Over at Forbes.com, speculation has been raised that the iPhone already has a larger number of ebook readers (people that is, not apps) than Amazon has sold Kindles… this is based on 390,000 downloads of an app called Stanza.
cover flow on your bookshelf?
Interestingly, this far outpaces the eReader software I’ve been using. I can’t see figures for it, but I believe the number to be around 1/3 of that CORRECTION: about the same (see comment below). I suspect this difference in take-up relates to the choice of ‘free’ books available on Stanza rather than offering access to a paid-for store with a broader range of titles. I will watch with interest to find out if the 390,000 who have tried Stanza stick around with it.
What it certainly reinforces for me is that, as discussed earlier on Sandlines, the future of ebooks is with devices you already carry, not new stand alone devices.
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This has been brewing in my mind for a while, so it’s about time I talked ebooks – and the devices on which they’re read. And AFullerView’s comments on the subject have nudged me to action.
Following Sony’s belated entry to the UK market, the likely arrival here of Amazon’s Kindle, and the already available Iliad, there’s been a lot of talk about the future of the humble-yet-mighty book.
Jeanette Winterson wrote an impassioned, if Luddite, piece about why she’s not a fan, though somewhat muddled up with a defence of the importance of spelling correctly… a somewhat linked, but discrete topic. Her main criticism is that ebooks don’t make it any easier to get books into people’s hands.
Well, I do and I don’t agree. Not sitting on the fence: I want to make an important distinction.
I don’t believe the ‘dedicated device’ route is a good way forward for reading ebooks. Particularly via the Sony eReader approach, which (in true Sony style, limits you to buying a proprietary DRM format of books that is at odds with the best range of ebooks available online, over at the excellent Fictionwise.
And there’s good news. If you own a decent smartphone, you can read books in a variety of formats right there – on your iPhone/iPod Touch (by far my favourite ebook reading device to date), on Windows Mobile devices (I’ve had a couple of those) and on old fashioned PDAs. I started reading ebooks back in 2002 on my Palm T3, and I’ve never looked back.
The screens have become gradually more eye-friendly. The range of books is slowly but steadily increasing. The price is appropriate – a little less than a printed book. Reader: this is the way forward. And as the digital ink that makes the Sony device look so good gains currency, the experience can only improve.
And if you go down this path, the green credentials of ebook reading are pretty decent too: you’re simply expanding the value from a device you already have, so no overhead there. And no trees.
Book 2.0 in action
Crucially, it means that hefty tomes, such as Neal Stephenson’s new 800 page wopper, Anathem, is reduced to something that puts no additional strain on my briefcase for my commute.
So, better screens on existing ’smart devices’ = less eyestrain, less backstrain, less bagstrain. And removes the ‘barrier to entry’ issue from Ms Winterson et al… it’s not just putting books in the hands of people who haven’t tended to read them, it’s putting the opportunity for entire libraries there.
= result.
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Those ARE real people down there... just click and see!
Sandlines is idly pondering his No. 1 FAQ, namely “what happens next”?
I wrote a few weeks back about buzzword inflation in the form of Web 3.0, as a framework for speculation. For me, one of the key elements is going to be the increase in relevance online. And a key driver for relevance is location.
Location has long been a tricky beast to observe on the web. Local IP addresses (especially outside the US) are difficult to get right, leaving declared location (via registration data) the nearest thing we often have for an answer.
But people are pesky things, They’ve an irritating tendency (at least, irritating in this context) to move about – i.e. changing their location, therefore their criteria for relevance shifts with them…. pub vs office vs coffee shop vs living room etc.
That said, they’re pretty ingenious too. Witness the invention of devices such as the iPod Touch (on which I wrote this post) or the iPhone – or other (gasp) smartphones, PDAs, laptops, UMPCs or even the Asus EeePC. All with internet capabilities of varying levels of usefulness and usability.
And guess what? They are terrific at pinpointing location. If I use my iPod Touch with WiFi and go to Google Maps, it puts me within 500m of my actual location. And not a cellular transmitter in sight. So, an opportunity for better (ie more relevant) search results for web users; better targeting options for advertisers… a better online experience all round.
That still creates challenges: how do you generate the content that provides relevance online? It’s easy enough to get macro level local content, but the more granular stuff is much harder to obtain. Businesses old (Yell.com) and new (UpMyStreet, KnoWhere.co.uk) try, but I think it’s unrealistic to expect traditional approaches to editorial to fill the gap. You need to generate community - for communities. In other words, user generated content: reviews, listings, groups etcetera. It is happening, but there’s still a way to go.
Location is going to be critical to the Web 3.0 future. Watch this (local) space.
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Our friends over at Nokia have announced their ‘Comes With Music‘ subscription service is going to launch here in Blighty first.
Comes with DRM Time Bomb
I’m a huge consumer of music – have been one way or another all my life – and I’m old enough to remember buying music in Vinyl (before it became cool again), cassette tape, CD, MiniDisc (remember that?) and now of course I buy most of it via download sites – MUCH prefering MP3 to the complexities and frustrations that DRM has inevitably brought to the process. So I come with baggage.
The only good thing about DRM (and there’s not room here to talk about all the bad stuff) is the opportunity for subscription services – rental of your content. And Nokia’s offering here is an interesting move ahead on what the likes of Napster and Vodafone (amongst others) already offer: this time the DRM is linked directly to the purchase of the device – so you buy your pay-as-you-go nokia phone, and you can download ‘all you can eat’. Then, 12 months later, the bomb goes off. You need to go out and buy another phone.
Neat trick: Nokia just turned the PAYG market into an annual subscription, of sorts.
D’you think they have people standing outside schools flogging these things?
Personally, Ihave an eclectic mixture of devices: a Sony Walkman music phone, an iPod Touch, a couple of other mp3 players – and I like my stuff to be playable whereever… so I MUCH prefer my music in MP3 format, thank you very much. Thanks to the mix of eMusic, 7Digital and Play.com, *most* of what I want to buy comes through in MP3 (legally!). I’m just waiting for (most of) Universal and for Sony to get with the programme… Come on guys!
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