Author: Jon Renaut

AT&T looking to monetize things

With the success of Amazon deal with Sprint on the Kindle’s always-on internet connection, it should come as no surprise that others are going to want to get in on the synergies.

“There’s a whole bunch of ways to monetize that type of device,” [head of emerging devices at AT&T Glenn] Lurie said in an interview with Bloomberg at the CTIA Wireless show in Las Vegas. “That’s coming, it’s coming fast,” he said. “We’re going to be part of it.”

This may be putting the cart before the horse – jumping into a market just because you see the dollar signs is a good way to lose your shirt – but doubtless AT&T has the money and the resources to do it right.  Whether they do or not remains to be seen.  Competition for the Kindle certainly won’t hurt consumers.

via AT&T May Enter E-Book Market, Dominated by Kindle Update2 – Bloomberg.com.

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The depressing same-ness of the ebook reader industry

This is what qualifies as news these days in the world of ebook readers.

As for features, the device is simple but practical: SD card support guarantees easy storage of eBooks and music it’s an MP3 players too, and Foxit, a company most famous for its lightweight PDF software, guarantees the device will read PDFs very well—a factor that help mitigate the reader’s lack of a Whispernet-type service.

So, this ebook reader is exciting because it’s sure to be really good at handling a file format that, while common, isn’t particularly well-suited for ebooks.

via Ebooks: $260 Foxit eSlick eBook Reader Makes Its Way to Cheapskate Readers.

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The demise of the newspaper will make us better off

Much has been made of the impending demise of the newspaper, as the Old Media (With a few exceptions) has steadfastly refused to embrace the new opportunities of digital delivery of content.  Many seem to think that, without newspapers, we will have no accountability, no one to peel back the layers and expose the wrongdoing in the world and in our government.

Meanwhile, Comedy Central and The Daily Show are making a pretty strong case that we may actually have more accountability.

Stewart’s point was that Wall Street got fat off of all our pension plans, 401K’s and long-term investments, while the “Fast Money” crowd cashed in our long-term investments — and CNBC was complicit in the entire gambit…

Click through below and watch the video, which I believe includes unaired content, and watch Stewart skewer Jim Cramer over CNBC’s role in our financial mess.

Far from needing newspapers to keep everyone honest, perhaps the time has arrived when newspapers are actually holding us back.  If they go away, we won’t see an end to journalism.  In fact, with greater freedom, unshackled from the old ideas of what journalism is, we may see a renaissance.  In some ways, with anyone who cares to observe and share the world, we already have.  People can complain about the quality of much of this sharing all they want, but the fact that much of it is well-produced, well-thought-out, and spot-on is inescapable.

The world does not need newspapers.  It simply needs good journalism.  And that shows no signs of going away.

via Jon Stewart slaughters crazy finance guy Jim Cramer — video – Boing Boing.

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How NOT to sell ebooks

Astak got a lot of press last year for promising an ebook reader in the $150 price range.  That never materialized, but they are now selling a rebranded Hanlin V3 for $270, putting them right alongside much of the competition.  Cheaper than Sony and Amazon, but not cheap enough to change anything.

So, they’ve launched Mobiebook, an ebook store to go along with their reader.  This makes sense.

What doesn’t make sense is the giant disclaimer on the front of the site:

All eBooks on this website are powered by Mobipocket eBooks common library and you can read them on your PC, but not on the EZ Reader. This is because the EZ reader currently does not support DRM ebooks. We are working hard on supporting the DRM format, and we will notify EZ Reader users when a firmware update is available it will be displayed on this website.

Can you imagine if you bought an iPod and followed Apple’s instructions to head over to iTunes, and then were told you were welcome to buy songs, but you couldn’t play them on your new device?  iTunes would have lasted about a week with no sales before disappearing.

When you have two complementary products (MP3s and MP3 players, ebooks and ebook readers, whatever), sales of one are supposed to drive sales of the other.  Ideally, this even works both ways.  But here, because of the ongoing ebook format wars and the inclusion of anti-consumer DRM, we have a situation where the complementary goods aren’t even complementary.

They also have a really interesting “promotion” going on, where you can pay extra for things that are usually included in the price.  Maybe I’m missing something – the website is pretty awful – but I’m not sure where the deal part of this is.

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The “iPod of books” will be something like this

There has been a lot of talk about whether or not the Amazon Kindle is “the iPod of books”.  People who aren’t desperately trying to attract search traffic will tell you the truth – niether the Kindle nor any of its competitors are anywhere close to having the impact on the industry that the iPod has had.

But if you’re looking for a game changer, look at stuff like this.  For $40 more than a Kindle, you get a full computer.

The specs, from their site:

  • 9.4″ x 7″ x 1.4″ for 2 lbs (with keyboard)
  • ARM Texas Instruments OMAP3 chip
  • 1024×600 8.9” screen
  • Storage: 8GB micro SD card
  • Wifi 802.11b/g/n and Bluetooth
  • 3-dimensional accelerometer
  • Speakers, micro and headphone
  • 6 USB 2.0 (3 internal, 2 external, 1 mini)
  • 10h to 15 hours of battery life

Sure, there are netbooks out there for less money.  But detaching the keyboard (or even not purchasing it, for $100 less) leaves you with a tablet with a ten hour battery.  Sure, eInk ebook readers have a longer life between chargings, but how often are any of us away from a plug for more than ten hours?

You give up the ubiquitous internet connection and a bit of battery life that the Kindle offers, but you gain so much in openness and flexibility.  You have a Linux-based operating system and a touchscreen.  What more do you want from an ebook reader?  It comes with WiFi and a web browser, so any ebook store that isn’t closed to the non-Kindle-owning-public like Amazon’s is easily accessible.

I want one of these.

I am curious, though, as to what they mean by “3-dimensional accelerometer”.  It sounds like something the marketing department made up.

Thanks to Alex for pointing this out.

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Digital distribution – doesn’t anyone get it?

This has nothing to do with ebooks directly, but everything to do with the same old problems of creating and distributing non-scarce content.

Jeff Bewkes, CEO of Time Warner, thinks the solution for online television is “asking online users to verify they subscribe to some form of pay TV before they get to watch content on other platforms. Whether consumers pay through their cable company, the telephone company or a satellite provider doesn’t matter. This, Bewkes says, will preserve a robust environment for video by making sure that no matter where it is watched, it continues to benefit from a dual-revenue stream of subscriptions and advertising.”  Check out the rest of the article.

The problem here is that, once again, the distributor is looking to preserve the old ways of making money without a thought to how to provide more value to the customer.

You know why Hulu is great?  They provide easy-to-access, totally free video online.  They show commercials, but not many of them, and they try to make the ones they do show count.  Most of them are a little longer than your typical tv commercial, but usually quirky and just more interesting than your average commercial.  I’ve found myself actually paying attention to commercials on Hulu.

And of course, the big content providers are constantly trying to kill Hulu.  In the end, they probably will, making everyone worse off than before.

So, why won’t this “dual revenue stream” model work?  First of all, it will be impossible to implement with anything resembling the convenience of Hulu.  How do you prevent sharing of accounts?  That is, me and 1,000 of my friends get one cable subscription, and share a user id?  Well, what the cable companies will do is limit the number of computers you can use, or limit the IP addresses, or something like that.  Inevitably, this will prevent legitimate uses of the service.  For example, in my house we have four computers regularly in use – my personal laptop, my work laptop, my wife’s laptop, and the desktop hooked up to the tv.  Can my one cable subscription allow me to watch on any one of those?  If so, how can it prevent me from giving my user id to my neighbor?

What’s really absurd is the underlying assumption that, without subscription fees as well as advertising revenue, quality video content just can not be produced.  Think about all the television shows that only have one of those – HBO series, for example, or anything on regular network television.  Are these shows of substandard quality?

The next revolution in the way we watch video content won’t come from Time Warner, or any of the other big content providers.  They have too much invested in the old ways of doing things, and are terrified to embrace the new.  For the most part they seem afraid to even try to understand the new.

Online video isn’t about convincing people that “if content has value to them, it’s worth paying for”.  That’s utterly irrational.  Online video is all about taking something in infinite supply and using it to increase the value of things that are finite.  Until the content providers realize this, they will always have to crush the Hulus of the world out of existence before they show people that there’s a better way to do things.

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It’s too bad Amazon didn’t ask for advice

Many people are calling the Amazon Kindle the “iPod of books”.  It’s really unfortunate that, while it had a chance to change the market the same way the iPod did, Amazon’s shortsighted focus on locking down their content and protecting sales of paper books has made the Kindle an interesting but ultimately flawed device.

It’s pretty simple: many book publishers look at this new medium and ask, “how can I use it to augment my current business model.” I’d like Amazon to challenge that thinking and say to the world, “how can you use this platform to create a new business model?”

There were really two ways to look at the release of the Kindle.  On one hand, you could look at it as an extension of the current market, something to fit nicely into the well-defined parameters of the publishing world.  Or, you could look at it as something entirely new, something unrestricted by past practices and old ways of thinking.

Clearly, Amazon chose the former.  There are advances in the way you can buy and read books.  The always-on internet connection is a great idea.  But there are no giant leaps.  It’s more business-as-usual in a slightly new way.

Article:  Seth’s Blog: Reinventing the Kindle (part II).

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Guaranteed cash up front, everyone might win

The industry needs to understand that a) fans are always thirsty for more content, b) there’s a lot of content to give, and c) this is not the time to be cheap.

What industry are we talking about here?  Obviously it doesn’t matter.  It happens to be the music industry, but the idea applies to anyone who deals with distributing content.

iTunes Pass, as the article says, is a great idea.  You pay now, and you get everything the artist releases in the future.  It guarantees a payment up front, some of which Apple might even pass on to the artist.  And, since we’re talking about infinitely copyable digital content, there’s no “loss” when the new content is released straight to the customer who has already paid.  Being paid up front means the risk is lower for the content to come – not only is there already money to go towards production, but there is a better sense of the demand, as well as committed fans who may be eager to pay for related goods.

There’s even a small chance that fans win here, too.  If a model like this is successful, and the content companies realize that they don’t have to collect money for each and every transaction, maybe we’ll see some real change in the markets.

Article: Why iTunes Pass is a Great Idea.

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Screen breakage is not the most common complaint

“Screen breakage is the number one complaint with today’s e-reader technology. Our display can take a lot of rough and tumble,” says Joe Eschbach of Plastic Logic.

Why don’t I believe that?

Perhaps because I’ve never once seen someone complain about an ebook reader screen breaking.  Sure, I don’t work for a company making a much-hyped reader like Joe Eschbach does, but I do read a lot about ebook readers.

A common complaint is that they are ridiculously expensive, rivaled only by the ridiculous expense of the ebooks themselves.  Also, they don’t really do anything except allow you to read things, and who wants to carry around yet another device that only does one thing, even if it does it better than anything else?

It sounds like Plastic Logic has some really cool technology, but a poor understanding of what the market wants, and how to serve it.  A magazine-sized ebook reader is even harder to carry around than the smaller Sony Reader or Amazon Kindle, making one of the most common complaints even worse.

It’s disappointing that New Scientist actually took the time to publish this article, which reads like a press release from Plastic Logic more than a scientific article.

Article: Flexible electronic books to hit market soon – tech – 23 February 2009 – New Scientist.

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A small step forward, a giant step back

The  world’s  leading  provider  of  e‐reading  solutions,  Netherlands  based  iRex Technologies  (www.irextechnologies.com),  has  today  announced  that  it  has  reached  agreement  with  Adobe®  to license  the  Reader  Mobile  9  SDK  which  provides  support  for  the  PDF  and EPUB  file  formats  plus  support  for Adobe’s content protection technology which it will offer on its iRex DR1000 series.

It’s great that iRex is supporting EPUB.  The more support this format gets, the more likely it is we’ll have a standard format for ebooks across all platforms instead of all these competing formats.  Imagine if you needed a different web browser for different websites you visited (Beyond the terrible websites that only work in Internet Explorer).

And reflowable PDF support is fine – PDF isn’t an open standard, but it’s widespread enough that it doesn’t have the large drawbacks of some of the other formats.

Of course, no format support is complete without the inevitable DRM announcement.  It’s nice to call it “content protection”, but we all know it’s anti-consumer technology that doesn’t work.

An extra kudos to iRex for including this message on the email they sent me with the attached press release (a PDF) – “Please consider your environmental responsibility before printing this e-mail on paper.”  I not only considered my environmental responsibility, but also my convenience, and didn’t print a piece of paper for me to lose.

You can see the press release here.

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