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Apple Intends To 'Digitally Destroy' Textbook Publishing
bonch writes "Apple is expected to announce e-book creation and social interaction tools at their January 19 media event taking place in New York, the heart of the publishing industry. Along with expanded interactivity features such as test-taking, the event is expected to showcase an ePub 3-compatible 'Garageband for e-books' to address the lack of simple digital publishing tools. Steve Jobs reportedly considered textbook publishing to be 'an $8 billion a year industry ripe for digital destruction' and was directly involved with Apple's efforts in this area until his death."
Let's hope this will loosen the grip of the major publishing companies. Paying $150 for a textbook (at least in the US) because you HAVE to get the newest revision to correct a few spelling mistakes is bullshit!
gasmonso ReligiousFreaks.com
Titles like that make for good drama, but we must stand back for a second to see what this means.
The "digital destruction" of textbook publishing has been underway for quite some time. The Internet has made the dissemination of information easy and cheap. Even before the Internet, digital mediums such as DVD and Laserdisc were used by educational institutions for teaching.
Self-published homemade works are now commonplace with music, movies, news (blogs), interactive media such as webpages and software. Full-size books are a logical continuation.
Easy to demonize Apple, but Steve was a fighter, he saw the opportunity for success and profit, and nobody would expect anything less.
-d
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
They will still get deals where required books are overpriced and rereleased.
Are you sure that's the right comic for this story?
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
... will now sue Apple for being similar to their products, taking inspiration from an existing product, and causing marketplace confusion in the textbook market.
Check your premises.
Aren't most e-readers able to display PDF files? I am sure e-PUB has more features, but creating multi-page PDFs or converting docs using Calibre seems to work well.
BTW, If we get rid of publishers, we lose the editor. Get ready for 1,000 page epics about cats.
Flexible bare-metal recovery for Linux/UNIX
Oh good, now I can spend $400 on a textbook that I don't even get the pleasure of burning when I'm done with it.
I'm pretty sure some of the bigger textbooks companies pay significant kickbacks to colleges and departments to require the latest editions their overpriced crap. Unless Apple is going to be offering similar kickbacks, I'm not holding my breath.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I know you're being tongue-in-cheek, but Apple's ability to make normal people excited about technology is one of their most important assets. I'm glad they're around to get non-techies hyped up about things like "ePub" and "digital distribution."
E-readers (and laptops, for that matter) are great for text that can be consumed quickly, including essentially all news stories, blogs, promotional materials, forums, light fiction, and non-fiction of the "layman's breezy guide to complex hairy subject" variety.
A real textbook is meant to be read sloooowly. Print works very well for that.
BTW when is the paperless office going to be here? We've been waiting on that for awhile.
I'm only two years out of college, and unless things have magically corrected themselves in that time, the college text book business remains completely frakked up. They've taken the 'Edition' distribution model and have used it to very much hurt the used book business, all while pushing prices higher and higher, yet adding no real value. They've literally got students (and to a smaller sense, professors) by the balls. I gladly welcome Apple's entry to the market; somebody needs to shake things up and eat the lunch of these archaic publishers. Not everyone loves them, but Apple is one of a few companies that has shown their ability to enter a market do just that.
Is it ever?
Any text editor.
Any word processor.
Any desktop publisher.
Any web page editor.
Any wiki page.
Any blog.
i.e. WTF?
Is this like when they branded lemonade as "Sprite" to increase the margin?
Deleted
The problem with college textbooks is that you have to find someone who is
A) Willing to write a book
B) An expert in the subject who is able to take their knowledge and lay it out in such a way that it is useful to the student and the professor.
And what really makes them expensive is that there might be three or four thousand copies printed total, so that everything that went into writing that book has to be recouped off of just three or four thousand copies, instead of the millions of copies for pulp fiction titles.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
Doesn't matter. There is no student alive who doesn't want this to happen. (Although many are indeed blind Apple fans, anything that can be done to emaciate textbook publishers is a Good Thing.)
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Interviewer: "So, Dr. Shiva, what are your responsibilities at Apple?"
Executive: "Well, as 'Director of Digital Destruction' at Apple . . . "
I'm surprised they didn't give it some schmaltzy name, like, "Re-birthing of New Education, for the Age of Aquarius Epoch" . . .
"Digital Destruction" is bound to get the attention of the DHS, TSA and their pals . . . "Hey, they're planning to destroy our Homeland Industry!"
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Please remember this is the same Apple that forced ebook prices higher because they wanted to take a larger cut than places like Amazon, but Apple forced publishes to set retail prices the same for all outlets.
Wikibooks has been around for a while, it just lacks collaboration from real experts. MIT open courseware has some textbooks. Scientific papers are becoming openly available in many cases. The evolution is just not complete. But take it from someone who has written technical reports and is working on a space propulsion online textbook ( http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Space_Transport_and_Engineering_Methods ), the hard part is the human writing and editing, not which software you do it on. Apple could have a slick program with a "make pretty" button, and people like me would still have to do all the same work to create the content.
This made me laugh. Yes, the overpriced textbook industry that charges people almost annually for minor updates will be destroyed by the overpriced electronic gadget company that charges people almost annually for minor updates. Fantastic. That's a real step forward.
I don't respond to AC's.
B) An expert in the subject who is able to take their knowledge and lay it out in such a way that it is useful to the student and the professor.
That doesn't seem to stop them.
Flexible bare-metal recovery for Linux/UNIX
Apple is "exciting" people about "technology" the same way Louis Vuitton is "exciting" people about, you know, apparel design and textile technology. Both companies sell an image and the fashion accessories to build it, and most people buy their products exactly as a fashion accessory.
With Apple it can actually get worse -- if you make the Apple device the dominant way you access information. That's fine and dandy, until you consider that when you buy the shiny little toy, you only get permission to access the world through it the way the designers of the technology believe it should be accessed, through their "approved" modes.
Once I heard an expression in a meeting that describes the situation very aptly -- "we're looking at your specs as if through a bent straw", said some desperate developer. If you're using Apple products, that means that you're looking at the world through a very bent straw, and Apple is doing the bending. Is it in your favor? You decide.
Of course, you can choose to be grateful and excited.
www.bookboon.com are doing a good job providing free textbooks, written by Profs
This could be interesting. The biggest problem with this is the way the market works. Okay, so we make a book. The physical cost of the book (your college chemistry book) was $3.65. Once you included in the author, the editor, salesperson's salary, MY salary in IT, etc, it was $45. We sold it to the bookstores for that, then they sold it for $65. Which means that we could theoretically sell it for $42. Not a huge saving... except when you include that middleman charging $20 more.
So, if we were to sell this via iBooks/Kindle/etc, the biggest problem is that bookstore - the reason for a new edition every 2 years was to combat the used book market. Sure, things got tweaked, but it was to make sure people kept buying the book. They make a LOT of money by physically holding those books for a few weeks. And if a publisher went digital to cut the bookstores out of the market - well, the bookstores would decide they wouldn't carry ANY books by that publisher, and the publisher would Go Away. (Supposedly this happened once in the early 90s, though I don't know who.)
But if Apple got involved? They could bring a lot of muscle to bear, since this isn't Sink Or Swim for them. That being said, the bookstores would still boycott the publisher, etc, etc.
Sidenote: the publisher I worked for had come up with a solution, albeit with lock-in. Pay X dollars per student, get access to all of our books. I'm sure there was a discount. I'm sure everyone here can see the problems with that, though it's the only halfway-decent scheme I saw.
If every text book is an internet connected device, where will the addresses come from?
http://michaelsmith.id.au
I work for a major textbook publisher that makes some of (albeit the cheapest) those textbooks.I admit that the system is broken, but the impression that the publishers are gouging the students is not entirely fair. The bookstores on campus with monopolies on their local markets and used book sales through nation-wide aggregators are a large part of the problem. All that is before we even get to piracy.
Also, textbooks these days come with a wide range of additional print and on-line resources like study guides, course management and homework systems, videos, etc. that are usually bundled with the book for "free." (I'm not going to insult you and suggest these add-ons don't effect the price of the book, but their value generally far outweighs the price)
If you want someone to blame, talk to the people who run your local bookstores.
The very company which is going on suing spree in madness to prevent competitors ? and also famous for walled gardens and overcharging for anything ?
and why havent any of you brought this up until this comment ?
Read radical news here
If ebooks can penetrate the K-12 market and lower costs significantly, then much power will be taken out of the Texas Board of Education's hands. School districts around the nation could decide for themselves if they wanted to teach that humans played with dinosaurs 5000 years ago, and not be forced to buy text books that spout such nonsense because Texas is the largest market and gets to set curriculum.
Someone made computers cool for the general public. The horror.
I think some of the Apple hatred stems from the fact that many techies absorb themselves in computers because it gives them a feeling of control that they lack in their daily lives. Mastering a system is gratifying on many levels. When a company offers a platform that doesn't allow or require that kind of micro-management and control, it's really like an attack on the person directly, especially when the product is popular among non-techies--many of the same people who alienated that person in the first place. And so there's resentment.
The only reason I say all this is that concerns like yours don't exist in the general populace; it doesn't even cross their minds that it would be a problem. They see the lack of open-endedness as simplification and refinement that makes the devices easier to use. As Steve Jobs use to say, something "mere mortals" could use. So I say again, I think it's awesome that the public is allowed to be excited about things like "ePub" and "digital distribution" rather than rely on nerds like us to trickle it down to the rest of the population.
In 10years I'm fairly sure I'll have rabid apple fans telling me all about how apple invented the ebook... along with the Smart phone, the MP3 player, the internet, the personal computer, etc... and how lame it is that everyone just keeps copying them. "Go ahead and use your lame non-apple ebooks, I heard their full of viruses anyway"
If I give a lecture, it's easy to record and distribute my face, voice, and slides, but the pointer position is lost. And that's half the drama!
When my wife was a prof, the textbook industry was her biggest peeve. Every year, a new textbook comes out, many with websites that contain supplementary and additional information. The websites become invalid at the end of the school year thereby eroding the used textbook market. With each coming year, faced with a new textbook, course instructors have to run through the book to update their curriculum where necessary..
The Chiropractor's Guild will likely come out strongly against this too, because people won't be throwing their backs out carrying around chemistry and physics textbooks.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
I'll just be glad if they succeed in destroying the textbook publishing business. There are few greater hives of scum and villainy than that one; putting out a new "revised edition" every 2 years for an ancient subject like calculus just so they can keep you from selling your textbook or buying a cheaper used one. I hope they die just like the video rental business.
The used book market is thriving, and if you think you are forced to buy books from the College store then crawl out of under that rock! This is a ploy by $Apple$ to have the book publishers lunch plain and simple with a change of format (read +DRM) that in the long run leaves people no better off, more likely worse off! Not sure about you folks' college experience, but I made the mistake of buying books at the College store only once. Every semester after freshman year, I'd ask professor if the book was required, obtain the ISBNs for necessary books and compare prices of new/used on Amazon or Addall.com and pick a winner. For most engineering and science books I'd save $50-100 per title. In grad school it got a little tough since topics were specialized, but still found a way. At the end of the year I would keep most of books that I liked or were good references and sell the rest on Amazon. 5 yrs later that IC design book bought for $75 saved my ass in a job interview, try doing that in 2017 with the ebook you bought yesterday!
many techies absorb themselves in computers because it gives them a feeling of control that they lack in their daily lives
I don't believe you think more than skin-deep about the dangers of the "walled garden" approach. The problem with Apple is very simple -- they have delegated themselves a right to approve how do you use "their" device and a right to charge you a tithe for everything that comes to you on "their" hardware. In effect, you've relinquished ownership, and, unlike some other platforms, you have no legal way out.
Also, software freedom is only a small part of it. Think of other possibilities that the Apple approach prevents. Even if an independent business and an owner of an Apple device both think there is a business mode they both can benefit from, which mode does not go through the Apple-approved system, they cannot achieve it easily, and hence cannot exploit the full potential of the hardware platform to their advantage. This is especially bad for the person who has paid the price for the Apple device.
Okay, point. That is a bad thing. But you know what? They'll be a lot easier to pirate, and even if only one person never uses one such textbook outside of normal classes and everyone else still buys paper because they do, it'll be less money wasted overall. Also, at least with music, Apple eventually shucked off (most of?) the DRM. Perhaps something could happen with electronic textbooks.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
It's not just that. The reason Apple took off in consumer electronics was the iPod, and the reason it took off was not the device itself, but because Apple hammered out distribution rights with major music publishers. Paid downloads of music were an obvious idea by then, but so what? Nobody else had made it happen (not with major labels most people wanted). Digital textbooks are the same deal - the hardware is almost a given, the content is already there - it's all about distribution rights. And, yes, DRM is part and parcel with distribution rights, because most content producers DO want to get paid. (That said, if a huge customer like the UC system wants to pay for their own content development and then allow free redistribution, I agree that would be even better.)
putting out a new "revised edition" every 2 years for an ancient subject like calculus just so they can keep you from selling your textbook or buying a cheaper used one
... As opposed to complete inability to resell a license?
Hopefully, we'll get it either cheap enough to compensate or - in an ideal world - DRM free.
Worst case scenario would be publishers catching up and starting to sell them on their own, overpriced, some fucked up proprietary format and DRM'd up to the ears.
Martin Luther (not King) was instrumental in getting the Bible out of the domain of the church where only the clergy who were trained in latin, the language of the bible in Germany at the time, he by insisting it was translated into the local language, which in itself helped make that the official language of Germany, helped give people their own version of the bible to read rather then have to take the word of their religious leader about its true contents.
But he was also a rabid anti-semite and one of the ground layers for what would centuries later result in the holocaust and the countless violent outburst against Jews. He both gave people more freedom were to get their information from but also spewd his own vile hatred through this new means of obtaining info.
The internet is much the same, often if you read sources that do not follow the mainstream you also run into a lot of utter drivel from the outright insane to hate speech. Do you believe the mainstream media are full of it? Read the stuff on TOR... it makes Fox news look sane and balanced in comparison.
There have been a rather large number of cases in history where the official textbooks have rather dubious links to reality BUT the alternative isn't always much better. The official line of Japanese history books might be that Japan has not committed war crimes but the alternative versions do NOT automatically tell the truth instead. Just because someone doesn't tell the same lie doesn't mean they are telling the truth. Just because Iraq had no weapons of WMD doesn't mean the war was all about oil automatically.
Ideally, in our modern age when so much information is available we should each as individuals be able to select the information that is correct... rather then what we want to believe... and everyone will have a pony too.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I disagree. I learnt to install Solaris before I have ever installed Dos/Windows. My computer throughout college was my trusty Apple //gs and the OSF/1 box with the huge black and white 21" monochrome monitor - damn, it was a fine monitor. I learnt to manage VMS, UNIX, installed Slackware Linux from 50+ floppies. I am one of the few rare people to have actually bought a copy of WordPerfect for Linux :) Used Gentoo for years and years, building from stage 1 when that was all that was available.
I still run OpenBSD at home as my outside facing server.
And I find Macs easy to use. For the stuff I need to do, it's easy. For the technical stuff, I can get right into the innards of it for the most part. Opensource stuff is downright easy. MacPorts if available. Otherwise, ./configure and make. Built a couple of hackintoshes for fun.
The OP was just being stupid. MP3s have been un-DRM"ed for quite a few years now - Apple was the one pushing for it, but of course, OP conveniently forgets that.
Apple also contributes back - they made so much improvements into KDE's browser that KDE just basically re-absorbed back in the entire webkit, among other things.
This is where you are being stupid. So far, none of the digital content Apple sells dies after X uses. Renting movies is different, of course.
So, whether this is a rent model or a buy model, we'll see on Thursday. But if the price is right, why not rent?
Whelp, Santa brought an iPad for me a few weeks ago. As a 6th grade teacher, the possible classroom uses for the iPad may not be endless, but will at least keep me busy for a long time. While sniffing around for a way to wirelessly project my iPad's display through my MacBook and onto my projector, I found a couple "e-Book" applications that allow PDF's of textbooks to be read, zoomed in, have videos linked to them, look up definitions of unfamiliar words, and electronic notes scribbled onto them. I was able to get PDF's of my Teacher Editions onto my iPad and now no longer have to stay late to plan lessons and thus avoid taking the rather large volumes home (which is what I should be doing now) or to actually take them home to work on them. They're on my iPad, in one very portable format. It is incredibly convenient. Having such an easily accessible breadth of content related to the subject of study (a time-lapse video of a glacier's movement, for example) on-hand to illustrate or otherwise add richness to learning is incredibly appealing to me and to my students. After showing them the sample textbook chapter included in one reader app, they asked when they could expect that to be available to them. While not "just like" having the real physical book right there to make notes on, it's pretty close. Sure, it's not "the perfect" way to view the information, but it's a whole lot more "current" than the 5-year-old textbooks my kids have now. Plus, eliminating the printing, construction, shipping, warehousing, storing and recycling of textbooks can cut costs, which should (but most likely won't) be passed on to college students and school districts. And, the information on them e-editions, in theory, can be instantly (or nearly instantly) updated with current information or corrections. I don't care if it's Apple or some other maker, it's pretty cool to at least have this be coming.
Apple is "exciting" people about "technology" the same way Louis Vuitton is "exciting" people about, you know, apparel design and textile technology. Both companies sell an image and the fashion accessories to build it, and most people buy their products exactly as a fashion accessory.
I am periodically reminded why headhunters don't lurk on Slashdot to find the next generation of innovating CEOs.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
OMG you make it sound like all sysadmins are giving desktop support (the whole day), I would be so unhappy if that was true
I'm positive, don't belive me look at my karma
many techies absorb themselves in computers because it gives them a feeling of control that they lack in their daily lives
I don't believe you think more than skin-deep about the dangers of the "walled garden" approach. The problem with Apple is very simple -- they have delegated themselves a right to approve how do you use "their" device and a right to charge you a tithe for everything that comes to you on "their" hardware. In effect, you've relinquished ownership, and, unlike some other platforms, you have no legal way out.
Game consoles have had "walled gardens" (ugh, that term) for decades, approving all software that appears on their devices, and the world hasn't fallen apart. To the contrary, consoles surpassed PCs as the primary gaming platforms several years ago. The world also hasn't fallen apart since Apple began approving software on its devices; in fact, iOS remains #1 in customer satisfaction surveys.
Clearly, non-techies prefer these kinds of platforms. Like I said before, the issues you raise are not even considered a problem outside of tech forums. Normal people don't care if they can't install absolutely everything under the sun, because they wouldn't want to even if they could. Nobody is putting a gun to anyone's head and forcing them to buy an iPad, so the victim angle doesn't work either.
You need to understand that it's not a black-and-white situation. Apple platforms may be perfect for other people but not for you. Just because you don't like Apple doesn't mean nobody else should use their platforms and that the world should be rid of their evil. It just means other people use those platforms and you use whatever you use, and the world keeps on turning.
Also, software freedom is only a small part of it. Think of other possibilities that the Apple approach prevents. Even if an independent business and an owner of an Apple device both think there is a business mode they both can benefit from, which mode does not go through the Apple-approved system, they cannot achieve it easily, and hence cannot exploit the full potential of the hardware platform to their advantage. This is especially bad for the person who has paid the price for the Apple device.
If Apple isn't meeting their needs, the independent business can choose to use a different platform. Nobody is forced to use an Apple device, so again, the "freedom" argument is silly and really comes down to techies trying to maintain control in order to feel a sense of mastery over something, in my opinion.
Odd that this article is specifically about "Textbooks". It should be about "books".
No one yet has really served up the Amazon Killer. But it's lurking. Without going all TinFoil Hat, it's Print On Demand.
Let's get it out in the open. Let's thrash it out. Ebooks kinda suk. They're stuck there on your device, and they're all digitally-slimy. You can't (easily!) draw notes and fold down pages and get pizza grease all over them. I'm not even going to get into Formats and DRM and Backups etc.
Sometimes you just want an Honest to Goodness Book. But we were so wowed with Amazon's selection we drank something REALLY worse than kool-aid. (Boilermaker? Skullgrinder? NecroAtomic ZombieMaker? Oh sorry, Kids, don't read that last sentence.) The crushing future is in Print On Demand.
There are a couple of legit tech hurdles - but big picture they're cake. (Glue quality, page shear, assembly speed, blah blah.) But I have in my hand, complete with generic non-SOPA-offensive blue and white covers, three paperbacks on religious theory that are at least 75% of "Professional Quality". The binding is still intact after about 2 years, the pages are the same size within X milimeters, the ink is solid, etc.
ANY book - in one hour. (I'm being generous counting for stuff like lines, staff, etc.) Screw that wait 3 days for ship junk.
But - what is this mysterious silence? The machines are "not that expensive" (topside $100,000, peanuts for a 70,000 SF retail outlet).
So mighty Slashdot, how have the Book people managed to TOTALLY elude entire chains like Borders? Was it REALLY that much fun to go bankrupt??? Was there NO-ONE among all 19,500 employees that bothered to try to get digital rights to POD? Not a single title? Not a single attempt at getting a machine in the store? Really???
Talk about an Elephant in the Room. I am annoyed because I cannot be smarter than 100 Borders Senior Managers.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
By itself, allowing more people to create books quickly isn't going to make a difference
Lots of good books already get published that aren't used for education, because textbook selection isn't based on quality or price, it's based on politics, and on complex, draconian, ever-changing standards --- which are so difficult to keep up with that perhaps $150 isn't surprising.
My issue with ereader textbooks is that many times I need multiple textbooks available at the same time. I like to be able to quickly scan between books and look at and compare books. I can not do that if I have to flip between books and the one I just looked at dissapeared. Sorry but I do not have enough cash for multiple ereaders. The time it takes to navigate between different books and the thought necissary to manipulate the e-reader is enough to loose my train of thought.
I don't buy the claim in the Ars article that the big thing standing in the way of digital textbooks is that the tools for creating them are nonexistent, not good enough, or too hard to use. First off, textbook publishers have paid professionals who do this sort of thing.
But that's just the thing - the ONLY people who can afford proessional textbook editing are the major players. What happens when you can get decent textbooks from companies with far smaller resources? Suddenly you have a vast increase in the number of specialized textbooks, which leads inevitably to reduced costs and thus a reduced price for the student.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Maybe some people do not like Apple due to the fact that people believe the hype. Many Apple users tell me that they can surf the web and open any email attachment without fear of ever getting a virus/malware. That is not true. If this was true I would have to be rebuilding Apple machines that are infected. Granted the users let the virus/malware be installed in the first place. They entered in their password when prompted without a second thought. That is the problem. The Apple users think they are totally safe, so any password prompt is fine since that are on an Apple machine.
Considering they're second..or third..or maybe fourth fiddle in the Ebook game.
You absolutely loved the "I'm a Mac / I'm a PC" commercials, didn't you?
Fuck you Apple and everything about you. You DONT know what everybody wants. Can you possibly believe that some people like print books? Textbooks in particular? Maybe someday you'll learn that DIGITAL != BETTER
Game consoles have had "walled gardens" (ugh, that term) for decades, approving all software that appears on their devices, and the world hasn't fallen apart.
Nice strawman you got there. Nobody is arguing that the world is falling apart, the argument is that there is possibility of real harm done. The Microsoft near monopoly in the PC market did not cause the world to fall, but it is hard to argue it was totally harmless.
Nobody is forced to use an Apple device, so again, the "freedom" argument is silly
It is good I am not making this argument then. All I'm saying is that people buy Apple products by the looks and assume the rest from what they already know about computers, and by doing so they buy into a sales method that limits the modes in which they can use their devices.
In my book that is bad, but, as I said in my frist psot, you always can accept it and rejoice.
Now some stuff a Wikipedia like Text is needed as the stuff get's updated / changed fast and the old dead tree does not fit that.
You can use any of those tools to produce educational material.
But just as a you can also record any music onto a cassette tape, with better tools you can get much better results.
As usual Apple is not inventing anything, they are just taking a number of tools you mention, then combining and refining them in such a way that they make editing and creating educational eBooks much simpler. Simpler combinations of media and text, integration with tests the user can perform to show comprehension, interactive examples - hard to say what all they are planning but it's not hard to imagine a very nice tool that could easily outdo everything you listed and be easier for the average person to use.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Let's you have lot's of books open at the same time.
I don't believe you think more than skin-deep about the dangers of the "walled garden" approach. The problem with Apple is very simple -- they have delegated themselves a right to approve how do you use "their" device and a right to charge you a tithe for everything that comes to you on "their" hardware. In effect, you've relinquished ownership, and, unlike some other platforms, you have no legal way out.
Oh don't be such a drama queen. There have been walled garden computers since at least the games consoles of the 1980s. And still the consumers are quite happy with them. There have been open consoles, and they've all failed. Given the choice of gaming on the "walled garden" consoles and open PCs, in the end the walled garden won majority share.
This "open" good; "walled garden" bad thing is ideology. And like all ideologies, it's wrong.
This is especially bad for the person who has paid the price for the Apple device.
Funnily enough the iPhone owner doesn't agree. He's more than happy with his virus free platform where he gets an enormous choice of quality apps in the 99c - $9.99 range.
Freetards amount to about 0.01% of the population. And they're the only ones that have negative views of a "walled garden".
As a guy who works within traditional publishing and printing the future both saddens and scare me, I love the tactility of the printing page, alsolearning from a real book is much easier for me personally.
With enough people interested in cracking it, a DRM format tends to get cracked sooner or later. And once that happens, the entire format is opened up to easy piracy. College students tend to have a lot of time on their hands, not that much money, and a strong interest in this kind of thing.
I think some of the Apple hatred stems from the fact that many techies absorb themselves in computers because it gives them a feeling of control that they lack in their daily lives.
The iPhone was loved around here until it became a mass-market product. Once it reached that point a new underdog had to be found. The 'hatred', in many cases, is really just a form of hipsterism.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
It's not just that. The reason Apple took off in consumer electronics was the iPod, and the reason it took off was not the device itself, but because Apple hammered out distribution rights with major music publishers.
Actually I think it was the other way around. iTunes Music Store didn't launch until the iPad had been shipping for 18 months. And the iPod was a big success from the start.
iPod was originally marketed as something you could put your CD collection on and take it with you. It was the success of that that enabled Jobs to persuade the record labels to join in. Of course once iTMS was up and running the two formed a virtuous circle that pushed the iPod to ever greater heights of success.
I don't see how this is any different. When I buy a physical book, my access is limited by how the publishers thought it should be accessed. Want to search for a topic? Only if the publisher saw fit to add an index, and only if the search terms you have in mind are among the ones tabulated. Want to compare the discussion in two different parts of the book? You are stuck flipping back and forth.
Mod this up. PDF is essentially Postscript in a viewable wrapper. Postscript is designed for accurate and repeatable printing of formatted information in a fixed manner.
Sara
Designer, Gamer, Macgrrl in an XP World
Actually I think it was the other way around. iTunes Music Store didn't launch until the iPad had been shipping for 18 months. And the iPod was a big success from the start.
I think you might want to reevaluate that comment.
Sure, all the more reasons for SOPA-likes.
"anatomy+101+no+drm+patch+torrent" - click - Stoprightthereyoucriminalscum! You have violated the law. Pay the court a fine or serve your sentence. Your downloaded files are now forfeit.
Hopefully, we'll get it either cheap enough to compensate
Well of course we will. Just as songs are cheaper than singles were, album downloads are cheaper than CDs, apps are down to 99c and existing ebooks are cheaper than their paper alternatives.
There are an awful lot of academics around that are capable of writing textbooks. But at the moment they have to get a publisher, and the publisher has to pay the printers, and then there's a bookseller who takes his cut.
Sounds like this is a bit like the iPhone app development. It'll let the authors deal direct with the store and set the prices. And it'll cut out all the middle-men.
If there's any industry that needs to be destroyed, it's the blood sucking textbook industry. Looking forward to $9.95 textbooks on the App Store.
I'm cool with ink printing on sustainable plant matter, and my little library *looks* awesome.
You'll be less happy when you've reached middle age and you've had to move all that dead tree pulp through 10 different house moves.
I've thrown away all my classics of literature on paper now, and replaced them with ebooks. It's made me very happy. I'd switch the rest too, if it wasn't for the cost. I wish I was at the start of my library creating life and could build a library of ebooks instead of a mountain of bound paper.
Quite so. I kept all my textbooks after college thinking that I'd have the need to refer to them. I can't remember opening any of them since I finished college. Might as well have rented them for a lower price.
Well, newspapers managed to get it wrong in many ways, with things like print annual subscription 6 times cheaper than app annual subscription - that was either New York Times or New Yorker, IIRC.
Hopefully Apple will apply enough weight to get the point across.
Sadly I haven't had mod points for ages, so all I can offer is +1, Insightful in a reply.
You've nailed every nail on the head with that.
Trolling is a art,
So what? Unless they implement a national firewall, they can't stop access to foreign bittorrent sites and the like. SOPA won't do shit for stopping copyright infringement, but it'll totally fuck over US-based businesses.
The vast majority of cell phones (including all the popular ones) before the iPhone and Android were the ultimate in walled gardens. Remember paying your carrier if you wanted to get your pictures off your RAZR?
Yeah, let me give you a hint: it wasn't apple.
On a lot of the writers blogs that professional authors discuss things on, they talk a lot about how hard it is just to pub a Short Story or Novel for platforms like Droid, iPad and iPhone.
So, I believe they will actually welcome this, although the inbetweeners won't.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Meanwhile, we got a new phonebook dropped on our porch last night and my wife and I both said in unison, "what? What are we supposed to do with this big lump? Why waste all those trees?" Granted, reference materials are an especially weak application for paper books.
But e-books just aren't that bad anymore.
PDF is a display format. Since eReaders tend to mess with all the display parameters, PDF doesn't work all that well.
However, having said that, if you take an ePub file and convert it to PDF, THAT PDF will work just fine in an eBook reader. Reflow works just the same, you can tap to zoom on/read a column of text or to make an image object fit the screen. The PDFs that are a pain are the ones that are basically pages and pages of PNG or JPEG images with OCR'd text hidden behind them. These suck in eBook readers, and never convert to any other format in any meaningful way. This isn't a limitation of PDF, but of the source material.
Apple makes people excited about consumer products; not necessarily excited about the technology itself. I don't see them making that many people interested in finding out how stuff actually works.
Innovating CEOs very often have little technological expertise. They see technology as a tool to get stuff done or as something to sell. Understanding how stuff works is for the little guy "ePub" is not a technology, it is an application on top of existing technology. Turning ePub into a product involves very few engineers but a whole lot of content creators, editors, graphical designers, etc.
Odd that this article is specifically about "Textbooks". It should be about "books".
No one yet has really served up the Amazon Killer. But it's lurking. Without going all TinFoil Hat, it's Print On Demand.
Sorry, the reason people want e- text books is for the size and weight savings. I would have killed to be able to carry around my entire semester's reading in one hand.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
Paid downloads of music were an obvious idea by then, but so what? Nobody else had made it happen (not with major labels most people wanted).
Do Apple fans make up their own history and timelines?
Rhapsody was launched as a music service on mid 2001 and by mid 2002 had the catalogs of EMI, BMG, Warner Bros. Records, Sony and Universal Records which are the 5 big music companies. Rhapsody was not the first either. Although iTunes had a release in early 2001, it wasn't until spring 2003 that you could even buy music from iTunes, over a year after other were already doing it.
SJ did not blaze the path for online music like many Apple fanbios would like you to believe. Rhapsody also had non DRM mp3's the same time EVERYONE did. Since the other music etailers don't have a cult following like Apple does, everyone just ASSUMED SJ was the driving force behind this as well. All of the music etailers were against DRM.
There used to be an educational book publisher in Crystal lake, Il. I have heard that they will move towards digital delivery. I am curious what they and other book publishers will do? Will they simply drop their presses, Sell them to China, or move the presses to compete in a different arena, while maintaining their educational delivery.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
No, I don't remember ever having to pay to get pictures off my phone, and my "walled garden" phones have had "app" markets and "music" markets since about 2000 for prices that were comparable to the iTunes and the Android markets.
That's simply not true. I used to be a Symbian developer. Around 2002-2005, I charged $10 for an image warping app, that seemed to be about the right price from looking around at what other apps were out there. The same kind of thing goes for 99c on the iPhone.
And the app used to be sold in a zip file, which the user had to download, unzip and then install from their PC. Again, standard practice for the time. There weren't any platforms that had the automated purchase-download-install workflow that the Apple App Store has.
In another post you asked me what a freetard is. This is a good demonstration. Not only are they fans of "open", "free", GPL etc. (the free bit) They also say things that aren't true in their trying to persuade everyone of their point of view (the tard bit).
Quoth siddesu: "In effect, you've relinquished ownership, and, unlike some other platforms, you have no legal way out."
So, you don't think there's any connotation of "freedom" even remotely attached to the above sentence, written by you 40 minutes before your subsequent response ? 'Cos I do; and contrary to your subsequent claim, it seems to me that you're very much making the argument that the user is not free to use the device how (s)he wants to.
So, either you're poorly expressing yourself, you're a bare-faced liar, or you have an agenda. Which is it ?
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
Wow. Wish I had mod points. I don't know why I don't ever get them anymore. I'd use them all on the parent. Very nicely put.
One man's pink plane is another man's blue plane.
What part of my post above isn't "true" exactly? I see nothing in your post that proves me wrong. The only thing I see is that you assume your experience is good enough to describe the *whole* range of phones and services. If you seriously believe that, you're having the -tard problem.
"Verizon has also blocked the transfer of most data over USB, such as ringtones." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_RAZR)
It doesn't specifically mention pictures, but they certainly did fall under "most data," at least for part of the RAZR's life cycle. But ringtones will do just fine. You don't suppose Verizon blocked transferring ringtones because they were giving them away free, do you? And yet Apple, champion of the walled garden, not only lets you put your own ringtones on iPhones but provides several different ways of creating them.
I'd definitely be interested in hearing which phone you were using in 2000 that supported a music market where you could download a good selection of decent quality full songs for $0.99 or less though.
There were no mobile platforms before the Apple App Store that offered automated purchase-download-install workflow,
You're obviously unfamiliar with i-mode and i-appli and Bree/Java development for Japanese carriers. These were exactly automated purchase-download-install workflows.
There are a number of third-party ePub readers for Mac OS X. You're probably trying to say that there is no OS X reader for iBooks, which is indeed annoying, but they aren't the same thing.
<crickets chirping> Well played, sir.
Let's get it out in the open. Let's thrash it out. Ebooks kinda suk. They're stuck there on your device, and they're all digitally-slimy. You can't (easily!) draw notes and fold down pages and get pizza grease all over them. I'm not even going to get into Formats and DRM and Backups etc.
This is not a problem for me. I just want to read a book. The rare occasion I want to make notes, my ebook reader lets me highlight and share, so I usually just share it off to my email address so I can do something with it later.
I switched to almost exclusive ebook reading several years ago. I bought an HP Ipaq as a test and found it was fine, although the interface was kludgy due to lack of good app support. Once I got an iPod Touch and Stanza, life improved.
Now I have Android and use FBReader and I just got a Kobo for Christmas.
On the rare occasion I read a real book, I am frustrated by its poor features. I have to hold them in two hands!? I have to use two hands to turn the page?! I can't read it in the dark?! Carrying more than one at a time while traveling weighs HOW MUCH?!
I will only go back to reading paper books when civilization collapses and I can no longer charge them from the wall socket, although given how much I use these things I'll try to buy a solar charger before that happens!
Oh, you actually thought you were going to use them again one day? That's funny. Pretty much everyone I know only kept theirs for office dressing.
Your hands must be very strong moving the goalposts like that. I will quote you again:
There were no mobile platforms before the Apple App Store that offered automated purchase-download-install workflow, and there were no mobile platforms that offered 99c as a common price point.
I don't see you limiting the discussion to "smartphones". If you choose to do so now, would you care to specify a definition of a "smartphone" first, so that I'm sure I'm not wasting time arguing with a fat troll?
-- they have delegated themselves a right to approve how do you use "their" device and a right to charge you a tithe for everything that comes to you on "their" hardware.
They have worked as hard as possible to create devices that work in ways that they genuinely believe are better than the competition. Is the 'tithe' you refer to the initial product price (entirely competitive), peripherals (comparable), or the ongoing costs of app store purchases? Do you think Apple's product pricing is unfairly high? Should all App Store purchases be gratis?
In effect, you've relinquished ownership, and, unlike some other platforms, you have no legal way out.
In effect, we have gladly relinquished the tyranny of micro-management, and have been rewarded with the time we would spend doing so.
... they cannot achieve it easily, and hence cannot exploit the full potential of the hardware platform to their advantage.
I thought that developers were free to install whatever they want on their iOS devices. It's only when you want to sell your app to the world that you must submit it to the App Store. Correct me if I'm wrong.
They don't fail because consumers hate them.
They fail because producers hate them.
The game manufacturers are the one that have the real power, and getting snubbed by them for not locking down the users.
In turn, open consoles look shitty because game vendors won't contribute to the game library, which obviously hurts selection.
Long before the IPhone my old Verizon BREW phone had an app store where I could purchase an app and it would be automatically downloaded and installed.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
so does e-pub include DRM then? If it does not I don't see how this is the case. But perhaps it does. I don't know.
In any event, I'm curious about a statement made in the article:
"authoring standards-compliant e-books (despite some promises to the contrary) is not as simple as running a Word document of a manuscript through a filter. The current state of software tools continues to frustrate authors and publishers alike, with several authors telling Ars that they wish Apple or some other vendor would make a simple app that makes the process as easy as creating a song in GarageBand."
Why is it not as simple as running Word text through a filter? Word has headings and sections and footnotes and tables of contents. So what is missing?
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Nature has announced "principles of biology", [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principles_of_Biology]. I think this one area of publishing is a no brainer for ebooks. I like their model. Of course, this would put a lot of back doctors out of business.
You hear about the person who didn't rely on anecdotal evidence to support his belief system?
There's no moving of goalposts. To open you said said:
"No, I don't remember ever having to pay to get pictures off my phone, and my "walled garden" phones have had "app" markets and "music" markets since about 2000 for prices that were comparable to the iTunes and the Android markets."
"app markets", not "applets". They are not the same. If they were the same they wouldn't have different names.
In my response to you I mentioned app 3 times. Thus we were both talking about apps, not applets.
If there was any moving of the goalposts it was at the point you wrote imode/i-appli.
Definition of a smartphone is easy. A smartphone allows native 3rd party apps. Native meaning using the same language and APIs as the built in apps. If it only offers WAP, J2ME or the like, it's a feature phone. If it doesn't offer that it's a dumb phone, or just a phone.
That's applets on a feature phone, not apps on a smartphone.
They fail because producers hate them.
The game manufacturers are the one that have the real power, and getting snubbed by them for not locking down the users.
In turn, open consoles look shitty because game vendors won't contribute to the game library, which obviously hurts selection.
PCs got plenty of support from the game vendors. But still the consoles won.
Lack of support for open consoles wasn't anything to do with ideology on their part. It's simply that they were unlikely to sell well. Selling well requires a lot of money on R&D, a high spec, and marketing, on a console that's not too expensive. That combination requires a walled-garden to finance.
Well, if "app" means something else than an abbreviation of "application" in your world, you're free to use your definition. I'll abstain from feeding you further.
No, it's not. Why? Because the professor writes a textbook, and sells it through Lulu. It is required reading for his mass lecture class, and costs $100. I forget Lulu's cut - say, 20%? There are 100 kids in the class. They all shell out for the textbook, and the underpaid professor makes $8000 that semester....
Apple can jump up and down all it wants - it doesn't get to set the syllabus or required reading list....
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
And by "free" I both free as in freedom and free as in beer.
90% of all of the material taught in K-12 and probably 50% of all of the material taught in an non-technology focused undergraduate degree hasn't changed in decades, and a non-trivial chunk of it hasn't changed in centuries. Granted that teaching methodology has improved some, but there's simply no logical reason why we as a society have allowed textbook publishers to bleed us for countless billions the way we have.
It's crazy at the university level and batshit insane at the level of public schools. The average US state spends close to $10M annually buying textbooks for public schools, at prices averaging around $50 per book. What they ought to do is take a chunk of that each year and commission the writing of a half-dozen open source textbooks. A little collaboration and planning between the states and in less than five years the entire K-12 curriculum could be reproduced in a freely available form. Want to put it on tablets and computers? Fine. Or contract a publisher to print paper copies for the cost of materials and labor. Or, heck, when I was in high school almost 30 years ago, we could print and bind high-quality hardcover books in the school's graphic arts shop. It's gotta be even easier now.
The same could easily be done at the university level, especially for generals. I've seen a dozen different Calculus texts and you know what? They're all basically equivalent. Profs will tell you that this author or that author presents the material in a slightly better way, and they're not wrong, but there's also no evidence that it really makes much difference in how well the students learn the material.
For that matter, with open source textbooks, profs could adjust what they don't like themselves and share it with like-minded peers. Github for textbooks! Fork and modify and if others like your patches they can pull them.
There is a volunteer open textbooks movement, but with a little organized focus, attention and money it could easily become the standard way of packaging and distributing educational materials.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Size and weight are minor annoyances.
I'd have given my left nut for e-books of all my text books last time I was in college for two simple reasons:
A) CTRL-F ... please
let me search it
B) Juarez is not *just* the name of a town in Mexico.
and college kids be broke as hell, ya dig?
Well, if "app" means something else than an abbreviation of "application" in your world.
I said app != applet, not app != application.
And you know full well that I'm correct in that, just like the rest of it.
Bye.
Call me whatever you will- my posts are available to anyone. But I couldn't give a shit if it was Apple, Google, or heck even MS who went after these fucks. My only frustration is that Amazon, a company I actually admire, hasn't done anything to fight this travesty.
They sell out of WWDC tickets pretty fast.
-mrxak
Onions Will Kill You
Amazon has less incentive to; their strategy in my experience has always been just slightly undercutting the competition, to maximize profit. In that sense they're a lot like a traditional vendor.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Digital books are great, I use them frequently, but to have something that relies on a device to read it rather than just my hands and eyes is not something I want any part of. I will read my news on line, I may even read some of the classics on my kindle, but I will not pay anything, not a single cent, for a book I can't lend, resell or ruin with a hilighter and margin notes.
With regard to printed new editions being forced on to students at extortionate prices - are you people seriously of the belief that this practice will stop with digital editions? The way books are sold will not change, no matter the medium the book is delivered on.
Oblig. Penny Arcade:
http://penny-arcade.com/comic/2011/04/13
1% APY, No fees, Online Bank https://captl1.co/2uIErYq Don't let your $$$ sit in a no-interest acct.
Size and weight are minor annoyances.
You wait until you've got to haul all that stuff around before you say that again...
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
If you're using Apple products, that means that you're looking at the world through a very bent straw, and Apple is doing the bending.
No not really. I'm not comfortable with the show "appstore" thing, and if it get's to be draconian I'll dump OSX, but that statement isn't true, unless you really want it to be.
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
because it gives them a feeling of control that they lack in their daily lives/quote?
Uh, no, I have control. I control the machines. They do everything I ask, and they do it now! So I have no lack of control in my daily life as I am immersed in computing machines.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
I thought we were going to talk about ePub. Instead I'm navigating through an Apple slalom rant.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
At least for the time being, Apple's actual computers (MacBooks, iMacs, etc.) are still general-purpose computers that you can install any software you like upon. That's why I have a MacBook, but would never consider buying an iPhone.
But I expect that one of these days, they're going to do something awful, like turn OSX into a flavor of iOS, and shut out apps that aren't digitally signed, the way they already do in the mobile space. If that ever happens, well, there are a couple of Ubuntu laptop providers that look kinda sexy.
Hi AC.
You illustrated my point perfectly. Instead of waiting 3 days with a spiral plastic bind, it should be printed right there while you wait. My aformentioned paperbacks complete with covers were about $8 each via Google Books.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I recently received and IPAD 2 for XMAS. It was my first time with any kind of mac/apple device short of a gen1 ipod. I got excited about the possibilities of stuff I could do on it and how portable it was. I liked the swipe interface for some stuff, hated it for others (kid reaching over and touching it makes it zoom instead of scroll etc).
I started thinking about writing an app for it for some random stuff. I also wanted to drop random files on it, and view images and movies over a samba share on my windows machines.
I guess I got spoiled browsing the web with adblock plus for the past few years. I forgot how ugly it was without it. I also hadn't been harassed for $$$$$$$ to do ANYTHING more so than when investigating anything related to the ipad. Free apps all have annoying add bars. Apps that do things the ipad should be able to do cost $. The spirit of open source and giving away of small apps seems to be quite dead in the i- whatever community.
To develop, I need a mac and 100 dollars. Yes, there are alternatives, but all of them seem ugly and honestly just not worth the time if you want to do some quick 'home use' programs.
All in all, the ipad has ended up being a great bathroom reader, so I guess it is good for something. I was just sad to see a bunch of potential great uses for it walled off with money.
Still have 50+ boxes of books in storage. *sigh* Am running out of walls to put bookshelves against. Still, a lot of these are out-of-print large reference books so don't want to get rid of them. If there was a public library within 30 miles of us, I'd donate them.
I drank what? -- Socrates
The flipside to this is that people who would ordinarily be afraid of/uninterested in technology actually use it.
My mother in law said a few months ago she'd like an iPod ... now, she's in her mid 60's, so if you believe she's buying it as a fashion accessory, then you're an idiot who only sees this one way.
She only recently got herself a laptop, and isn't exactly the most computer savvy person there is. However, we set her up with iTunes since we figured it would be the easiest to use (and we already use it ourselves). She has successfully learned to rip her CDs -- all she does is pop it into the drive, and click "OK" to import it. She's decided she's like an iPod for her walks, and, as she put it, "as soon as you start hiding from these things, you're basically dead".
She doesn't give a rats bum about how people will see her with this ... and quite frankly, neither do 99% of all the people I know with Apple devices. It really is function, not fashion.
My mother in law isn't going to want to buy some generic MP3 player, learn to manage the files on it, understand what MP3s actually are, or worry about the open-ness of the format. She wants to click the buttons, and have the device work -- which, quite frankly, is why I like my iPods/iPad/Apple TV ... because they do what I want them to, integrate well with each other, and generally provide a nice user experience.
So, maybe Apple's biggest strength is that they can make technology which is accessible to people? Sure, the geeks here on Slashdot will bitch and moan about the walled garden (and apparently bent straws) ... but in terms of an integrated, functional user experience, there's a lot to be said for it.
Maybe in high school or Hollywood these things are fashion accessories ... but the reality is that Apple has made their money by selling technology to people who don't want to know much about technology.
The people who insist on ogg vorbis or who want to port the Linux kernel to their device? Well, they're a different market ... and one I would argue is smaller than the niche Apple is pursuing.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Unless Apple is willing to only sell high school textbooks that state Jebus rode dinosaurs to church (yes: Church, not temple), they won't be selling iBooks nor iPads there nor to most of the Southeast US 'public' schools.
What you fail to understand is that the problem with Apple approach is not evident in their current wave of products. It is not there yet. We will face this problem (stagnation, high prices, etc) when and if most of the devices will be like these.
They are suing because they believe
a top nasdaq-company full of bright minds, brilliant college graduates, pioneers and frontiers, BELIEVE that shiny rectangular corners can belong to someone.
get real. its pr speak.
Read radical news here
> Ebooks kinda suk.
There's a place for both print books and electronic books. When reading something (especially fiction) for the first time, yeah, I love a physical book. But when I'm out later and don't have it on me, or when I want to search for a word or phrase, I SOOOO wish for an electronic copy.
> They're stuck there on your device
They're all with me at all times, no matter where I am...
> and they're all digitally-slimy
... and they have great digital features like being quickly searchable, copy-and-paste-able,* etc.
Yeah, it's possible I'll be at home when the power is out, or out somewhere with a dead battery, but neither of those things has happened to me more than 3 times in the last 5 years. However, I can't even count how many times I've been out and about without a particular book and wished I had it. If you insist on making it an either-or (which it doesn't need to be), I'd choose electronic.
* ideally :-)
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
" If you're using Apple products, that means that you're looking at the world through a very bent straw, and Apple is doing the bending. Is it in your favor? You decide."
I think Android is working much harder to get your eyeballs.
as much as I use both Apple and Google products, I'm more wary of what Google is going to do with my info.
Portable game consoles are headed for oblivion thanks to smartphones. The same may partially happen to other console uses thanks to the tablet format. Eventually your own TV will be the console and you will not need to buy a separate device at all...
That's true. The biggest mobile gaming platform is now iOS, which is still a walled-garden.
Apple also contributes back - they made so much improvements into KDE's browser that KDE just basically re-absorbed back in the entire webkit, among other things.
Webkit is not KHTML. They are still seperate, and Konqueror doesn't use it as the default backend. Reconq, however, does.
MP3s have been un-DRM"ed for quite a few years now - Apple was the one pushing for it, but of course, OP conveniently forgets that.
Amazon was selling it DRM-free September 2008 while Apple was pushing it (until 6 Jan 2009). Before these, Walmart on Aug. 2007, and others never used it. Note that Walmart was selling PlaysForSure WMAs and switched to MP3s.