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29 Dec 2011

5 eBook Apps that Amazon and Apple Will Fear
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How do you autograph an ebook?

by Daedalus Howell

Dec 29, 2011 - 03:40 PM

Daedalus Howell

Given Amazon’s pre-Christmas blitz and Apple’s prowess with any object they care to precede with a lowercase “i,” there’s a significant chance that you’re either reading this on a Kindle or an iPad. Dozens of e-reading devices have proliferated in the market. Even brick-and-mortar stores like Barnes and Noble proffer a book device some marketing type convinced them to call a “Nook,” which sounds more like a place one might have breakfast or a word you’d repeat three times to summon the ghost of Curly from the Three Stooges.

If you’re presently swiping and hyping the written word on your shiny new e-reader, let me personally welcome you to the 21st century. You’re evolution from pulp to pixel is not only saving the backs of hacks but some trees as well. But don’t worry, your media diet won’t suffer for lack of roughage. There will be much to chew on, from breathless editorials eulogizing the passing of print to the inclusion of paperboys on the endangered species list.

It’s notable that in 2011, Kindle ebook sales overtook those of traditional printed books at Amazon. In an unmarked grave somewhere in Mainz, Germany, a man named Gutenberg is beginning to turn. Though this might betoken a critical shift in how we read books, it also changes how we handle books – or, for that matter, mishandle books – now that they’ve gone from physical objects to merely data on an expensive device.

For example, how do you burn an ebook without having to visit the Apple Store afterward to replace your beloved iPad? There should be an app for that. In fact, there are several apps waiting to be born into this brave new world of reading without paper (it’s when we start reading without words that we should worry).

Here are my prospective “5 eBook Apps that Amazon and Apple Fear:”

1. As mentioned: The ebook-burning app. This app allows you (or the fascist regime you live under) to “burn” your ebooks by erasing their data with virtual fire without harming your device. As the author of a forthcoming ebook, I invite my critics to purchase and “burn” as many books as they wish. Seriously, go big – then watch your money burn a hole in my pocket.

2. An autograph app. There’s nothing sadder than watching a fanboy trying to wipe Neil Gaiman’s scrawl off an iPad 2. Yes, you can effectively tattoo your tablet with a Sharpie but it makes using it similar to wearing glasses that have been tagged with graffiti (attention, “cool hunters,” this could be a hot trend for 2012).

3. An overdue library book app. Many libraries now lend ebooks but unlike printed books they don’t need to be returned, the data just evaporates from your device – as does the library’s revenue stream in overdue fees. Using geo-location to virtually hide your borrowed ebook somewhere in your house, office, car, etc., the library can charge your credit card until you find it. If you find it.

4. Smarty Pants eBook Covers. Change lowbrow Stephen King into highbrow Albert Camus with a mere tap of this app, which will stock your virtual bookshelf with a pile of “trophy” books that make you look smarter than you are.

5. The Used College Textbook app. This app adds a yellow “used” sticker to the cover of your selected ebook, covers its text with erroneous notes and charges your parents and extra $50 for the privilege.

• • •

Daedalus Howell’s "I Heart Sonoma: How to Live & Drink in Wine Country" is coming to an ereader near you in January. Learn more at FMRL.com.

via sonomanews.com
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29 Dec 2011

The Rise of the eBook
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Sure, 2011 saw a congressman inadvertently tweet his boner to the masses, Steve Jobs' permanent departure from Apple, and Amazon's overheated foray into the tablet market. The media and tech news of 2011 that will likely have the most enduring effect on our culture, however, is the rise of the e-book.

The Association of American Publishers and the Book Industry Study Group released a report earlier this year that indicated e-book sales in 2010 were 114 million. When sales data for 2011 rolls in, I expect it to have doubled.

Thank the iPad and the Kindle. Though e-books existed in various form long before tablet devices, the sales for Apple's iPad (about 25 million sold by June of 2011) and Amazon's Kindle Fire (reportedly selling 1 million a week) suggest cultural ubiquity.

Moreover, these guys are ruthless. Amazon recently raised the ire of indie booksellers and their patrons with its price-check shopping app, which enables consumers to scan a barcode and compare the prices of goods at brick and mortar stores with Amazon's prices. This in itself wasn't necessarily offensive; it was the 5 percent discount offered by Amazon for choosing to purchase from the online juggernaut instead of Main Street.

Predictably, an "Occupy Amazon" movement ensued among booksellers, which might seem like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. E-books now account for about 20 percent of all book sales, which is remarkable when one considers that movable-type press was created 561 years ago and the iPad only two years ago. At that rate of disruption, e-books will entirely supplant printed books within the decade. Real life, of course, doesn't work this way. But still, the numbers are staggering.

Consider this: in 2011, a mere four years after the introduction of its first Kindles, Amazon reported that e-book sales have surpassed those of printed books. Even sci-fi legend Ray Bradbury, who's been publicly skeptical about digital media (e-books "smell like burned fuel," he famously opined to the New York Times) has finally permitted Fahrenheit 451 to be released as an e-book.

Of course, the revolution has not been without its casualties—like, perhaps, fair trade. The European Commission recently opened formal antitrust proceedings to "investigate whether international publishers" including Harper Collins, Simon & Schuster and Penguin, have engaged in "anti-competitive practices affecting the sale of e-books in the European Economic Area, in breach of EU antitrust rules." Moreover, they allege Apple may be helping them.

Be assured, the outcome of this investigation is coming soon to an e-book near you.

Daedalus Howell's e-book 'I Heart Sonoma: How to Live and Drink in Wine Country' comes out in late January.

via bohemian.com
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9 Jun 2011

iCloudius: Apple's Man in the Sky
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When it rains it pours for Apple CEO Steve Jobs. The lauded gadget guru qua rainmaker came out of medical leave to formally introduce attendees of Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference to a bevy of new products, among them the much anticipated announcement of the iCloud. Apple’s own spin on so-called cloud-computing, which, sans the weather whimsy, simply refers to information stored in remote servers and accessible via your device of choice anywhere there is a decent Internet connection. Though the concept isn’t new (telephone companies once used the metaphor to describe their early forays into “virtual private networks”) its implementation in tech quarters gained real momentum in 2006 when Amazon introduced its Elastic Compute Cloud, a service that obviated the need for expensive server systems and paved the way for a bevy of start-ups. It was Google, however, that brought the cloud to civilians with its suite of document creation tools (aimed squarely at Microsoft’s bread and butter). Now, with iCloud, Apple has also entered the consumer cloud market, touting synchonization of one’s digital data – docs, email, calendars, iTunes library, videos and plans for world domination, between one’s MacBook, iPad, iPhone and beyond. And it’s free. Heretofore, one’s computer was like the sun in a private digital solar system around which all other devices orbited and depended for data (through increasingly arcane syncronization rituals). Conceptually, iCloud collapses this solar system into a single celestial body accessible, anywhere, anytime by whatever piece of gear happens to be in your hand. It’s as if you’re opening a wormhole into the fabric of your virtual universe andt hough other companies offer aspects this “unified field theory of your stuff online,” including Amazon’s “Cloud Drive” and Google’s Gmail inbox (sort of), none offers total integration of everything in a single service that’s hardware-agnostic. This is the crux of Jobs’ plan, “demoting” the “PC” and even his own company’s iconic Mac line to mere, as he explained, “devices.” Of course, to those who’ve eluded induction into the cult of Apple, the company’s products have always been mere devices. For true believers, however, they’re tantamount to religious talismans that signify belief in a higher being – namely Jobs. His conceptual downgrading of his stock and trade might prove as revelatory a moment in the history of personal computing as Macintosh did for user-experience in the early 80s. It takes the way we deal with data, the ones and zeroes that comprise much of our quotidian experience not to mention whole flanks of our self-concept and moves them from the concrete to the abstract, from “there” to “everywhere,” in a manner analogous to going from the corporeal to the spiritual (which, by some accounts, Jobs might be soon doing). The device, like the body, is but a vessel. “We’re going to move the digital hub, the center of your digital life, into the cloud,” Jobs beamed. It’s not hard to imagine him hovering there too – lightning bolt in hand.
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10 Feb 2011

The Daily: Murdoch's iPad Newspaper Can't Wrap a Fish
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For a media magnate whose empire first began to bubble in vats of newspaper ink, one might think launching the first of its kind iPad-only newspaper app would not be in their best interests. Unless, of course, the magnate is Rupert Murdoch of News Corp. whose vats runneth over – and now with ones and zeroes. Led by veteran newspaperman and editor-in-chief Jesse Angelo (late of the New’s Corp-owned New York Post), The Daily is being billed in-house as “a category first: a tablet-native national news brand built from the ground up to publish original content exclusively for the iPad.” This one can glean from the new apps’s website (even apps have websites apparently) but that’s essentially where the new venture’s relationship with the web essentially ends. The Daily is meant to be consumed entirely within the sleek interface of Apple’s tablet phenom as a discrete standalone experience forged from words, images, video, infomatics and animations baked fresh daily and delivered piping hot direct to your iPad. Sentimentalists wax fondly that “newspapers are a daily miracle” (or in some cases, a weekly miracle), however, The Daily, for all its journalistic aspirations, serves more to remind how miraculous the iPad is. If ever there was a proof that there exists a unified field theory of media delivery – supplanting television, radio, print, cinema and daily newspapers in its wake – this is it. That said, Murdoch’s quotidian quota of bleeding leads and the sundry other tropes squeezed from ye olde printing press is quite impressive – not least of which for sinking $30 million in development (and $500,000 in weekly expenses) into what amounts to a video game with news. “My first impression is very positive,” said Roger Fidler, program director for digital publishing at the Reynolds Journalism Institute who also oversees the Digital Publishing Alliance, which brings together media industry leaders and innovators, including the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal. “Team Murdoch has done what I’ve always hoped newspapers would do with their tablet editions – create an interactive hybrid of print and web that is visually rich and enjoyable to read. It clearly demonstrates the value of involving publication designers in the production process.” For Fidler, The Daily has been a longtime coming. Internationally recognized as a new media pioneer, Fidler first envisioned tablets and digital newspapers back in the 1980’s. Now that they’ve arrived bundled as The Daily for a mere 99 cents a week, or $39.99 a year, they might just save newspapers. “The app has a lot of advantages, one I think simplicity for people, more of a feeling of being a curated package of information with a beginning and an end,” observed Fidler. Or perhaps, The Daily is a so-called “killer app” that will actually destroy newspapers but in so doing free their spirits to live in the Digital Age. Sure, the app might not save all newspapers but it will certainly help Murdoch’s newspaper holdings eventually transition into the light. “I think newspapers have to realize that the publications being developed for the iPad may, in fact, become the dominant forum for reading news content in the not too distant future,” said Fidler. “We clearly are seeing a steady trend of declining leadership of printed newspapers and of steady migration to digital.” “Digital” is an abstract concept, the iPad is $600 of cold, hard cash in the midst of a recession. At that price point, will Murdoch’s new format find the ubiquity of the traditional media upon which his empire has previously relied? “You know, people felt the same way about television when it first emerged in the 1940s and 50s, that only rich people would have it,” said Fidler. “Now they have people with television sets in almost every room of their house and it’s become the common medium. My sense is that the tablet will evolve intro a common reading device and media device for education, for business, for a host of applications and that reading newspapers on it will be just one other important use for that device.”
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13 Jan 2011

iPad App Takes Comic's Content Over Medium
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Sad Comics droll addition to iTunes' burgeoning (comic) book store

Somehow, someone in every generation claims to have had the inaugural issue of – insert comic book title here – stowed in the attic, garage or under the bed only to discover that their mothers had disposed of it with the one-eyed teddy bear and one’s cummerbund from prom. If this well-worn tale is true, millions of dollars of collectible comic books are now moldering in landfills across America. When your progressive mother claims to have “recycled” your pristine first edition of Action Comics No. 1, remind her that having $317,000 pulped into toilet paper is little consolation. How the ephemera of children’s entertainment transforms into high-end obsessions for collectors requires more analysis than this space allows, though we might surmise names like Freud and Peter Pan and would come up as frequently as Frank Miller and Stan Lee (also, notice how it’s always the mother who dumps the comics in these tales of multi-panel of woe). Entrepreneur Alex Komarov has a product that will prevent comics from ever being dumped again – keep the content, ditch the medium. Komarov’s latest foray into the iPad app market (coming on the heels of his popular “Accordéon” app, which replicates the squeezebox in nothing less than HD) is an elegant addition to the growing library of graphic novels now available on the tablet device. Komarov’s, however, is a standalone application entitled Sad Comics, a clever anthology written and illustrated by Roman Muradov that invites readers into a “world of delight and dismay” and features the ruminations of a dying fish (and its notion of seducing Hitler’s bride Eva Braun) and a bear negotiating an existential entreaty with his terminal brain cancer. That both Komarov and Muradov hail from Moscow might account for the distinctly Dostoevsky-ian sensibility of the material rather than the muscle-bound, Spandex-clad tortured redeemers one often finds in comic books. This is content for its own sake. Whereas a traditional comic book is collectible as an artifact, Komarov’s product is only collectible in a sense – you can purchase all 5 issues on iTunes for $3.99 (the first issue is available for $0.99). There is no inherent value, however, to the digital one and zeroes that ultimately comprise the experience. In fact, since digital media is infinitely replicable, it’s tantamount to ubiquitous, which, in terms of market scarcity equals worthless. Sad Comics, however, is worth far more the aggregate pixels that form its tastefully murky palette – like the best graphic novels, Sad Comics is diverting, contemplative, beautifully rendered hybrid of art and literature. Its method of delivery, however, raises intriguing questions about how we not only consume media but how and why we value it, and by extension, art. Hang an iPad frozen on Sad Comics on your wall and you’ve saved on a frame by wasting an iPad. However, a lithograph of the tumorous bruin signed by Muradov might fetch you some rubles on eBay. Will this valuation model ever change? Komarov, one can safely assume, doesn’t care – for him it’s about the content, not the debate. The eponymously-named Alex Komarov, Inc., is a “mobile interaction design and strategy” company, which generally creates solutions for clients in the digital mobile space. Publishing Sad Comics and other material under the Pretentious Press banner is a relatively recent development for the technology firm, which quickly realized comic books represented an entirely different kind of challenge. “I think the biggest challenge is the content,” said Komarov. “No matter how good your eye is, at the end of the day what matters is ‘Are the comics interesting enough and do people want to read them?’” The technological aspect of the project rolled straight out of Komarov’s wheelhouse. “The iPad does not present too much of a challenge because the format of the screen is perfect. You can read it on the screen as if you’re holding the real comic book,” said Komarov. “This is exactly what we’re trying achieve – the feeling of the real comic book, to basically transfer the magic of the comic books that you have on your shelf to the iPad.” Sad Comics will soon release a “premium app” that will feature high-resolution artwork and “extras” reminiscent of DVDs, including “making-of” material like early sketches, additional illustrated short stores and “secret bonus content.” Which, sounds kind of collectible, but only kind of – so far.
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20 Apr 2010

Will Apple’s new iPad save print’s sorry ass?
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There will come a time when the sleek, electronic tablet device known to all as the Apple iPad will look as quaint and anachronistic as an abacus. Until then, we cannot help but marvel at its glory as we once did over squares ping-ponging across the dark void of a cathode ray tube. The iPad has been heralded as a prospective savior of the ailing publishing industry with particular emphasis put on how it will reel magazines back from the brink and escort institutions like the Gray Lady across the digital divide and into the 21st century. As is oft reported with Nietzschean succinctness, "Print is dead." However, that does not mean that the New York Times is penning its own obit. On the contrary, it and its brethren are on the eve of a renaissance. What the arrival of a multimedia device such as the iPad really means to publishing is the emancipation of written content, which, heretofore, has been distributed via ink and paper and, to a lesser degree, cut and pasted onto the web. If the iPad proves as virulent a market maker as the other devices in its gene pool, we will soon consume our media diets with our fingers, pinching and swiping at apps from a radiant touch-screen. There was a time when the medium and the message were the same, but, alas, Marshall Mcluhan is dead, too. The iPad seeks to make the message the message, and the message is, in the words of Sausalito-based tech visionary Stewart Brand, that "information wants to be free." Mind you, that's not "free" in the pecuniary sense but rather in the running-naked-and-bat-shit-crazy-down-the-Infinite-Loop sense of the word. The connective tissue that links analog and the digital media has always been the information it contained. It's as if content has gone from a solid (analog media like books and vinyl LPs) to a liquid (the malleable digital media of CDs and DVDs) to a gas (content literally stowed in the "cloud" and downloaded in digital drops). Or how about: books, magazines and newspapers are to rolling papers what the iPad is to a bong. And by "bong," we mean the kind sold as kits from the nether reaches of the internet and assembled in garages into bubbling, wheezing edifices that outshine their purpose. Indeed, the iPad's relationship to content is akin to how the tobacco industry once referred to cigarettes as a "nicotine delivery device." The quiet hope among media moguls is that we will become addicted to content as never before in its flashy new digs. Of course, Apple is not without its missteps. In its Jurassic period, circa 1993, it rolled out its first tablet device, the Newton. A clunky, chunky so-called personal digital assistant, the Newton cost the equivalent in today's dollars of $1.5 billion to develop, and its deficiencies relative to its abilities resulted in a product that did little more than function as a pricey paperweight. Of course, this all went down before Apple's in-house messiah Steve Jobs returned, bringing with him the era of the lowercase i appended to everything (surely the iBong is being beta-tested in some Silicon Valley bedroom). But what's in a name? The Long Tail retail concept, as popularized by Wired Magazine's Chris Anderson in his 2006 tome The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More, found expression of sorts when Apple finally revealed the name of its tablet to general derision a few months ago. Somehow, unbeknownst to its marketing department, MadTV had produced a sketch parodying the iPod by linking it to the feminine hygiene aisle, the "iPad," back in 2005. The five-year-old sketch enjoyed a brief surge on the YouTube charts (nearly as fast as the rapidly trending Twitter topic "iTampon") and snagged CNN coverage for its star and lead writer along the way. Who'da thunk Apple would fail to Google its prospective product name? Who cares. It beats sliding beads along a wooden frame.
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22 Feb 2010

From Kindling to Kindle
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Will the future of reading affect the future of writing?

James Joyce, it is said, became so disgruntled while drafting his first novel that he threw it on the fire. His girlfriend rescued the work-in-progress from the flames, and the subsequent rewrite became A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Such acts of literary self-immolation and redemption could only occur in our once-analog world, when the permanence of erasure moved only as fast as fire. These days, the irreversible deletion of one's work is a mere keystroke away. That said, it seems would-be authors are more apt to hit the "publish" key on their blogs than the "delete" key on their magnum opus. Future literary historians will decide whether this has been a positive trend for the world of letters. Of the 100 million–plus blogs in existence, it's unclear how many purport to be literature, let alone how many actually are. Nevertheless, entire industries have arisen to support the notion one's blog could be a book, turning aspirants into authors with a click and credit card—at least for now. Print-on-demand services like San Francisco–based Blurb will print the next Joyce a "Blog Book" for a percentage of that book's sale to the author or his readers, in as many or as few copies as desired. Blurb has even automated the process with a program that "slurps" a blog's content from its online habitué and excretes it in the shape of a book when ordered online. Likewise, online retail juggernaut Amazon provides a similar service, CreateSpace, an on-demand clearinghouse for everything DIY, from books to DVDs. It is a micro-mogul's mecca for the manufacture of media. Now print-on-demand might prove to be a transitional technology the same way DVDs are giving way to digital downloads. Amazon claims 35 percent of its book sales are downloads for its Kindle "wireless reading device." In March, cult brand Apple will overshoot the electronic book fray with the iPad, which aggregates print, video and music enjoyment into a single, sexy device. Be assured, publishers and independent authors alike are readying their wares for Apple's latest game-changer, which is an overgrown iPhone sans telephony. But who wants to take a call while in the thrall of a warm, glowing piece of technology anyway? It's like a vibrator for the mind, and a throng of independent content producers hopes to get you off. In the olden days of digital reading, circa 2000, premium content was scarce. Beyond being deskbound, the only texts available seemed to be classics poached from the public domain, Joyce included. Occasional experiments in electronic-book marketing came and went, with business ebooks and white papers seeming most prevalent. The transformation of print-to-pixel was a trickle with publishers wary or unsure of the medium, though pixel-to-print releases were garnering wider appeal and stoking dreams of digital discovery for thousands of would-be authors (blog-borne Julie/Julia is a popular example). Publisher HarperCollins even created Authonomy, an online authors community from which it occasionally cherry-picks and publishes material vetted by the crowd. Now, however, it seems a new type of author is poised to emerge, one tailored to the new medium literally at hand, whose work will bypass traditional publishers and appear in the iTunes store, forsaking the bookshelf entirely. Pictures in printed books must have once been a novelty—moving pictures embedded in the text of your iPad is an inevitability, not to mention audio, three-dimensional maps, animated sidebars and other electronic illuminations. How will this amplify or diminish storytelling as we know it? A fear is that mutant transmedia hybrids might obviate established forms or at least leave them marginalized in the market in which a bestseller and killer app are one and the same. What seems most uncertain is whether how we read will affect how we write. This will have to be determined in the field, for not even a visionary such as Joyce could have anticipated someone cuddling up with his words "In the silence their dark fire kindled the dusk into a tawny glow" from the glow of a tawny Kindle.
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29 Dec 2011

How do you autograph an ebook?

29 Dec 2011

9 Jun 2011

10 Feb 2011

13 Jan 2011

Sad Comics droll addition to iTunes' burgeoning (comic) book store

20 Apr 2010

22 Feb 2010

Will the future of reading affect the future of writing?

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