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Five Top Publishers Plan Rival to Kindle Format
eldavojohn writes "Time Inc., News Corp., Conde Nast, Hearst Corp., and Meredith Corp. are teaming up to create a digital newsstand and somewhat open format that 'can render our content beautifully on those devices that come to market' instead of the gray inked Kindle's energy conscious display. Devices are being made for the new format with the launch coming next year. The format will also target smart phones and tablet computers. Will this pose a threat at all to the Kindle?"
What's wrong with ePub?
From TFA: "...technology that would display in color and work on a variety of devices."
Wow, its taken them this long to find out about HTML?
?
That reading the news drew more of my battery for the sake of colours.
instead of the gray inked Kindle's energy conscious display
PDF? Or does "open" mean "open... to anyone who wants to pay and sign our NDA"?
This is a bad thing? Personally i like that feature.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
That's a real axis of evil
Of course. Publishers aren't stupid, they're already under Amazon's thumb, and they've seen what's happened to the music industry with Apple. It's no wonder they want to run their own digital distribution.
... cause I still get my reading material in that old standard... print.text
0100010001101001011001 0100100000011010010110 1110001000000110000100 1000000110011001101001 0111001001100101
eInk (like the Kindle display) is definitely nice to read but a little color and maybe some sound would definitely help.
Kindle might be great for reading the occasional novel but it is worthless for any kind of textbook or reference material. Those just have too many pictures, charts, heck even syntax highlighting, and alternate fonts to be effectively used on the Kindle.
ePub may have potential as a standard but some of the current implementations are awful. They need to learn how to restrict the reflow (I don't know how much of that is the format and how much is the implementation).
Is Murdoch's News Corp actually going to enter the news business?
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
A device could have different settings, so you could turn on the color just when you want it. That said... the same could be done for a netbook. So while they may be highlighting the "pretty pictures", the main reason is to have a dedicated device is, of course, content control. ----- My husband is always trying to convince me that I, like him, am a geek. I keep telling him: yIDoghQo'
HTML renders in color too, you know.
Will this pose a threat at all to the Kindle?
Nope.
Regardless of how much they like color or what kind of DRM they want to bolt on, they're also going to want to actually sell their content. So they'll license the format to folks. And if Amazon is actually threatened at all by their devices or whatever... They'll do whatever it takes to license it.
Either that, or these companies will refuse to license the format... Which will quickly become irrelevant because it doesn't work on many devices... And they'll wind up abandoning it.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
Daily news and publications aren't good on the kindle not because of lack of color, and pictures. It has more to do with pricing and the fact I can get it at the website instead.
I'll agree that as far as publications go, the current format limitations are pretty terrible for news, but there isn't a great way to display the information of a newspaper. Reading a newspaper and reading the articles of a newspaper are 2 different things.
instead of the gray inked Kindle's energy conscious display.
"None of that namby pamby green shit for us," shouted Rupert 'The Dominator' Murdoch. "Our reader will run on leaded gasoline fuel cells, arsenic paste and mercury vapor canisters!" When asked about the environmental impact of such a device, Murdoch ripped out the reporter's heart and ate it in a single bite.
"Argh!" said Murdoch, and brought the press conference to a close by pissing on the press corps and killing fifty puppies.
Even if this gets nicely marketed and gains a decent amount of traction into the current eBook user market, what will this do to make people want eBooks?
iPhone owners, of which there are SIGNIFICANTLY more of, can get their daily news much, much easier. Unless there are a sizable number of avid readers that would benefit from having these digital readers (which they wouldn't, considering the DRM and their anti-sharing nature), I don't think prettifying magazines and such for use with readers is a good solution. Furthermore, magazines are a bit touchy, since a LOT of them are sold right from the stands because of their convenience. I'm sure that a digital model would work better for subscription-based magazines like Time that would work well as a digital platform. However, I'd like to assert that what REALLY drives magazine sales are super catchy headlines and pictures relevant to our interests. There's a reason why tabloids and celebrity trash is incredibly popular with women...
As an alternative, I think that consumers would be better served with a coalition that really investigated the sociology, psychology and technology behind what people really want in digital book readers.
Here are a few examples showing why this is needed. Most readers come with keyboards, physical and/or virtual, but they are mostly useless. Additionally, the Nook comes with a color screen...but its introductory review only gave it fair marks. Even further, they come with cellular radios so that people can download books on the fly...but only work in the United States AND are still carrier-locked! Worse, with the exception of the Nook, they don't have Wifi...which is probably most convenient to readers in areas without wireless access or without the desire of paying umpteen dollars extra per month just to download books. Finally, let's not ignore the fact that they only have one screen, which is completely counterintuitive to the way people read books. One screen works fine for short text, like newspaper articles and such, but doesn't have the same ease of use when reading novels that are hundreds of pages long!
When the iPhone was released, it had a processor that was slower than a lot of its competition, bugs up the wazoo, and didn't even have copy and paste! Nonetheless, it sold like hotcakes on sale for the same reason the iPod did...it was easy for people to use, and it made sense to own one. When eReaders approach that level of ease, I think we'll see them really (REALLY) take off.
Of course this all has to EXIST before any of these question matter...
I'll keep my money in my pocket.
It's amazing how many people miss the point. When the Kindle and other e-readers come up in conversation, I explain time and time again exactly what e-ink is and what it means for battery life. And every single time the first thing that people ask is, "Oh, wait, so it's just in black and white?"
This is just a larger group of people missing the point of e-ink. Then again, since there are so many like-minded people, maybe they have a point of their own. Perhaps there is a market for flashy e-readers. I mean, netbooks are doing well enough.
I'm reading Asimov's SF January 2010 edition right now.
I think the Kindle appeals to very specific groups of readers. Probably someone who reads mostly news periodicals and not text-based novels, non-fiction, etc. is going to be much happier with some other device. Nothing pleases everyone. I do most of my reading in waiting rooms, waiting in line, and at home late at night. I'll never need a backlight, and if I did, it would be easier to have a little LED clip-light around. A large part of my Kindle is that I can hold it without twisting my wrists to hold heavy books - even paperbacks can be large. And when enough people get to the age where arthritis and sight is their problem, many will take to some kind of e-reader, just for the versatility of form and fonts.
Games? Social Networking? The fact that Murdoch is a part of this venture does not surprise me, because it shows an astounding lack of understanding for why people are buying ebook readers and what the market actually wants in a book reader appliance. Namely, they failed to do prior art to find the millions of PDAs people were using to do exactly what this new format is proposing. Or rather... not doing exactly what this format is proposing, because no one really needs it and it is an energy hog.
The Kindle and other ebook readers (i.e. the Sony one I've owned for the past 3 years) did not become popular because they were a new idea and a new device, they became popular because of a new technology: e-ink. There were book readers before the e-ink displays came around, but very few people used them because they suffered from 2 major drawbacks. The first was the power consumption of their displays meant that you had to plug them in and let them charge on a daily or twice daily basis. People already have to charge their cell phones on a daily basis, but charging one twice a day when you use it a lot is pretty annoying, and a huge amount of power is spent on the display when a cell phone is being used. The second drawback is simply screen real estate and the interface to get to it. PDAs could do exactly what is being proposed, but they didn't because it was hard to use a handheld device in that manner. Sure handheld gaming devices exist and are used... but they have buttons and layouts specifically tailored to using the device as a game. The same goes for cell phones, PDAs, and ebook readers. You can play games on cell phones, but not easily and the power usage sucks up the battery. The new format proposal looks to do exactly the same thing to ebook readers. Congratulations, you just re-invented the N-Gage.
The major "killer app" in the ebook market that no one is mentioning is really quite simple. It isn't a killer display (black and white is fine for books), it isn't a fancy new display (though color would be nice, it would also be mostly useless and a major expense), and it isn't a whiz-bang new DRMed file format. What is missing from the ebook marketplace is simply a universal storefront. Amazon books only work with the kindle. Sony's store only works with their ebook readers. The same for most other ebook stores (with a wider list of readers that can use their store... but a lower percentage of people who actually have those readers). DRM has fractured the marketplace, but selling to the entire install base of ebook readers is really quite simple because all ebook readers out there can read non-DRMed files. It is only the stores that are enforcing DRM. The first store to offer a wide selection of books in non-DRMed format at reasonable prices will suddenly be able to sell to 100% of people interested in ebooks and steal market share from everyone else out there.
I could rant on this subject for days, but the bottom line is: I can get almost any book out there for free from pirates, and I don't have to worry about losing those books when I migrate from my Sony Reader to whatever device I might end up using next (the battery is finally dying). However, I've bought most of my books from the Baen store, because I can get them fast, easily, and with good proofreading. It is easier to read them and find them, and they aren't some OCRed crap with forced line breaks and errors. Publishers have to understand that on the web, they're not competing against the price and convenience other publishers, they're competing against some random pirate scanning in a copy of their book and giving it away for free. If it isn't easy to find a copy of their book that will work on my system for a reasonable price there ($15 for a paperback selling for $8 at the local bookstore?) there is no reason to give them money.
That said, there is one thing I can see some value in for the proposed format: daily deliverables. This is something that isn't done all that well in current generation ebook reade
The very last page of the article consists solely of a link to a Sports Illustrated Tablet concept page. The tablet itself is the interesting part of this story. Whether or not the /. audience cares about Sports Illustrated or any other Time, Inc. property, we do care about gadgets, and I bet a great many of us would be perfectly willing to tolerate a year's subscription to SI if we could get that full color full motion video touch screen tablet for $150.
Let's start the betting pool on how long it will take to jailbreak the device. I'll bet a cookie it takes less than a week. (No, I won't take bets that it will come out anywhere near $150. Unfortunately.)
The tablet could be everything the CrunchPad should have been before the backbiting started, except for it being open, and the odds are very good it will be possible to open it (with a can opener if necessary).
The collection of companies involved is big enough that they could push the price of the device down into the realm of the Walmart special if they wanted to get serious about it. They have the ability to buy so many devices that it would take multiple Taiwanese manufacturers to fulfill their buy order, and when that happens, the prices drop like a rock because you can deliver the device by the pallet load, nationally, instead of dribbling out 5 here and 6 there to retailers. The price point is everything for such a device; nobody cares if the UI is bad or good if they look at the price and decide to buy an XBox instead for less.
Whether or not this crowd of old school publishers understands that remains to be seen. Whether or not the terms of their probable subscription plan to meet that price point is tolerable also remains to be seen. I confess the concept video did spark a case of Want in my greedy little heart. They can convert Want to Buy if they do it right. And won't if they don't.
They tend to also forget that LCD, some of them color capable, ebook readers were the norm. They were simply ignored.
One that hath name thou can not otter
The only way this would work is if they offer the reader free to subscribers.
What a great track record these companies have in designing and building hardware and software for the consumer.
Can't wait to read all about the "Kindle Killer" sometime in 2010, see it launch in 2012, and be able to buy one in the clearance rack at BestBuy in 2013.
They want to push some color, flashy, embedded video having, online capable version of a magazine? Hmmm.. I think I've seen that somewhere..oh, yeah, like a fucking website? WTF? This already exists, its called the web and no, it will not "threaten" the kindle, whatever that means. The kindle is pretty good at one thing, books and the eInk is great for extended reading. Not text books or big picture books, but regular ol books, you know, the majority of books. If you want some type of hybrid web enabled, color/video-ized,futuristic media delivery medium then I suggest you wait until apple releases its tablet next year. Oh, and let them help you design it, dummies.
So many injustices..so little time..
I'll keep reading in HTML, so no thanks.
Which, I suppose, is like a "somewhat" honest politician.
Did "open format" and "News Corp" just get mentioned in the same sentence? Even "somewhat"?
Ha. Ha. Ha.
I used to work for a magazine distributor and have seen this coming for at least a few years. Now the distributor is out of business, but far before the time of a workable digital magazine download/viewing system. The big publishers are looking to cut their costs some more. They're raking in ridiculous profit, but always want more. Getting rid of actual physical product in stores would be a great way to do that!
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
The only thing stopping me from buying one of these E-ink readers is the fact they only render in shades of gray. Sure that's perfectly fine for reading a novel or even newspapers but if you are reading a book about photography for example, well unless the book is about B&W photography you are kind of missing out on the whole point...
Yayyyyy proprietary! Yeah, proprietary. That'll sell. Locked in or locked out. Yeah. That will earn you the wrath of customers with 30 boxes for every format, nothing working with anything else. There are a pile of formats that are non-proprietary and well designed. But these clowns won't go for that. They are in for making the big bucks, and filling landfills and not giving a damn about angry customers. They had a medium that was universal. They had to draw customers with content. If the content is acceptable, they get more customers. If the content isn't acceptable, they lose customers. The old format doesn't lock customers in or out. The new format can. Will their first big foray into this new medium be a screwup? Survey says yep!
As long as somebody wires his eBook-reader and his camera to his computer and digitizes and OCRs these eBooks to HTML...
"...instead of the gray inked Kindle's energy conscious display."
mobipocket and topaz does color just fine. most Kindle ebooks are actually in color, you just see them in gray because that's the trade off of a display that is a power miser and also readable in a wide range of lighting environments. The device also supports PDF (poorly). And formats like ePub can display just about anything you can do in CSS/HTML4. not that Kindle supports ePub, but really this is more about format wars than price.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire