This is a solid point. Apple is hurting the development process by not doing more to encourage projects like PhoneGap. The open source dev process is excellent for eliminating many of the common bugs and even some of the really tricky bugs. I'm still at a loss for trying to understand why they don't do more to encourage them.
From the sound of it he's tried getting the app passed numerous times despite knowing that what he's doing is not allowed.
Really? What am I doing that's not allowed? I pop up a UIWebView and stick in some HTML. That's it. Yet I got some rejection letters telling me that I was either accessing a private API (I wasn't) or somehow interpreting code. (I wasn't.) The UIWebView was doing that and it is perfectly okay for Apple's frameworks to interpret things.
Here's what the rejection note said:
No interpreted code may be downloaded or used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple's Documented APIs and built-in interpreter(s)."
Well, everything I do is pumped into the UIWebView which is well documented.
Furthermore, how can Apple really make any deep decisions like this? I don't upload code. They don't compile it. They look at raw binary code.
Yes, I think this getting at the deep point I was trying to make. Any one company-- even Apple-- can satisfy all of the demands of all of the customers. Many want only quality apps. Some want violence with faux school shootings. (http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/20/apple-approves-iphone-app-that-promotes-school-shootings/) Some don't.
Apple can't make one group happy without angering the other. It's caught in an impossible bind.
Personally I'm peeved that they approved this school shooting simulator before approving my GOLD app. But what can I say?
Are you for real? Do you have any idea of what it was like to develop mobile apps before Cocoa Touch was available?
-jcr
That's not the point. It didn't take me long to write the software. It took me weeks to get rejections and the rejection reasons were nonsensical. One dinged me for using open source software because it was a "framework".
If you read deeper, you'll find the answers to some of your questions. First, the AppStore has proven to be worthless for driving any interest in my books. You can't even find the book by typing the name of the book into the search field. It doesn't help to add quotes around the name. You get other apps with odd names. Don't ask me what's going on.
Second, this isn't about free advertising. I paid Apple to be included in their dev program. You can't even submit free apps without paying.
There's been a healthy debate about the best ways to distribute books for the platform. I like many of the readers. They offer more features than I was able to hack together. But the readers add another layer between the author and the user. They deserve to be compensated. I'll probably experiment with them in the future too. But this was all about experimenting with the AppStore.
Finally, I did build an HTML version and it works reasonable well. You can find it here:
But it has limitations too. The marked up version of the book is more than a megabyte. Anyone can read it on their iPhone by hitting this URL. But the caching isn't great and they may need to reload it. The performance is much better as a direct App.
In any case, I still think that iPhone users and iPhone developers should be able to find each other without waiting for Apple's clearly overburdened team to approve the interaction. That makes a good platform.
It's one thing to take your chances and ignore failures when you're storing a gig or two. But once you've got 1024 or 512 disk drives spinning away, one of them is going to fail and you don't know which one it will be.
So maybe to store a petabyte, you've really got to store two copies of a petabyte. That doubles the weight.
These aren't bad ideas. I've done that with _Free for All_ and I still give away thousands of copies from my web site alone.
Still, that doesn't answer the question of how someone else is going to fund the chance to do something more. Let's imagine that someone else takes my work and puts two months into updating it. Can they sell it and you'll support their efforts? Or will they be treated to the same harsh reality? Will they be able to swim against the tide of piracy?
I'm not going to disagree with you. I was just saying that I don't have the energy to deal with the used book market and so I was going to repeat what others have said. When the used market expanded online, the used book sellers defended their actions and suggested that it would make it easier for people to spend on new books knowing that they would be worth something in the after market.
But I think that your observations are good. If the books wear well, then they can be passed around quite a few times. If the old model depended upon printing n copies to spread the development costs around n people. Now imagine that each used copy will last through 10 readers. That means that only n/10 new copies will be sold and the price will need to be roughly 10 times greater to cover the same amount of costs.
Suddenly the new price appears outrageous. A book that once sold for $10 would need to be sold new for $100. If the user was able to sell it used for $90, the price would still be $10. Then it could be resold for $80, $70 etc.
I don't think this model will work.
And the biggest problem with the used model is that it doesn't map over to the digital world very well. It may be reasonable and functional with printed material, but it fails in the digital world. Oh well. I don't have time to tackle everything.
In the United States, this is known as the public broadcasting business model. It seems to work well for them but you wouldn't know it from the tone of their pleadings whenever they run a pledge drive.
I would like to think of this as distinct from the plundering ethic that seems to motivate many pirates. If anything, it's a cute way for the content creators to unpirate the pirate distribution network.
But she doesn't seem to explain just how much money she takes in. I wish I could be wildly optimistic about it, but I just don't know if there's enough good will out there.
Oh, I'm sure that this may work for a short window of time when it's new and hypeworthy, but don't think it's a sustainable model for most of the authors. It's only been said to work for fiction and even then I'm not sure it's really worked. There's no way to do any
Nor do I think it's something that really helps the audience. See my suggestions toward the bottom of this about the difference between free and paid information:
he is still expecting to get money for something that is already rendered obsolete
Actually, I'm not. I just wish that anyone who still showed an interest in my book would be shown directly to a place where they could actually pay for it. And I wish that they wouldn't be tempted with all of the Torrent sites.
I know the book is ten years old. I'm not surprised that someone may have written a better book. I would just like the book to be treated fairly.
In the end, my needs are inconsequential. The problem is that the better authors who write the newer books are going to be affected even more by piracy. And then they're going to do something else. So you can blame my book all you want, but we're all going to be hurt when the better books disappear.
People who are pirating your book are not reading your book. People who are reading your book are not pirating it. Any engineer who seriously wants to learn about whatever's in your "Data Compression Textbook" is going to buy it and expense it to their company. They are absolutely not going to get on TPB and grab the torrent. I don't really get what you're worrying about here.
Really? I wish I could be more optimistic, but I've met too many very nice people with very good jobs who fill their iPods with music they never bought.
Remember this was a weird game of numbers and it was only half-fair in the past. The creation of the books was funded by everyone who purchased them, not just the person who really, seriously needed it enough and had an expense account to pay for it. This spread the cost out over a number of people. It let us keep the price lower. It meant that some people who only needed a few pages were paying too much, but the people who needed everything were getting a good deal.
That model doesn't seem to work anymore. All we can do is bill the people who really, truly need the text. Everyone else who just kind of, sort of needs a section or two gets to pirate it for free.
I think we're arguing cross purposes. Of course the book is not the right book for everyone. Of course it's old. Of course it's not going to solve any of the problems confronting people writing video codecs today.
In any case, the problems I illustrated with the torrent sites aren't caused by the limitations of my book. Nope. They're going to affect the best books too and I'm sure that piracy is going to reduce their sales even more and that's going to remove the incentives to create the better books even more.
This has nothing to do with me and being snooty about my book doesn't change the fact that the Torrent sites are doing an even brisker business in newer, cooler, fatter books. This is a societal problem about how we come together to support the synthesis of knowledge. One very useful model that's served us reasonably well up to now is breaking. It will be gone soon.
Again, I'm just a poor player. The real question is whether anyone is going to fund UNIX Internals in the future or will the engineers at Apple be forced to glue it all together from thousands of little posts on mailing lists.
But if people truly thought your book was a quality product, they would buy it or donate to you to compensate after obtaining it for free online. There ARE honest people out there.
Is this a mild version of telling a rape victim that don't worry, there are a few decent people out there?
Again, I'm ready to argue about piracy but I'm not willing to take on the question of libraries. You're right there are similarities but the effects of libraries are limited by the nature of physical goods. There are only so many copies out there. That's not the case with Pirate Bay or the others. It's a difference between being nudged by a car and being run over by a semi.
I was willing to attack the piracy problem but I'm not ready to deal with the used book question. For now I'm willing to accept the notion that a fertile used book business supports the new book business because it makes it easier for people to get some of their money back when they're done with the book.
It is just that any question related to coding/algorithms/standards/methodology/etc.. has been pretty much asked and answered online.
Yup, you're right for many topics that used to be well served by the book publishers. But I still think that there are some that need more explanation.
But I've certainly seen less demand for the kind of books I once wrote about Java programming.
Trust me. I won't make any more money from my book about data compression. It's ten years old. But I do have a stake in this society. As a reader and a movie goer, I like the old model. I like when content creators risk their own time and effort and let me decide at the last minute whether it's worth purchasing. I like that freedom. I don't want the government to tax me and then give out grants. I don't want to wait for some communal textbook to emerge. I like the free market and I like people competing for my business. Piracy destroys that.
Blaming a torrent for your loss of income, in the worst economy since the Depression, doesn't seem reasonable.
Sigh. Double Sigh. Yup. That's it. It's my fault. I get it now. Somehow if I can't dig up reams and reams of data for you in which you can poke more holes, then those sainted people who swap huge ISOs filled with "Great Science Textbooks" must be okay.
Right and that guy selling something that just fell off the truck might be telling the truth. And that girl in a tight dress who was raped was just asking for it.
If you repeat "maybe your book sucks" enough times, then you can feel okay about your hard disk filled with boosted MP3s.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't forget the "mirror" applications that do even less. Yet they've got a high click through rate.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/17/top-iphone-app-developer-was-losing-out-on-2000-a-day-because-of-sloppy-coding/
This is a solid point. Apple is hurting the development process by not doing more to encourage projects like PhoneGap. The open source dev process is excellent for eliminating many of the common bugs and even some of the really tricky bugs. I'm still at a loss for trying to understand why they don't do more to encourage them.
Sure it's to drive interest in the book and maybe even raise some money for charity.
And yes, the Blackberry is on the list. But after all of this grief, I've been aiming more to build webapps that work with webkit.
The URL I've posted should work with some of the newer Blackberry handhelds. I just don't own one so I haven't tried it.
And it should also work with Android and also the Palm Pre if they did a good job with their webkit.
From the sound of it he's tried getting the app passed numerous times despite knowing that what he's doing is not allowed.
Really? What am I doing that's not allowed? I pop up a UIWebView and stick in some HTML. That's it. Yet I got some rejection letters telling me that I was either accessing a private API (I wasn't) or somehow interpreting code. (I wasn't.) The UIWebView was doing that and it is perfectly okay for Apple's frameworks to interpret things.
Here's what the rejection note said:
No interpreted code may be downloaded or used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple's Documented APIs and built-in interpreter(s)."
Well, everything I do is pumped into the UIWebView which is well documented.
Furthermore, how can Apple really make any deep decisions like this? I don't upload code. They don't compile it. They look at raw binary code.
Yes, I think this getting at the deep point I was trying to make. Any one company-- even Apple-- can satisfy all of the demands of all of the customers. Many want only quality apps. Some want violence with faux school shootings. (http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/20/apple-approves-iphone-app-that-promotes-school-shootings/) Some don't.
Apple can't make one group happy without angering the other. It's caught in an impossible bind.
Personally I'm peeved that they approved this school shooting simulator before approving my GOLD app. But what can I say?
Look around. Palm and Symbian applications can be downloaded from many websites. Here's a website with more than 500 open source Palm apps:
http://www.palmopensource.com/
Microsoft works with a number of stores like Handango.
If the sandbox is good enough-- and it's not that hard to build a good one-- then any software should be downloadable.
Are you for real? Do you have any idea of what it was like to develop mobile apps before Cocoa Touch was available?
-jcr
That's not the point. It didn't take me long to write the software. It took me weeks to get rejections and the rejection reasons were nonsensical. One dinged me for using open source software because it was a "framework".
Actually they did publish it. Then they took 2+ weeks to publish the dozen or so new lines of code that fixed bugs.
At the same time they rejected a very similar version. The only difference was some extra HTML. The Cocoa code was equivalent.
So it was fairly random.
If you read deeper, you'll find the answers to some of your questions. First, the AppStore has proven to be worthless for driving any interest in my books. You can't even find the book by typing the name of the book into the search field. It doesn't help to add quotes around the name. You get other apps with odd names. Don't ask me what's going on.
Second, this isn't about free advertising. I paid Apple to be included in their dev program. You can't even submit free apps without paying.
There's been a healthy debate about the best ways to distribute books for the platform. I like many of the readers. They offer more features than I was able to hack together. But the readers add another layer between the author and the user. They deserve to be compensated. I'll probably experiment with them in the future too. But this was all about experimenting with the AppStore.
Finally, I did build an HTML version and it works reasonable well. You can find it here:
http://www.wayner.org/books/ffa/webkit/
But it has limitations too. The marked up version of the book is more than a megabyte. Anyone can read it on their iPhone by hitting this URL. But the caching isn't great and they may need to reload it. The performance is much better as a direct App.
In any case, I still think that iPhone users and iPhone developers should be able to find each other without waiting for Apple's clearly overburdened team to approve the interaction. That makes a good platform.
It's one thing to take your chances and ignore failures when you're storing a gig or two. But once you've got 1024 or 512 disk drives spinning away, one of them is going to fail and you don't know which one it will be.
So maybe to store a petabyte, you've really got to store two copies of a petabyte. That doubles the weight.
These aren't bad ideas. I've done that with _Free for All_ and I still give away thousands of copies from my web site alone.
Still, that doesn't answer the question of how someone else is going to fund the chance to do something more. Let's imagine that someone else takes my work and puts two months into updating it. Can they sell it and you'll support their efforts? Or will they be treated to the same harsh reality? Will they be able to swim against the tide of piracy?
No. I just think my experience is going to be shared by all authors and everyone is going to need to adjust their expectations for the marketplace.
I'm not going to disagree with you. I was just saying that I don't have the energy to deal with the used book market and so I was going to repeat what others have said. When the used market expanded online, the used book sellers defended their actions and suggested that it would make it easier for people to spend on new books knowing that they would be worth something in the after market.
But I think that your observations are good. If the books wear well, then they can be passed around quite a few times. If the old model depended upon printing n copies to spread the development costs around n people. Now imagine that each used copy will last through 10 readers. That means that only n/10 new copies will be sold and the price will need to be roughly 10 times greater to cover the same amount of costs.
Suddenly the new price appears outrageous. A book that once sold for $10 would need to be sold new for $100. If the user was able to sell it used for $90, the price would still be $10. Then it could be resold for $80, $70 etc.
I don't think this model will work.
And the biggest problem with the used model is that it doesn't map over to the digital world very well. It may be reasonable and functional with printed material, but it fails in the digital world. Oh well. I don't have time to tackle everything.
In the United States, this is known as the public broadcasting business model. It seems to work well for them but you wouldn't know it from the tone of their pleadings whenever they run a pledge drive.
I would like to think of this as distinct from the plundering ethic that seems to motivate many pirates. If anything, it's a cute way for the content creators to unpirate the pirate distribution network.
But she doesn't seem to explain just how much money she takes in. I wish I could be wildly optimistic about it, but I just don't know if there's enough good will out there.
Oh, I'm sure that this may work for a short window of time when it's new and hypeworthy, but don't think it's a sustainable model for most of the authors. It's only been said to work for fiction and even then I'm not sure it's really worked. There's no way to do any
Nor do I think it's something that really helps the audience. See my suggestions toward the bottom of this about the difference between free and paid information:
http://www.wayner.org/talks/gtalk.html
Pirates: We're smarter than you think, matey.
Yup. I understand this. I'm just amazed how much effort people put into stealing things.
he is still expecting to get money for something that is already rendered obsolete
Actually, I'm not. I just wish that anyone who still showed an interest in my book would be shown directly to a place where they could actually pay for it. And I wish that they wouldn't be tempted with all of the Torrent sites.
I know the book is ten years old. I'm not surprised that someone may have written a better book. I would just like the book to be treated fairly.
In the end, my needs are inconsequential. The problem is that the better authors who write the newer books are going to be affected even more by piracy. And then they're going to do something else. So you can blame my book all you want, but we're all going to be hurt when the better books disappear.
People who are pirating your book are not reading your book. People who are reading your book are not pirating it. Any engineer who seriously wants to learn about whatever's in your "Data Compression Textbook" is going to buy it and expense it to their company. They are absolutely not going to get on TPB and grab the torrent. I don't really get what you're worrying about here.
Really? I wish I could be more optimistic, but I've met too many very nice people with very good jobs who fill their iPods with music they never bought.
Remember this was a weird game of numbers and it was only half-fair in the past. The creation of the books was funded by everyone who purchased them, not just the person who really, seriously needed it enough and had an expense account to pay for it. This spread the cost out over a number of people. It let us keep the price lower. It meant that some people who only needed a few pages were paying too much, but the people who needed everything were getting a good deal.
That model doesn't seem to work anymore. All we can do is bill the people who really, truly need the text. Everyone else who just kind of, sort of needs a section or two gets to pirate it for free.
Sigh. I wish I were as optimistic as you.
I think we're arguing cross purposes. Of course the book is not the right book for everyone. Of course it's old. Of course it's not going to solve any of the problems confronting people writing video codecs today.
But, it is still used as a textbook in some places. Why? Perhaps it's just habit.
In any case, the problems I illustrated with the torrent sites aren't caused by the limitations of my book. Nope. They're going to affect the best books too and I'm sure that piracy is going to reduce their sales even more and that's going to remove the incentives to create the better books even more.
This has nothing to do with me and being snooty about my book doesn't change the fact that the Torrent sites are doing an even brisker business in newer, cooler, fatter books. This is a societal problem about how we come together to support the synthesis of knowledge. One very useful model that's served us reasonably well up to now is breaking. It will be gone soon.
Again, I'm just a poor player. The real question is whether anyone is going to fund UNIX Internals in the future or will the engineers at Apple be forced to glue it all together from thousands of little posts on mailing lists.
But if people truly thought your book was a quality product, they would buy it or donate to you to compensate after obtaining it for free online. There ARE honest people out there.
Is this a mild version of telling a rape victim that don't worry, there are a few decent people out there?
Again, I'm ready to argue about piracy but I'm not willing to take on the question of libraries. You're right there are similarities but the effects of libraries are limited by the nature of physical goods. There are only so many copies out there. That's not the case with Pirate Bay or the others. It's a difference between being nudged by a car and being run over by a semi.
I was willing to attack the piracy problem but I'm not ready to deal with the used book question. For now I'm willing to accept the notion that a fertile used book business supports the new book business because it makes it easier for people to get some of their money back when they're done with the book.
It is just that any question related to coding/algorithms/standards/methodology/etc.. has been pretty much asked and answered online.
Yup, you're right for many topics that used to be well served by the book publishers. But I still think that there are some that need more explanation.
But I've certainly seen less demand for the kind of books I once wrote about Java programming.
Trust me. I won't make any more money from my book about data compression. It's ten years old. But I do have a stake in this society. As a reader and a movie goer, I like the old model. I like when content creators risk their own time and effort and let me decide at the last minute whether it's worth purchasing. I like that freedom. I don't want the government to tax me and then give out grants. I don't want to wait for some communal textbook to emerge. I like the free market and I like people competing for my business. Piracy destroys that.
Blaming a torrent for your loss of income, in the worst economy since the Depression, doesn't seem reasonable.
Sigh. Double Sigh. Yup. That's it. It's my fault. I get it now. Somehow if I can't dig up reams and reams of data for you in which you can poke more holes, then those sainted people who swap huge ISOs filled with "Great Science Textbooks" must be okay.
Right and that guy selling something that just fell off the truck might be telling the truth. And that girl in a tight dress who was raped was just asking for it.
If you repeat "maybe your book sucks" enough times, then you can feel okay about your hard disk filled with boosted MP3s.