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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
... 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
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."
They will still get deals where required books are overpriced and rereleased.
And DRMed so they self-destruct at the end of the semester.
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
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.
One problem with "self-published homemade works" is that there are few areas where these are yet of any quality.
The internet gives everyone a voice, true. This carries many benefits, but it also weeds out the structure that before prevented kooks and cranks from influencing as many as they do today.
The mechanisms by which this was accomplished are not in and of themselves wholly good, but there was good in the fact that most people with influential voices in media, in medicine, etc. were educated and trained. Today bloggers feel they are journalists and rumors/gossip too often pass for news. Fact checking, not just in media but in people's psyches as a whole, is quickly becoming extinct.
You can look at the growth in general public belief in any number of dubious conspiracy theories, in the emoting against vaccines, and armies of the dumb outraged about breastfeeding and any number of other topics which in the past were inane and not considered social advocacy issues. The internet has amplified many times over the voice of the dumb, while the voice of those qualified to speak on a topic is also amplified, it's often being drowned out.
Self-publishing of educational textbooks is not, in my opinion, going to affect this trend in the right direction.
It was said once that evil will always triumph because good is dumb. Well.. stupid triumphs because the internet age hasn't adapted for it, and smart isn't loud enough.
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!
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.
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.
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.
One problem with "self-published homemade works" is that there are few areas where these are yet of any quality.
Totally untrue. See my sig for a catalog of free books. Many of these are of very high quality. Here are a few examples:
Those are just the first few that came to mind.
Find free books.
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.
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.
No. Every time there's a textbook story on slashdot, someone posts this nonsense about "kickbacks." Every time I see it, I post a reply and ask for evidence. None is ever forthcoming.
I teach physics at a community college. I have been approached by many, many textbook reps. None has ever offered me a kickback.
Publishers do not need to offer kickbacks to get instructors to switch to the latest edition. The publisher simply stops selling the older edition, and the prof has no choice but to switch.
Find free books.
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.
People love to quote this $400... I've never seen an undergraduate textbook that costs more than $200.
Donaldson and Dunfee, Ethics in Business and Economics, is $680 on Amazon. (But it ships for FREE with Super Saver Shipping!) Gotta love the combination of price and title.
In any case, even $200 is totally unacceptable.
Now, that's still a lot, but the same book can often be had for very cheap used from a previous student or off Amazon.
The publishers have gotten very good at killing off the used book market. They bring out a new edition every couple of years, making just enough superficial changes to discourage people from using an old edition. For example, in a math textbook they'll rearrange all the homework problems so the numbers are different.
Find free books.
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.
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.)
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.
Amazingly enough, "Apple fans" tend not to claim those things. The'll usually claim that Apple made a particular niche popular - portable music players, all in one computers, tablet computers, online music stores etc. Rarely do they ever claim that Apple "invented" them - because they obviously didn't.
Apple haters, however, will claim that's what Apple fans believe and say, and then "righteously" yell at them for "being wrong".
It's getting old.
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
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
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".
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)
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.
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.
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.
Schools frown on complaints about transgressions that the GP made up.
Many real textbooks have information cross linking across the text, with appendices, bibliographies, footnotes, endnotes, sidebars, etc. We may have learned how to navigate them, but they're really very clunky, with much unneeded repetition and referencing.
A properly written e-text would be much nicer, as you could quickly drill down to the information you need, and have a record of what you have and haven't read. You can also set reading plans, check your progress by theme, keyword, chapter, or anything else you want. You can toss notes inline, or just link them to MULTIPLE bits of highlighted text. You can quickly make connections between bits of information provided that the original authors missed or weren't interested in.
You can do all of this with a hard copy too, but you'd need to make extensive use of a photocopier, and would have a mess to manage the next time you went to review the text.
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!
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!
I think that Khan Academy is a good indicator that digital education can work when implemented properly. Arithmetic, Algebra, and Calculus instruction shouldn't need to be updated every year. They come out with new editions with the same crap rearranged and reformatted slightly. Not to mention all that information is available for free on Wikipedia. Also, interactive exercises are exactly what those types of books are missing. Textbooks are a sham - they screw K-12 out of taxpayer money and they screw students out of money in higher education. They're just like the music industry - clinging onto a business model that was once necessary to get material out to the masses that is no longer needed given new forms of communication. Just because in the future textbooks won't be the standard educational item they are today (replaced by iPads) doesn't mean that you won't be able to find those types of resources in print. I'll give you a hint: try a library.
Teach a man to fish and he can fish - but if you videotape it and put it on YouTube, you can teach anyone in the world to fish.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
"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.
<crickets chirping> Well played, sir.
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?
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.
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
Is it that hard to find a decent textbook that's either in the public domain or sold cheap?
Thanks to the entertainment industry, any textbook that is PD will be close on a century old. Across a huge proportion of human knowledge there's been a lot discovered and worked out in that time; the PD textbooks are of historical interest, but you can't teach from them. (There are very few that are current and PD; it takes a lot of work to write a textbook and authors mostly like to be reasonably compensated.)
Sold off cheap is much more of a sane option, except that it is hard to ensure that a whole class gets the same edition of the same book at that point, which is what you need to keep the teacher from going crazy. (Can you imagine how awful it would be if everyone in a class of 30 was trying to learn from a different book, many of which will have silly errors in or which you'll have never read yourself?) The only way it can work is if the same book is used for a number of years in a row, allowing students from one year to sell it on to the next. Which is what happens now.
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
Tablets were "wildly popular" before Apple came along?
Smartphones *maybe* - since Blackberry certainly had a good following, but it was nowhere near the market penetration that came when iPhone and Android were selling the "classic" touchscreen phone.
The mp3 player was certainly not "wildly popular" with the general public. Not even close. There were certainly portable mp3 players, but they were a niche product - if the iPod killed anything it was MiniDisc (in all countries except the US), the discman and the walkman. At the time, the concept of music as files on your computer was the realm of the extremely tech-savvy computer geek. Apple just took it mainstream.
You were doing well right up until claiming that "image" is Apple's only real product - to do so is a gross underestimation and, given that many other manufacturers seem to think as you do, why they have such problems creating products that compete favourably with Apple ones. Android manufacturers cottoned on to this pretty quickly and as a result have made some very good phones after listening to what their customers want (note: you don't need to copy Apple for Apple's model to work - Apple's method is to make something that people want to buy, so as long as you do that, you'll sell).
If Apple was "all image" then they might manage a large number of sales to start with, then they would quickly fall off as word of the product spread. This is also known as the "box office turd" effect, where the opening weekend is huge but then drops off like a rock. Apple's product sales are much more like the box office hit - big opening weekend, strong sales long into the run. If the products were not delivering on expectations (and not necessarily those of the slashdot geek who wants to compile Linux on his phone every 3 days) then they would not continue to sell in ever increasing numbers - marketing will not do that for you in the presence of a terrible product.