Here’s a novel way of looking at how we (maybe) fit into the future of publishing—Dorling Kindersley Books did a video about The Future of Publishing, initially for internal consumption, but later on they released it on YouTube. As Cory Doctorow said when blogging it in BoingBoing.net[1] “Watch it at least halfway through…” and you’ll see a change in attitude. [Read more…]
Making your own information radars
Howard Rheingold has a series of videos
describing how journalists (particularly) can use online tools to create their own radars (seek out information), filters (remove the crap), and dashboards (display the information). You can see lots of other video on his video blog.
I have thought recently about writing an online book (downloadable) or even a printable book about the “plumbing” that allows bloggers to integrate lots of sources into their blogs—because most bloggers are not really technologists and it’s hard to make some of these software tools work correctly. My thought was to connect the dots and come up with a Give your blog a shot of steroids “book” that would be really useful to non-tech-savvy bloggers. When am I going to do that?
Howard’s major message right now is about 21st Century Literacies which you can view online—he and I were in London during July 2009, where he delivered that particular talk.
Why the iPad gets a good grade from me
How could Steve/Apple ever possibly have topped all the hype the preceded the announcement of the iPad? He was up against a real challenge.
Well, in some ways, Apple did top it—for one, the price is really, really aggressive. In other areas, the announcement was exactly what we expected. And that, in my opinion, is why the iPad is getting poor reviews from so many people, though they haven’t used it yet. Like a kid on Christmas eve, they had just gotten too overwrought in anticipation of all that candy they had hoped for!
I can see how the iPad could knock off the ebook readers and the netbooks all with one fell swoop. Maybe even the TabletPCs (remember, I’ve had a Toshiba TabletPC for 5 years).
First, here’s what I like about it:
- I love the glossy and really bright screens. (I only have one “old” non-glossy screen left in my office.)
- I love the multi-touch gestures. My iPhone is the first device I’ve been able to interact with in the way I really wanted to – touching the screen. My MacBook gets close, though, because of the multi-touch (example: two-finger wipe to scroll up or down) gestures that make it so fast to operate!
- I love the size of the screen (and consequently the device). I read ebooks on my iPhone now, and they’re just a tad too small (that is, I’m having to swipe to turn a “pages” every 1 or 2 seconds), so having 4x the screen real-estate will be wonderful.
- I’m impressed that they were able to put the iWork suite on the iPad. I use Pages and Keynote a lot, and from the demos I’ve seen, these will be pretty easy to use on the iPad. I love the idea of using the iPad to draft presentations and documents while I’m on a flight from here to Delhi.
- Battery life. 10 hours sounds great and we’ll probably get 6 hours in real life, but if I can keep it charged up while I’m in that airplane, then I’m one happy camper. (More and more flights I’m on have power plugs now, and I’m starting to choose airlines and flights based on whether they have a plug under my seat so I can run the computer. One question—can I plug the iPad into the airplane charger?)
- Did I say price? I think $499 is really good as a starting price. I just received, as a gift from its manufacturer, an electronic pictureframe that’s priced higher than that, and it only does pictures. And it’s more than a high-end Kindle, but it does a lot more than a Kindle!
And what’s questionable about it:
- Only running one app at a time. I absolutely can’t stand this on my iPhone. What a pain! But, I don’t think this is going to get fixed any time soon.
- No microphone. They’d better fix this—I want to record interviews and notes, and I want to use the iPad as a speaker phone (thru Skype if not through real 3G phone). Maybe the iPhone headset (which has a microphone) will be usable in the production models—that would be OK.
Will I get one. Yes, most certainly at some point. Certainly not the first or second or even third production models, but I’ll bet you I’ll be working with an iPad before then end of 2010.
Read what I’ve said about my use of ebooks and ebook prices. Also read this note about what Amazon is saying about prices higher than $9.99.
The $9.99 ebook
I have been reading ebooks for about 5 years now. Mostly I buy them from Fictionwise.com and most often I download their sci-fi short-story Nebula-award nominees series, which they publish once a year, for free. But, I’ve probably spent on the order of $200 on other books as well.
Oh, and I subscribe to Scientific American digital (monthly) and read it as a PDF on the screen rather than get all that paper that just piles up before I can get to it.
As in quantum-tunneling[1] effects, you can get me past the initial resistance to an ebook if:
- The price of the ebook is 60% or less than the price of the physical book; or if
- I don’t want the physical book hanging around anyway after I’ve read it; or if
- It’s available in PDF so I can read it anywhere (though I do purchase prioprietary DRM formats frequently); or if
- It’s $9.99 even if I think I could find a paperback for slightly less somewhere else.
It is just so much easier to take an ebook with me and read it on my screen (or iPhone in the case of the Kindle[2] and Fictionwise readers)!
[1] I use quantum-tunneling as a metaphor all the time. Read about quantum-tunneling here in Wikipedia where it’s a difficult article to follow, but go the the paragraph that describes Shroedinger and has the little illustration of the “tunneling” particle (see above).
[2] There’s a Kindle book reader iPhone app that allows you to buy and download Kindle books from Amazon to read them on your iPhone. No reason this wouldn’t also work on the iPad, since they say 140,000 apps already run on it. (I wonder who took the time to test that assumption…) Fictionwise.com also has a reader available in the app store.
Google.cn in again out again
I pulled together a page of references on the Google China issues, beginning with their 2006 announcement that they would begin providing filtered search results at google.cn and ending “today” with speculation about exactly what has been going on that caused them to announce they would stop filtering results and see whether they could reach an accommodation with the Chinese government about providing unfiltered results in China. The summary page is at The Social Graph of Malware, not here. Go read it. And I’ll try to keep it up to date.
Its clear that the decision to filter was tough. And it probably took less to get them to reverse the decision than if the original decision had been clear cut. The issues that I see are involved include these:
- Censorship – even if mandated by local laws;
- Censorship – on more universal grounds (such as censorship of hate speech, etc.);
- Increasing Chinese cyberaggression – hacking servers, looking for industrial secrets (supposed Chinese, because it’s almost impossible to really know);
- Aggressive attacks against minority communities and free speech advocates (cited by Google, but I’ve seen them personally);
- Drive-by malware insertions in free-speech web sites, and whether this is targeted or not;
- Whether an equivalent of the Geneva Protocol (which deals with weapons as opposed to prisoners) can be developed for cyberwarfare.
The Social Graph of Malware is a site I started a few months ago, and sporadically contribute to, that describes how social engineering contributes so much to the spread of malware. The Google incident that sparked their “reversal” decision to stop filtering (just a week ago) was largely a piece of social engineering. We have been seeing targeted attacks on the Tibetan exile community (and others) recently, utilizing social engineering tactics to get people to open poisoned files that then infect their computers. So I’ll continue to track the Google.cn issue on The Social Graph of Malware because of this connection.
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