crop to pick from.
Here are our choices for the best tech books of 2016 (and no, we’re not including Jony Ive’s $300 tribute to himself).
The great App Store purge is finally underway.
Apple warned developers in September that it plans to remove apps from its store that don’t meet quality standards of being “functional and up-to-date.” According to a new report, the deadline to meet those standards has passed and thousands of crummy apps are now being removed.
The fun Jonathan Zufi had playing RobotWar on his high school’s lone Apple II in the early 1980s re-emerged one day. He just had to play it again.
The lark that led Zufi to an online search for an Apple II to play the game grew into the acquisition of more than 500 vintage Apple items, which he lovingly photographed, but then sold to fund production of a coffee table book that has sold more than 15,000 copies.
Apple’s nearly three year legal battle over charges that it conspired with publishers to raise the price of e-books is finally coming to end.
This morning the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear Apple’s appeal, which leaves the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling in place. Apple will finally have to pay $450 million as part of the settlement.
Hollywood has long been the sparkling gem of entertainment in the U.S., but when it comes to making money, Apple is schooling the entertainment industry on how to bring in the cash with the App Store.
In 2014, iOS app developers earned more than Hollywood did from U.S. box office revenues, reports top Apple analyst Horace Dediu. According to Asymco’s number crunching, apps are now a bigger digital content business than music, TV programs, movie purchases and rentals combined.
Apple paid out approximately $25 billion total to developers, which means that not only is the App industry healthier than Hollywood, but also on an individual level, some developers are out earning Hollywood stars. The median income for developers is also likely higher than the median income for actors. If you’re looking to strike it rich, forget becoming the next Brad Pitt. Be the next Dong Nguyen.
Check out the chart below:
In a delightful little video from Microsoft founder Bill Gates, the tech billionaire and philanthropist talks about the favorite books he’s read this year. It’s an eclectic collection: Thomas Piketty’s volume on income inequality, Capital in the Twenty-First Century shares equal space with fiction novel The Rosie Effect as well as a book from the late 1970s, Business Adventures, by John Brooks. It’s a rare insight into the mind of one of our biggest business and cultural leaders of the last several decades.
Check out the video below for the whole list, and a charmingly presented stop-motion Lego film starring Bill Gates himself.
Walter Isaacson’s new book might not be quite the monster hit that his 2011 Steve Jobs biography was, but The Innovators is definitely the 2014 tech book you’re most likely to spot someone reading on the bus. Having focused on one of tech's most singular visionaries, The Innovators turns its attention to teams of inventors and computer scientists, offering a look at just how far technology have come over the past century.
If The Innovators has a downside, it’s that it can be cursory in its discussions of specific people. Jobs got 500 pages of his own, but Vannevar Bush, Alan Turing, Doug Engelbart, Robert Noyce, Bill Gates, Tim Berners-Lee, Larry Page and others have to share less than that between them.
Still, if you’re looking for a tech book people will have read this winter, The Innovators should be high on your list.
Photo: Simon & Schuster
What’s the difference between a businessperson and a regular person? According to Evernote, a businessperson has secrets, whereas a regular person is happy to share everything. This somewhat cynical take is a pretty good model of the world, and it is embodied in the Evernote Business Notebook, a “collabo” with Moleskine that lets you snap/scan a photo of your pages into Evernote, and selectively share the result.
Let’s take a look.
Load up your manly new leather tote with dreamy camera filters, stick a handmade lens on your Leica, slip into a hideous, advertising-overloaded shirt from Rapha and jump on an outrageously expensive bike that’s unique selling proposition is its paint job. What could be more fun this July 4th weekend?
You know what I hate about Apple computers? The precious keyboards. They look lovely, with their sleek designs and tiny little keys, but they absolutely kill my wrists and fingers. That’s why I plug a grimy old Goldtouch keyboard ($129 list when they made ‘em) into the MacBook Air that I use for work. I even take the weird-looking A-frame keyboard with me when I travel. It’s not an elegant-looking solution, but it’s a lifesaver.
I’ve dealt with typing-related RSI for decades. While I use voice recognition when I have to write something lengthy, it’s not the perfect tool to accomplish every task in every situation. Sometimes I need to hammer away on a keyboard, and when I do, the Goldtouch makes the experience far less painful. It’s split down the center, with a ball joint that lets me adjust the angle between the two halves as well as the height at the center. And the soft-touch keys just feel good to me. — Lewis Wallace
P.S. I haven’t tried the updated Goldtouch V2 ($115) or the company’s Go!2 Bluetooth mobile keyboard, but when ol’ faithful finally gives up the ghost, that’ll be my move.
Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac
PaperSync is a more appealing version of the Mod Notebooks service. Like Mod, PaperSync scans your paper pages and turns them into digital files. Unlike Mod, PaperSync uses plain old PDFs, and works with any notebook you like, not just the special Mod notebook.
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Evernote’s new Business Notebook (made my Moleskine) lets you share just a part of your handwritten notes with other businessy-type folks, and it also lets you check a box on each page to set a reminder. And of course it does this in concert with the Evernote suite of apps.
Flickr takes another step towards “being awesome again” with a new book printing service, built right in to Flickr itself. And it’s so simple that you can have even a pretty long book put together in minutes.
Following the release of OS X Mavericks on Tuesday, Apple has updated iBooks Author for Mac to introduce compatibility with the desktop iBooks app. So, books created in iBooks Author can now be previewed and read in iBooks for Mac.
LitBound has made the jump from Android, and is now available on iOS. If you’re a fan of books, or just a library geek at heart, this game offers you hours of trivia fun, testing your knowledge of best sellers, great works of literature, children’s books, and genre fiction like science fiction, fantasy, and graphic novels. Oh, yes, and movies.
Amazon’s Whispersync for voice was always an interesting curiosity: You can read a book on your Kindle, seamlessly switch to the Audiobook version, and then switch back again, all without losing your place. This works thanks to the fact that Amazon owns Audible, the biggest audiobook seller around.
The service just got a lot easier to use, thanks to a doubling of compatible titles, and a new Matchmaker service which automatically pairs up any books you already own, and lets you grab the audio version for a big discount.
If Apple made a notebook (a paper notebook, with paper pages) then it would probably look something like the Baron Fig notebook: The design is understated, obvious even, but it’s chock-full of tiny details that should make it a pleasure to use.
Remember Federico Viticci’s review of the amazing new iPad “text editor” Editorial? Of course you do – it’s the one you pushed to your read-later service and never read later, because it was just too damn long for a single post on a website. Hell, the thing even had a table of contents. A blog post with a table of contents.
Now, though, you can enjoy Viticci’s opus in a form much better suited to a long text with multiple sections: a book. And being an Apple nerd, Viticci made it into an iBook.
Everpix – already the best slightly-confusing service for keeping all your photos ever in one place – has updated to add support for Mosaic. And lest you – like me at 2AM this morning – go searching through the app’s settings to find some cool new grid view, let me tell you now that Mosaic is a separate service for printing photo books.
Simon & Schuster has confirmed it will be launching a paperback edition of Walter Isaacson’s best-selling biography on Steve Jobs this fall, featuring a younger Jobs on its cover. The book, which will also be updated with a new afterword, will be available on September 10.
Shelfy is a new iPhone app which lets you quickly and easily keep a record of the books you have read, and the books you want to read. And unlike apps like Delicious Library, it doesn’t assume that you have a stack of physical paper books to scan: Input is strictly via search, and all the better for it.
This is the Bridging Book, and it “bridges” the gap between reality and virtual reality by combining an iPad app with an actual paper book. The concept is simple and yet looks to be very effective, if the smiles on the kid in the video are anything to go by: The iPad detects page turns made in the book using magnets. Yes, frikkin’ magnets.
iTunes users spend an average of $40 a year on digital content, according to the latest report from Asymco’s Horace Dedio. And with more than 500 million users, Apple is raking in over $5.5 billion in iTunes sales revenue every single quarter.
That’s more than some technology companies see in total, and Apple’s making it on just one service.
Derrick Story – photographer, Macworld writer, podcasts and the man who (somewhat brilliantly) named his site The Digital Story – has just launched a new book called iPad for Digital Photographers.
The book isn’t proposing that you use you iPad to take photos, holding it up in front of you like some big dork, but that the iPad is a slim and powerful computer that should be slipped into the gear bag of anyone who takes pictures.
There’s some irony in the fact that David Sparks’ (MacSparky) book on Markdown – a format dedicated to being as simple as possible – is published as an iBook which contains audio, video, screenshots and everything else, along with its text.
But if you are either Markdown-curious, or a hardcore Markdown user who just wants to nerd out for an afternoon or two, it’s worth checking out.
