We’re nearly halfway through July, and while the vast majority of us are enjoying the summer weather (unless you live in the U.K. where it continues to rain), retailers are already preparing for Christmas. U.K. retailer Currys and PC World just published its of predictions for the top ten gifts this holiday, and at number four it lists an “Apple mystery device” with pricing to be confirmed.
Could this mystery device be the upcoming iPad mini?
The Wall Street Journal today has a report on how the e-book industry is paying close attention not only to what books people read, but how they are reading them. Do readers skim the intro, skip around in the chapters? Do they read straight through? What are readers’ favorite passage to highlight and share? This kind of data mining is happening now, even on your iPad.
Should we be worried?
One of the ironic twists about the anti-trust lawsuits against Apple and the major publishing companies is that Apple’s entrance into the ebook market actually broke Amazon’s virtual monopoly on the ebook business. In the process, publishers gained the ability to control ebook pricing, which can be seen as actually encouraging competition in the industry.
While the U.S. Department of Justice and attorneys general from many states are pursuing lawsuits around the matter, not every country would see the situation in the same terms as the U.S. government. In France, for example, publishers can legally control pricing and are protected from booksellers undercutting their business as Amazon had been doing with its power over the ebook market. It’s even possible that France’s laws protecting publishers may have served as inspiration for the agency model that Apple used in building the iBookstore.
I love e-books. I love them so much that I’m considering buying a double-sided, sheet-feed scanner, chopping the spines of all my dead-treeware books and having an OCR frenzy on their asses.
What I don’t like is DRM. Not for any idealistic reasons (well, maybe a few) but for practical ones. My bookseller of choice is Amazon, as it has the best range and Kindle books work on any device. But the Kindle app for the iPad sucks, and with an update this week it is almost unusable. If only I could read my Kindle books in the beautiful iBooks app. Well, it turns out that I can. And what’s more, I can keep all of my books in a DRM-free format in the cloud, ready to be downloaded to any device, whenever I like. Here’s how.
The Kindle app has been updated to – supposedly – improve the reading experience on the iPad, and to add support for books with pictures: essentially kids books and graphic novels. And while the second is welcome the first – -to my eyes – actually looks worse.
Hearst, the publishing conglomerate that includes several of the world’s largest magazine brands, sees a bright future of iPad and tablet editions. Duncan Edwards, CEO of Hearst Magazines International, delivered some surprising statements as to what that future will look like at this week’s World e-Reading Congress in London.
The most surprising statement was that Hearst doesn’t plan to include interactive content in its digital publications despite work done in the company’s little known App Lab and the belief that users will pay more for a digital edition. Edwards also described mix of devices used by Hearst digital subscribers. That mix is headed up by the iPad but with Barnes & Noble’s Nook platform right behind it.
The Justice Department’s anti-trust suit and the accompanying class action suit brought by various states (totaling 31 plus the District of Columbia) on behalf of consumers against Apple and the major publishing houses has always been tinged with more than a little irony. After all, the alleged price fixing and collusion actually broke Amazon’s monopoly-like hold on the ebook market. In doing so, it opened the door for products and platforms to compete with Amazon’s Kindle.
The idea of Apple as a sort of digital age Robin Hood is a powerful one in the narrative and one that could give Apple a viable case in the anti-trust suit if the actually goes to trial. Unfortunately, new evidence in the class action suit throws a bit ice water on Apple’s attempt to cast itself as the good guy (or at least as the better guy than Amazon).
One of the problems with modern glass displays on smartphones, tablets, and computers is screen glare. If you’ve ever tried to use your iPad out in the sun or check your iPhone on the beach during a bright, sunny day, you know what it’s like — any kind of light creates a glare that can be almost unbearable. Amazon has touted the Kindle’s E-ink display for its anti-glare technology, while all of Apple’s products with glass screens, including the non-matte MacBooks, are notorious for their tendency to collect smudges and reflect ambient light.
MIT researches have developed a water-repellent, self-cleaning glass that “virtually eliminates” reflections of any kind. The new glass will hopefully start making its way into the technologies we use on a daily basis, especially our beloved Apple devices.
Amazon’s lineup of Kindle e-readers and tablets have been fairly successful devices for U.S. retailer Target, with the Kindle Fire becoming its best-selling tablet on Black Friday last year. However, a leaked memo has revealed that the company is about to cease carrying all Amazon devices due to a “conflict of interest.” Many believe it’s simply a ploy to boost its sales of Apple devices.
Microsoft has teamed up with Barnes & Noble with a $300 million investment that will create a new subsidiary focused on accelerating “the transition to e-reading.” Microsoft will take a 17.6% equity stake in a subsidiary, which is yet to be named, while Barnes & Noble will own the remaining 82.4%.
The move will provide Microsoft with its own answer to iBooks, with plans for a NOOK application that will run on Windows 8, and it’ll give users an alternative to the Kindle Store.
Amazon today announced its “Send to Kindle” app for Mac users. The free tool can send documents from a Mac to registered Kindle devices (including the iOS Kindle app) wirelessly. Many are unaware that each Kindle account comes with its own email address, and Amazon lets its users send documents to devices through that address. Popular bookmarking service Instapaper also lets its users push articles to a Kindle account for reading later.
The new Send to Kindle app cuts out the email middleman for desktop computer owners.
Apple’s e-textbook initiative, which the company launched in January along with iBooks Author and a revamped iTunes U service is aimed at K-12 schools rather than higher education. Higher education has a different set of needs when it comes to textbooks, study, and reference materials. There are also big differences in device/platform selection between K-12 and the college market.
In fact, these differences are probably a big part of why Apple decided to focus the majority of its e-textbook (and, by extension its iPad in education) effort on the K-12 market. It’s a market that yields Apple more growth opportunities now and down the road.
Many schools in the U.S. haven’t even had their spring break yet, but school administrators are already planning for the next school year. For public schools that means determining how best to allocate scarce financial resources and trying to determine how far they can push their budgets before the residents and homeowners in their district will vote them down. School IT departments meanwhile are beginning to consider what major projects and upgrades they’ll be doing over the summer recess.
Although this decision-making process tends to run like clockwork for most schools and districts, this year there’s a new factor to consider: Apple’s iPad-based iBooks 2 e-textbook initiative (as well as the iPad itself).
By all accounts, text-heavy apps really shine on the new iPad’s Retina Display, so I’m glad to see that Amazon have already updated my favorite iOS e-reading app to work at native 2048×1536 resolution.
And that’s not all. Amazon has also taken the opportunity to redesign the Kindle library view so that it’s organized in two separate tabs, “Cloud” and “Device,” which should make it easier to tell which e-books you have stored locally and which ones need to be slurped down from Amazon’s databanks.
You can download Kindle 3.0 on the App Store right now for free.
With the U.S. Department of Justice gearing up to slap Apple with an antitrust lawsuit, the Cupertino company has spoken out over claims it has teamed up with publishers to raise the price of e-books, and downplayed the threat from Amazon’s Kindle. It argues that it gave publishers the opportunity to set their own prices, and that it cannot be blamed for e-book price hikes.
BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS 2012 — One of the things that first inspired me to be a professional writer was sharing my early fiction experiments as a 10 year old on the discussion boards of the old dial-up service, Prodigy. The instantaneous feedback, the helpful advice, the suggestions from other people about what should happen next to my character (a monster-killing, Nazi-loathing private dick named Dr. Crypt, a name which I still use as my Twitter handle): all of this was a formative experience for me, and without it, I never would have dared to dream that someday, I would make my living putting words down on paper.
Prodigy’s bulletin boards aren’t around anymore, but a new start up is trying to encourage kids and teenagers to write the same way. The company’s called Movellas, and it’s taking the concepts of Twitter, LiveJournal, Kickstarter and the Kindle self-publishing platform to help identify and nurture the next Stephanie Mayer or Stephen King when he or she is still a kid. And, of course, they have an app for that.
Whether Samsung’s blatant Apple bashing adverts are actually convincing customers to buy its products is unclear, but they are at least inspiring other companies to mock Apple’s gadgets in their own ads.
Amazion is the latest, with a new Kindle ad that takes aim at the iPad for its poor reading conditions in direct sunlight, and its heavy price tag.
Today Amazon launched an iPad-optimized Kindle Store web app. Visiting amazon.com/iPadKindleStore on the iPad will now take you to Amazon’s new web portal for buying ebooks from Apple’s tablet.
Once you’ve logged into your Amazon account, you’ll be able to browse and purchase ebooks in Mobile Safari on the iPad. Your purchases will then be pushed by Amazon to your Kindle device or Kindle iOS app.
Just how popular were Kindles as Christmas gifts? Amazon said today it sold at least 4 million of the devices in December, or 1 million each week. Sounds great until we check Apple numbers and find the Cupertino, Calif. tech giant demolished the Internet retailer’s sales hype in about one day.
If you buy books through Amazon and use their Kindle app, a nice update was just pushed to the App Store bringing the option to subscribe on your iPad to any of the magazines offered on the Kindle Fire
New tablets from booksellers Amazon and Barnes & Noble are chipping away at the iPad’s commanding lead of the market. The Kindle Fire is expected to be the strongest challenger, dropping Apple’s market share below 60 percent in the fourth quarter of 2011, analysts write today.
Amazon, known for its shyness about sales figures, made a bit of a splash today, announcing it had sold 1 million Kindles per week for the past three weeks. Sure, that isn’t much to go on, but it prompted some to wonder whether the No. 2 tablet maker is about to overtake the iPad.
If you’re a fan of The Neverending Story, here’s an iPad case that even a Rockbiter could love.
Did Apple conspire with major publishers to increase e-book prices? The European Commission has launched an antitrust probe of Apple and five publishers amid claims the industry was “terrified” by Amazon’s $9.99 e-book push. At the heart is Apple’s iBookstore and the tech giant’s “agency model” that a California lawsuit charges inflated book prices.
In late 2010, Steve Jobs commented on the sudden influx of 7-inch tablets by calling them ‘tweeners. He said that Apple had considered 7-inch displays for the iPad, but after extensive testing, a 7-inch screen was too small to really be useable.
Android tablet makers, of course, scoffed… then rushed to market with their own 10-inch tablets once they discovered that Steve Jobs was telling the truth. So how long until Amazon updates the Kindle Fire to 10-inches? The results of Kindle Fire usability studies are in, and the 7-inch Kindle Fire is an ugly, hideous mess of missed taps and users screaming out of frustration.
