Chuck Palahniuk’s Pygmy is a great book. Random House not so good on the e-book basics though.

He makes a number of points in the article that are worth looking at one by one.

Incumbents made bad revolutionaries
His argument here seems to be that Apple is more interested in using the great technical features of the iPad to either restrict its use or find a way to make people pay for it.

The example he uses is the Marvel iPad comic app. The argument is the app – and by extension the iPad – is bad because, for example, you can’t lend someone else your comic. Put aside the fact that it’s really an anti-DRM rant (which I mostly agree with) he forgets one simple thing. The device actually makes it extraordinarily easy to lend someone your comic – hand them your iPad. It is in this way exactly as easy to lend someone a comic on your iPad as it is with a physical comic book.

And if Apple gets this right, they’ll help craft – or at least speed up – the development of a whole new computing and media model - tablet computing.

That leads nicely into the next argument…

Infantilizing hardware
Tonight I had leftover pizza for tea. I heated it in the microwave and then put it under the grill for a minute to crisp it up. I punched some buttons on the microwave and it did what it needed to do – help me consume my dinner. I don’t need to be able to take it apart, repait it and install Linux on it. I just need it to work – like my television, my bed and my table.

But Cory’s argument here seems to suggest that if I’m only using a device to consume something I’m somewhat less likely to survive in the brave new world of the 21st century than someone who can take a device apart and put it back  together.

I can enjoy consuming a book even if I don’t know how to pull the spine off, reorder the pages and put it back together again. It  should be okay that not everyone wants to take everything apart all the time.

Boing Boing is a site supported by ad revenue. I bet there’s a strong correlation between the rates for those adverts and the number of people simply consuming the site – page hits or unique visitors. I hope the number of people actively interacting with the site by adding comments also factors in there but I doubt simple consumers of the site take a back seat when it’s time to crunch the numbers.

Wal-Martization of the software channel
According to Wikipedia there are around 150,000  third-party applications in the App Store. If Apple was the only computer maker in a regulated market I’d be more likely to accept the claim that “the iStore lock-in doesn’t make life better for Apple’s customers or Apple’s developers.”

But again this is an anti-DRM argument, that’s not (or shouldn’t be) restricted to the iPad. Clearly developers and customers aren’t stupid. That’s why more than three billion downloads have been made from the App Store.

The Wal-Mart analogy is a bad one too – at least on one level. The development of the iPod Touch, the iPhone and now the iPad has not seen a massive takeover of an existing market, it’s fostering a massive expansion of a new, previously small market.

Journalism is looking for a daddy figure
It’s not the device’s fault if journalists and bloggers get sucked into the spin from Apple’s marketing team. Indeed, arguing that Rupert Murdoch is silly because he thinks putting up a pay-wall will save his newspaper empire in the long-run should not be confined to discussion about the iPad.

Gadgets come and gadgets go
I’ve got some sympathy for the argument that “the real issue isn’t the capabilities of the piece of plastic you unwrap today, but the technical and social infrastructure that accompanies it.” But that’s the real crux of the whole post. Until he gets to here, Cory seems to be arguing that the iPad can’t won’t and shouldn’t change things. But here, he pretty much gives up the ghost and you almost get the sense that he knows it will.

 

The GBS represents a new stage in the evolution of the publishing industry. It offers a glimpse of what bookstores might become in the mature Information Age: A hybrid library/storefront whose job is to preserve and monetize books. It will be difficult to balance the public good of libraries with the free market of the bookstore.

Check it out here.

A quick preview of some of Penguin’s plans for books on the iPad. Shiny!

It’s followed by a less shiny but more interesting talk from Penguin CEO John Makinson about how publishers will become more relevant, not less, and how they’ll be taking a giant leap into a distribution model that lets them play around with pricing and access a lot more consumer data. You can see that video over at PaidContent.org.

Well you can’t buy a device, there are no e-books on sale through the app store and it was only announced three days ago but as predicted Apple’s iPad has already shaken up digital publishing.

On Friday Amazon removed all books by publisher Macmillan – physical and digital – in a move industry insiders say is the culmination of an ongoing dispute over the price the retailing giant was charging customers for e-books on the Kindle. Macmillan wanted to set its own price (around $15) for e-books but Amazon had them locked in at a maximum of $9.99. That disagreement means you can’t currently buy any books from one of the world’s biggest publishers directly from Amazon.

Funnily enough Macmillan is one of the big publishers signing up to the Apple e-book store right from the start. And what’s the price Apple is letting Macmillan charge for an e-book? The magical $15.

While the New York Times rightly says there may be some anti-trust issues if Macmillan’s books went on sale through one of the stores and not the other, there’s still a bit over a month before Apple’s e-book store opens for business. My guess is that it’s Macmillan flexing its muscle now there’s another giant player in the market. Plenty of time for further negotiations.

I’m even more convinced now that the iPad as an e-book reader is a fifth order issue when it comes to digital publishing. All the uber-geeks are complaining because it doesn’t do this or it doesn’t do that. But this device is not designed to replace your laptop. It’s a device to let you consume digital media easily. And it does that well. I’m sure it will make a very good e-book reader but we’ve got plenty of them already.

While it could be months (or years) before Australians will be able to buy e-books from Apple, the impact across the digital publishing industry is likely to be felt much sooner.

But the interesting news is what it means for the e-book market.

The iPad introduces a new app called iBooks which links with a dedicated e-bookstore called iBookstore (enough with the “i”s already). It supports ePub as its native format! Apple adopting an industry standard is almost unheard of and it will be interesting to see if Apple allows access to ePub books bought for Stanza (or someone adds this functionality through a hack). They already have in place agreements with major publishers such as Penguin, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, and Hachette.

But the device is not the issue – Apple entering the e-book trade is. These developments – support for e-Pub and Apple having a dedicated e-bookstore will mean a lot for the business. If only we could convince them to open the store up to non-Apple devices. 

What it will mean for the Kindle, who knows at this stage. But it’s 2.5 times heavier, thicker and larger, has a shorter battery life and there’s still that backlit LCD screen. I don’t think it’s a Kindle-killer. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a big leap for e-publishing.

I took this photo a week or so ago at the Brisbane Borders store. It got me thinking about the future of bookstores (as distinct from the book business) becoming more and more analogous to cinemas.

There are around 220 copies of Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight books here – and that’s on top of the display on the ground floor, the display in the science fiction and fantasy section, the display in the YA section and the posters promoting the upcoming release of the DVD. It’s no surprise there are reports that the Meyer books accounted for 16% of all tracked book sales in the US in the first quarter.

Many chain bookstores are already stocking fewer titles but the oncoming ebook swarm is about to make that even more profound. I suspect we’re going to see chain bookstores either devote more space to making it easier to buy ebooks instore (in the interim) and then move to stocking substantially fewer “hit” titles. The cinema analogy comes into play when you look at choosing a movie online or from the rental store, or going to see one of eight or 10 movies on the big screen.

Question is how fast it will happen and what it will mean for the book biz in the meantime.

The story so far for those who missed it: Amazon this week re-Kindled its ebook reader and announced some new features including more storage capacity, better screen contrast, round keys and a text-to-speech feature.

It’s this last ‘new’ feature that’s causing all the grief (mind you – round keys! Seriously? That’s outrageous)

Some small publishers are concerned about how it impacts on rights issues and what that may mean for author payments. But the biggest noise is being made by the Authors Guild, which is insisting the text-to-speech functions not just infringes audio rights but is essentially the same thing.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Authors Guild executive director Paul Aiken  said: “They don’t have the right to read a book out loud. That’s an audio right, which is derivative under copyright law.”

Text-to-speech is a transient form – not a recording. It’s no more a breach of an author’s copyright than reading a work aloud to yourself is. It is not derivative unless someone broadcasts the audio or records it (I’ll save format shifting arguments for another time).

And the technology already exists. Windows will do it for you already with many ebooks and there’s plenty of places on the web that will as well. If you’re keen to hear Mr Aiken’s quote in all its auditory glory, check it out here.

I remember convincing my three-year-old nephew once that there was a little man living in my speakers because he used to talk to him after I typed some text into my computer. That would have been in about 1992. This ain’t nothing new folks.

I’ve often tried to win debates by arguing a more outlandish case and have someone argue me back towards my desired (and more reasonable) point. But The Authors Guild has a long way to go given they first have to be argued from wrong to silly before they can meaningfully engage.

As a reader, I think it’s a great idea. It means I can put my book down for a few minutes and stay with the story the story.

As an author, I think it’s a great idea. it means my readers can put the book down for a few minutes and stay with the story. 

Wouldn’t this be a great tool to add to WordPress or LJ?

One defence many supporters are offering that doesn’t fly with me is that it shouldn’t matter anyway because the quality of the computerised reading voice is so poor it doesn’t come close to replicating the experience of a trained voice actor read an audio book. The quality of the computerised voice is poor. But it won’t be forever. Check out the audio of the Aiken quote that I had the website create for me. It’s not Orson Welles or Morgan Freeman but it’s actually not too bad. And it will get better, much better, over time.

To me though, it’s just another example of why authors should work hard to understand themselves and their work as a platform. It can be confusing stuff but the publishing world is changing and authors need to engage with this stuff any more.

On a final note turns out science fiction author Fred Pohl is on a Guild advisory council. Fred’s a smart guy. Maybe he could knock their heads together a bit.  You out there, Fred?

Last month I headed to Bribie Island for an extended weekend of writing, relaxing, chatting with friends and a few drinks. I took three print books with me and loaded a few files onto my first generation iPod touch to test it out as an e-book reader.

I was using the excellent stanza reader and had downloaded George Orwell’s “Why I Write”, War of the Worlds, Cory Doctorow’s “Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future” and a few other bits and pieces.

Stanza is deceptively easy to use. Put the iPod on its side and you get a landscape reading screen. To “turn” the page you simply tap the right or left side of the screen, depending on whether you want to go forward or back. To change the font size you put two fingers on the screen and pinch or push apart your fingers depending on whether you want it bigger or smaller. Unlike the iPod’s photo interface this was a bit buggy but it wasn’t too much of an annoyance given it’s something you really only have to do once and then forget (adjusted for declining eyesight over the years, of course).

I read a bit of the Orwell book and then got stuck into the Doctorow essays. These were a great choice – engaging and relatively short. Coming in at 115 grams, my iPod weighs about a third of a standard paperback (350 grams or 12 ounces), so holding it is no problem. You can turn the brightness right up if you’re outdoors or turn it down, which was my preference, indoors. That saved on battery power and made reading the screen pretty easy on the eye.

The verdict? As an e-book reader, the iPod touch mostly works. It’s light and puts very little strain on the eye thanks to its good brightness control and the crispness of the text. I think it was lucky I was reading non fiction that had no dialogue and infrequent paragraph breaks. The page in the photo has 109 words on it but a dialogue heavy page of Lee Battersby’s“Alchymical Romance” has just over 80 words. To put it in context – that’s about three paragraphs of a well written newspaper article and I think I’d get annoyed having to tap the screen every 10 seconds or so. But maybe that’s me.

Unlike some people I’m not ready to declare the iPod (or any smart phone) theconvergence device. I think we’ll end up converging on two types of devices that share similar functions but mych different sizes. But more on that another time. As an ultraportable e-book reader, it works.