On 2009-02-19, Linda G <[email protected]> wrote: > > > .... There's industry speculation that Apple > may jump into the ebook business in the near future, which would add > considerable momentum. ...
When Apple moves into the ebook business, it will be with an offering that leverages all their existing strengths without adding much of anything new. That's how they work.* I doubt it will make much of an initial splash, but will probably end up shaping the way ebooks are sold (not least because they'll patent the user interaction so it can't be used by anyone else, which could even lead to a 'negative shaping'). It will probably use iTunes as the delivery vector, and will work on Macs and Windows PCs, iPhones, and iPod Touch only, no separate e-reader hardware and no Linux support until someone creates it. (And then Apple will periodically break that support with service and forumat upgrades.) You'll have to buy into a contract with their mobile partners to make it work. Content will be in smaller chunks than from Amazon, and there will be (much) less of it to start with. Their initial market will not overlap very much with Kindle's, because Kindle is designed to ape the book experinece, and an iPhone just won't be able to do that and won't try: They won't make the same assumption Adobe did, which served them well, that people will "need" the page to be the same digitally as it is in hard copy. I like to think they'll have accepted the need to have a library model (i.e., buy it once and download it from them whenever you need it), but they won't do that until they're dragged into it kicking and screaming. (See Jason's comments about DRM.) (This is all already in the works. Note that nex-gen iPod Touch devices will be slightly larger, to get a bigger screen. I don't know how much bigger, but at that size a little can make a big difference.) Aside: I well remember the digital document wars of the 90s, as Adobe, WordPerfect/Novell and a third company -- wow, I really can't remember who that was, just that they existed (was it Lotus?) -- duked it out over who would define the de facto format for digital text. WordPerfect's offering was able to adjust the presentation based on the medium, and had some workmanlike hypertext support. For a screen, the document would look one way, in print, another, and it could have indexes and clickable ToCs in its earliest versions. That all ended up being a bad thing, even though they saw it as good (and I still do), because people couldn't easily map from screen to print and they didn't really use the complex feature set. Adobe's format, PDF, was less flexible, fundamentally print-focused: You basically got a printout, displayed page by page on screen. There was no sensitivity at all to other media -- the working assumption was that you were going to print the damn thing. It's gained some screen-focused features over time, but PDF is still fundamentally a print-oriented format, and doesn't cope very well with alternate presentations. I think we're finally going to get past that, now, as we have to display books on a lot of different screen sizes and resolution. PDF is just woefully unsuited to most small form-factor presentations, and it's a major hack to make it suited -- its workflow is print-focused, not screen-focused. I tried to read a PDF on my Archos 604 the other day, and it was murder. Anyway, Adobe won that fight. They had the most primitive of all the offerings, and they won. That was a big lesson for me. I later drew analogies to the way that HTML had triumphed handily over more sophisticated hypertext modalities. Aside 2: One thing that's needful from the ebook publishers is some new way of indicating position in the book. Pages are a print-centric concept. The new way of positioning yourself needs to be semantically-driven, not presentation-driven. Paragraph #s could work, but I think that will feel mechanical and legalistic to readers; I think that micro-chapters or sub-chapters (basically, scenes) will become fashionable, and the problem will be largely addressed by replacing two-page spreads with sub-chapters as the main unit of place-marking. -- *While at the same time creating the clever appearance of innovating by repackaging something that someone else designed -- viz OS X [Berkeley Unix], the zoomy applications dock [KDE], Safari/HTMLKit [Konqueror and KHTML from KDE], iTunes [DataBecker, as far as I can see, of all bizarre sources for inspiration], the iPod+iTunes "halo" [brought to them by a freelancer who they bought off to keep quiet about it], multi-touch [around conceptually since the 80s, at least], switchable desktops [available for years on *nix UIs like KDE and Gnome], and the list goes on. Apple are ruthlessly efficient as second-movers, but they haven't really innovated much since 1984, and when they have, as with the Hockey Puck Mouse and the Mighty Mouse, it's usually been disastrous. -- eric scoles ([email protected]) --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "R-SPEC: The Rochester Speculative Literature Association" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/r-spec?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
