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Rise of the book thieves

I love Apple. Especially Apple hardware. And I’m glad they’re doing so well. But one area where they really messed up is in e-book pricing.

Steve Jobs wasn’t an avid reader. According to Isaacson’s biography, he just read the same Zen Buddhist book over and over. That kind of explains what happened. You may have heard the sordid tale, or read about it in the biography:

Amazon was first in the e-book market and established a wholesale model where no e-book sold for more than $9.99 (Perfect. I remember those halcyon days). Then Apple came along and realized they couldn’t compete using the wholesale model (which they had successfully used for music with their 99c tracks). So they told the book publishers they could set their own price. All the publishers had to do was give Apple 30 percent.

Oh, and one more thing. If they sold a book through Apple, they couldn’t sell the same book for less money on Amazon.

So, the publishers went to Amazon and demanded the same deal, or they would pull all their e-books out. Amazon had no choice.

And that brings us to today, where you either pay $28 for an e-book, or buy the same book - except a real, physical book - at a bookstore for $9.99. Obviously the physical version costs far more to produce and distribute, which is why consumers are ticked off.

The resulting anti-trust lawsuits are going to stretch on for years. In the meantime, armed with Calibre and BitTorrent, ordinary book worms are discovering the enticing world of piracy. Text files are really small and quick to download, unlike those 7-gigabyte HD movies that take all week. You can literally download thousands of stolen books onto your kindle in one shot - more than enough reading material for several lifetimes. Sure, it’s almost impossible right now to find that obscure title you’re looking for - but with enough momentum, that’s going to change.

Unless the major players get their act together and start looking at the situation from a consumer’s point of view, rather than an accountant’s one, publishers are quickly going to be mired in the same rampant piracy that almost decimated the music industry.

No serious reader wants to steal from the authors they love. But they don’t like being ripped off either. Let’s fix this before it’s too late.

The real textbook dilemma

Yesterday, Apple announced the arrival of interactive textbooks on it’s new iBooks2 platform, as well as an online course delivery system through iTunesU. Thus fulfilling Steve Jobs’ dream to take on the textbook industry and relieve students everywhere of their back-breaking packs filled with dead trees.

A digital textbook seems like a great idea, but that’s where it ends - just a nice idea. The reality is that our educational landscape is so uneven and broken that the idea of iPads for every students seems a pipe dream at best. This sobering editorial says it best - the devil is in the hardware. Who’s going to pay for all these iPads? And who will replace them when they inevitably break? Can families afford it?

It seems that a few pilot projects in the richest schools is about all we can hope for, leaving poorer school districts drooling in envy. If you’ve seen the excellent documentary Waiting for Superman, then you’ll know that the education system, in the US at least, has a lot of catching up to do before entering the digital age.

What about university? I can really see the value of digital textbooks shining here - but not on the iPad. Students have enough to distract them without the temptation of tweeting or playing Angry Birds during that boring biology lecture. Perhaps it would work if there was some sort of classroom equivalent of “Airplane Mode” where you could lock the iPad into textbook mode. I can’t see that ever taking off with students though.

Am I being a bit of a Neanderthal? Perhaps. But I was educated with a blunt pencil and the back of a ruler and turned out just fine.

Steve Jobs bio review

Cover from Whole Earth Catalog

This isn’t a book for fanboys who are looking for a insider’s view of Apple or the tech industry. The author, Walter Isaacson, is very much an outsider looking in. As such, he granted Steve Jobs a cool respect, but was never drawn in by Steve’s Reality Distortion Field.

As a result, this biography is extremely well researched. Isaacson gives us a measured, balanced narrative of Steve’s life. The writing is gushing when describing Steve’s many accomplishments, and rightly so. On the other hand, Steve’s dark side is portrayed with frankness, but at times tinged with a sense of self-righteousness that shows the reader Isaacson wasn’t able to truly understand his subject, even after two years of interviews. As open as Steve was to engaging with others, he was also intensely private, as befitting his dualistic, black-or-white nature.

Overall, I’d say this book is a compelling and fascinating read, not just for Apple acolytes, but for anybody interested in the man who created (and resurrected) the most valuable company in the world today.

Remembering the man who changed everything

Steve Jobs passed away yesterday. What is there to say about a visionary who changed the way we interact with our computers, communicate, listen to music, or even appreciate the beauty of typeface. There is so much to say that has been said more eloquently by others. I am greatly saddened, as are so many others, by the loss of such a powerhouse in the tech world.

Yet, although he has left us with many cool toys like iMacs, iPhones, and iPads, it is his inspiration which is a far greater legacy. Steve was uncompromising, sometimes to a fault, in living each day to the fullest. He followed his heart, his passion, his gut. He was crazy enough to believe he could change the world, and so he did. The way he owned the public stage with such exuberance and enthusiasm for his creations was infectious. He was, unapologetically and wholeheartedly, doing what he loved to do.

Goodbye Steve, and thank you. Thanks for showing us that following your dreams is more important than all the money or fame or gadgets in the world.

A revolution nobody cares about

So, yesterday the iPhone 4S was announced and the general sentiment was that it was a huge letdown. Even the media jumped on the bandwagon with news reports on CBC about how disappointing the whole deal was. Most sane observers will tell you the truth of it though: people get hung up on a name. An iPhone 4S sounds like a spec bump whereas an iPhone 5 sounds like a major upgrade, despite the fact that the new guts of the 4S are pretty impressive.

But one revolution that no-one seems to care about is the Siri voice assistant. The functional AI and incredible voice recognition technology that will open up a whole new world for the visually impaired. Bigger screens and thinner profiles are for kids who want a new toy so that it looks like their new phone is better than last year’s model. But this bleeding-edge technology heralds a new age of AI assistance and usability for the disabled. Why aren’t more people making a big deal about this?

Here’s a mock-up of where I think this technology could go in the very-near future:

Now this doesn’t seem so far-fetched, does it? After all, they’ve been doing it on Star Trek for over 20 years now.