Now that Apple Owns the Tablet Space .....

When the iPad was launched, there was a widespread view (and I shared it) that soon, and not more than a year or two later, there would be some highly competitive and lower-priced tablet alternatives for customers to choose from. The iPad had opened a new hardware category, but competitors would quickly crowd into this new opening... there would be lots of choice and most of it would not be for Apple hardware.

Whilst dissecting a review of one of the best Android competitor's to the iPad, Marco Ament notes:

Translation: Android tablets have managed to copy the iPad’s hardware well enough — the easy part — but have failed to provide good software and significant third-party app choice — the hard part. The Android Tablet Problem

For any 'head-to-head' competitor tablet to get into the market for a face off with the iPad there is the possibly insuperable problem that the new tablet lacks a coherent body of developers and of tablet-primed media. Apple has been building its iOS developer community and media resources for four years (arguably more). Apple has huge momentum and capability behind its iOS platform and this cannot be matched by any competitor. I don't think that a 'head to head' competitor to the iPad can emerge in the next five years. The competitive threat if it comes, will be from a completely new approach, an external threat not a mid-size device like the iPad. We should look to a paradigm shift as radical and disruptive as the iPhone/iPad surge that Apple has produced to disrupt the mobile phone and the laptop computer.

Harry McCracken reviews the state of iPad competition and concludes that it is very hard to see why anybody in the market for a tablet would buy something other than an iPad 2.

And yet no Apple competitor has started selling anything that clearly answers a fundamental question: “Why should somebody buy this instead of an iPad?” Sure, it’s easy to point at specific things that other devices do better (or at least differently) than the iPad, and some of the people reading this article can explain why they chose another tablet and don’t regret the move. (If you’re one of them, please do!) Still, sales figures for tablets show that when consumers compare the iPad to other choices, an overwhelming percentage conclude that the iPad is the best option. ....Instead of an iPad (Technologizer)

If the 'competitors' to the iPad cannot emerge now, a year after the first iPad was launched, why should it be feasible that the direct competition will be stronger in a year or two's time? The iPad eco-system is getting richer and stronger at an amazing rate and that is the problem any direct tablet competitor faces. The fundamental point about the iPad and the iOS range of devices is that Apple is not really selling a hardware solution; Apple is offering a software and services solution, and it is the whole package that customers are buying into. This is something which no competitor to Apple is plausibly positioned to challenge. Not Microsoft (they don't really do manufacturing), not Google (they don't truly understand selling), not Amazon (who are best placed to have a shot at it, but do not have deep consumer-device engineering DNA).

We will come back to Amazon in a minute. But first let us consider what are the consequences of Apple owning the tablet category for the next three, four years -- by which I mean that Apple has a good chance of being the supplier of most of the tablets bought for the plan-able future.

1. Apple will sell a lot of iPads and will certainly offer a modicum more choice (high-end, low-end, high-res, medium res). Moore's law says that Apple should be able to produce a sub $200 iPad for Christmas 2012. Apple will do that.
   
2. The degree of device choice will be constrained by the requirement that as many apps as possible should run across all iOS devices. So no new aspect ratio, but quad pixel density. The coherence and interoperability of the range of iOS devices is already another source of lock-in. That gets stronger as the differentiation within the range is gently increased.
   
3. The lead that Apple has in the deployment of apps for tablets will grow. Enormously, and become even more of an obstacle to 'internal' disruption from iPad-like competitors.
   
4. Android, or maybe Windows, phones may well provide very strong competition at the 'low end', at the small format end of the market. There will be plenty of apps for non-Apple phones. These non-Apple phones will also be well-placed to produce competitive applications which are not tablet-sized and which do not necessarily require the full range of touch interface.
   
5. Apple's competitors will increasingly throw their weight behind web standards and 'open' technologies.
   

Amazon already has the Kindle platform and has sufficient strength in books, music, film and periodicals to mount a competitive challenge to Apple with its likely Android tablet -- they need to launch it soon or Apple will own the holiday season device market in 2011. Amazon may be able to launch a somewhat credible Kindroid alternative to the iPad, but I think Apple has played a very clever move here in the last couple of weeks. It relaxed its e-commerce terms so that the soft Kindle can stay on the iPad/iTunes platform. This might have looked like a concession to Amazon (and to the millions of iPad owners who run the Kindle app on their iPad) but it was in fact an astute and decisive blow to the hardware side of Amazon's business. Not having your Kindle library on the iPad would have been a decisive reason for many Amazon customers to switch to the Android tablet that will soon be launched by Jeff Bezos. Now there is no compelling reason to buy the Kindroid, no reason not to buy the iPad which will hold your library. Apple will not be getting 30% from the sale of Amazon ebooks, but those books can be used on iOS and Apple's selection of music, film and apps is so much better than Amazon will be able to offer on the Kindroid. Apple will not be letting Amazon deploy film or music apps within iTunes either. So who has the upper hand in that trade? Apple never actually applied the e-commerce rules that it has just relaxed (they were meant to come in force at the end of this month). Perhaps they were told by lawyers that the proposals would attract monopolies sanctions, but rescinding/withdrawing them now was a stroke of genius and a sign of confidence. When push comes to shove, Apple owns the tablet space and there is not a lot that Amazon or anybody else can do about that.

Apple's Terms of Trade Finally Win Acceptance with Magazines

Suddenly the dam seems to have broken and the major consumer magazine publishers are lining up for iPad editions sold on subscription through iTunes.

In the last ten days, Time Inc, Hearst and Conde Nast have all announced moves towards selling their leading consumer magazines as subscriptions on the iPad. They are also offering free iPad access to their existing print subscribers, a simple and very necessary step as we have been emphasizing for months.

In disclosing these new offerings the major consumer magazine companies have been stressing that Apple has been willing to make concessions and to grant flexibility (see reports of such by Peter Kafka at AllThingsDigital). I expect some modest concessions have been granted, but on matters of detail and to help with 'bedding in'. Apple has not had to modify its developer contract or bend on its commission terms. Apple has the whip hand and, more to the point, Apple will not make concessions on issues that put obstacles in the way of the successful operation of the iTunes service. Apple will not make concessions which force it to re-write its end-user license agreements. Apple will not make deals with magazine companies on its 30% commission when it has been completely impervious to the pleadings of the music publishers on royalty rates. The bald and uncomfortable truth for these giants of consumer publishing is that Apple is not going to do deals. Apple is not going to cramp the economy of iTunes for the sake of the magazine business. So what follows?

1. Magazines will sign up to the iPad service in a growing avalanche. Now that the big 3 of the US consumer magazine business have moved over to the Apple way of doing business, we expect that most major magazine companies will move over to producing iPad apps for their key magazines.
2. Within 12 months iTunes will contain many more iPad magazine titles than has ever been collected in one physical kiosk or emporium. Finding titles in such a rich product mix will become more of a problem. But magazines are better placed than most categories to thrive since magazine titles are (usually) so clearly branded and so distinctive.
   
3. The magazines in iTunes will be offered primarily on a subscription basis. Hitherto iPad apps were being offered on a single issue basis.
   
4. The major consumer magazines in all the major national markets will soon be offering iPad apps through iTunes and they will also be offering free digital access to their existing print subscribers. Magazines will do this because in that way they retain more control over their subscriber base and can avoid having all their subscription services handled by Apple. They retain, indeed enhance, the crucial relationship that they have with paying customers.
5. The prices for digital magazines within iTunes will be pitched at increasingly aggressive levels, Bloomberg Business Week costs $36 per annum. The Esquire iPad app will apparently cost $19.99 pa. Apple's pricing rules mean that international pricing will level-down to the best home market subscription offers (US subscription prices for consumer magazines are low in comparison to European prices).
6. These recent announcements have all been focussed on the iPad. Conde Nast and Time Inc are committed to producing iPad apps, it is not clear whether the iPhone market is being by-passed or merely temporarily left behind.
   
7. Android apps also appear to be taking a back seat. It will be interesting to see whether this week's Google I/O, now in its second day, has any mention of digital magazines. Not much sign of them in the opening sessions.
   
8. The apps that are being produced for the iPad bear a remarkable similarity to the print product. The idea that a magazine app needs to be something radically different from the page-oriented, highly designed and issue-based package that we all know, is losing ground. Most magazine publishers cannot afford to run two parallel design, production and editorial processes.
   

There is no question that the iPad is a very good device for reading digital versions of print magazines. The magazine publishers have, of course, realised this from the outset. They are now beginning to realise that Apple's terms for trade are not so bad. When Amazon brings out its Android tablet I suspect that these same magazine publishers may find that the Amazon terms of trade for digital magazines are just as unyielding, and perhaps in some ways worse than those that Apple have set before them. My first take on the Amazon app developer rules certainly caused me to blench.

Amazon, Apple and Google

John Naughton has a terrific column Amazon's new Cloud Drive Rains on everyone's parade in yesterday's Observer:

"Impetuosity and audacity," wrote Machiavelli, "often achieve what ordinary means fail to achieve." If you doubt that, may I propose a visit to the upper echelons of Apple, Google and Sony, where steam might be observed venting from every orifice of senior executives? If you do undertake such a visit, do not under any circumstances mention the word "Amazon".

.......

Behind the scenes in the US, though, there has been frenetic activity, with Apple, Google and Amazon racing to get into the streaming business. Apple has cloud services, customers who are used to paying for music, a good range of mobile devices but no licensing deal for streaming. Google has terrific cloud services and millions of Android devices but no music store customers and no licensing deal. Amazon has cloud services, a music store, paying customers, a terrific e-commerce operation, and access to Android devices. But it also had no licensing deal with the record labels. John Naughton Observer, 3 April, 2011

This last sentence is not exactly right. Both Amazon and Apple already have digital distribution deals with the record labels; its just that Amazon's existing digital distribution deal is in crucial respects rather better and more permissive than the Apple deal. Ironically, and again crucially, Google does not have an agreed license, though it has been negotiating hard for months and the Amazon chutzpah may well make it harder for Google to get the deal it badly needs. Amazon has been selling digital music since 2007, so it does have a licensing deal with the labels and the Amazon deal is actually rather more favourable to streaming than the digital distribution deal that Apple was granted some years earlier. The crucial point about the music distribution deal that Amazon has, is that it allows Amazon to sell and deliver 'unencrypted' MP3 files to consumers -- and Amazon's new Cloud Drive is just allowing consumers to store their files in the cloud, rather than on a hard disk. Amazon already has a license to distribute (most) music to consumers through the web in a form in which music can easily and simply be stored in an individual consumers 'music locker'. Amazon's license with the record labels, is not ideal, but it is workable for streaming music and gives Amazon good leverage. It is not ideal because, Amazon's rights are currently restricted to the US (or in practice restricted to the US where individual content shifting is explicitly approved by the courts), and because without more leeway from the licensors Amazon may have to maintain individual Cloud Drives for each consumer (it would be more efficient to have individual libraries where common tracks were represented by 'tokens' rather than full copies). Apple, on the other hand, has distribution deals with the music labels which are explicitly tied to Apple's commitment to encrypting music in the way that is proprietary to Apple, and which limits music to devices recognised by the Apple DRM. Apple, we should assume is still significantly hobbled by these agreements. Having to encrypt all 'streaming' music in the DRM specific to iTunes is the major factor delaying Apple from introducing the 'cloud based' iTunes that it knows that it ought to be offering. A music streaming service needs the freedom for music to be delivered to a device as many times as it may need to be played, but Apple being lumbered with 'Fairplay', its download-tracking, DRM for iTunes clearly needs some permission, some wiggle room, from the music companies for this to happen. Amazon came along much later with its request for a music distribution deal, and the music companies were so desperate to have some competition for Apple that they agreed to Amazon's terms which give them more scope for internet-based distribution.

One irony of this situation is that the roles are reversed when it comes to books. For books, the Amazon distribution rights are more clearly dependent on their commitment to DRM and to a proprietary format. Amazon was the innovator in the ebooks space and Apple was playing catch up, so the publishers were less insistent in their negotiations with Apple on the requirements for DRM. The Apple iBooks standards are less proprietary, more open to industry standards than the Kindle. Apple seems to be cast (perhaps unwillingly) in the role of bad cop for music, whereas Amazon is looking like good cop in the music sphere and 'bad cop' for books. Google would love to be playing the role of good cop in both markets, but it is not clear that it has the necessary leverage. It needs to come up with a proposition for the record labels, that is good for consumers and wrong-foots both Apple and Amazon. That may not be easy.

Amazon tackles Apple

"Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) today announced the launch of Amazon Cloud Drive Amazon Cloud Player for Web and Amazon Cloud Player for Android. Together, these services enable customers to securely store music in the cloudand play it on any Android phone, Android tablet, Mac or PC, wherever they are. Customers can easily upload their music library to Amazon Cloud Drive and can save any new Amazon MP3 purchases directly to their Amazon Cloud Drive for free." from Amazon Press Release 29 March, 2011

This is going to be a protracted and complex tussle and Google will join in. Doesn't look as though there is going to be an iPhone app, but the Amazon Cloud Player for Web will presumably work fine through any web page...... Safari has a role.

Are we laying odds on the outcome? I think of the web as the mat on which these wrestlers are having their match. Chances are that the web wins in the end. The audience are the audience.

World Military Wrestling Championship (via Wikimedia commons)

P.S. The man in blue may look like he is going to lose. But that was not the outcome.

Google goes into Culture Commerce

The rumour mill has it that Google will launch a Chrome netbook, cloud-based, computer before Christmas or early in the New Year. When you put this rumour alongside the others coming from the Googleplex you get an interesting picture

1. Is Google going to buy a big package of movie rights? Is that why it has hired the former Netflix executive George Kynci?
2. Google is possibly quite close to signing a deal with the major music labels for its cloud-based music-streaming service.
3. For a couple of years, Google has been apparently on the brink of releasing a digital books service in collaboration with book publishers. Most recently Dan Clancy told us that Google Editions will be launching very soon ("très bientôt")

The rumours about the Chrome netbook suggest that its really all about the web, cloud-based productivity and web browsing, but if its launch is accompanied by, or closely followed by, a Google distribution and e-commerce solution for books, films and music, the market place for publishers and entertainment companies may change very fast. Google will be a formidable competitor if it becomes an information publisher and an e-commerce platform for film, music and books. Competitor primarily for Apple and Amazon, Google may well be seen as more of a 'friend', because more collaborative and more open than either Amazon or Apple, by the big incumbent publishers and media groups. Knowing, as we do, the way Google works (quiet launches, 'beta' services, and something of a scatter gun approach) I think its unlikely that Google will launch a fully fledged, cloud-based, Chrome-machine, with a multi-channel, multi-media dashboard in place in the first quarter of next year. It is surely more likely that this hardware platform and this constellation of media services will each emerge in their own good time. But if the plans come off and Google has these publishing partnerships in good order, it is highly likely that Google will be selling a lot of consumer products next Christmas. And I do not meant via Groupon; a commercial solution that can stream all kinds of media stuff from your locker in the cloud to Android and Chrome platforms, will be a dazzling consumer attraction

Nominalism, Realism and Digital Books

There is a quasi-philosophical disagreement underlying the steady digitisation of literature. A radical disagreement about what digital books really are. In a strange manner this dispute parallels the controversy between nominalists and realists in medieval scholastic philosophy about the status of universals (properties, numbers, virtues etc). Texts in the twenty-first century take the place of properties in the fourteenth. Are books more than texts, are texts more than digital file formats? Are these abstract concepts: "red", "thirteen", "chastity" real entities or are they simply instances and constructs based on our experience of coloured objects, groups of cakes and the people we meet? The nominalists denied the reality of these abstractions and the realists retaliated. Blood was shed. Now we find the digerati divided over the question whether a book is really more than a text; since the ebook nominalists, finding meaning in sentences and texts and not much else, would be be happy with books digitised as texts (preferably in the ePub standard) and the realists say that a book is much more than its text and that the pagination matters, the layout matters, the entirety of the book matters, the references and the citations to the book matter, and of course the illustrations matter; therefore in pursuit of realism, digital systems should virtualise the whole book, not just its text. While Project Gutenberg is at one end of the spectrum (nominalists carefully proof-reading and hunkered down in ASCII or XML), Google with its Book Search digitisation project is at the realist edge -- some would say 'hyper-realist' in its acceptance of blank endpapers and leather bindings, all part of the 'real book' as represented in a Google database. Google probably would, if it could, encode the sensory aura of historic books, the vinegar that comes from cholera-touched books.

But the modern predicament over books as texts, or books as virtual objects, is complicated by a dimension of uncertainty over the appropriateness of treating books as a collective whole as parts of a library and a literature, or of digitizing them one at a time as individual atoms; perhaps, in some cases, with unique and unusual bibliographic or structural properties. Digital nominalists are governed by a standard of simplicity and hold that a text is a text, is a text. But some nominalists are atomic, whilst others favour a more holistic and uniform approach, in the interests of creating a library or a reading platform, in which all books can be searched and individual books isolated as readable downloads. Correspondingly, on the 'realist' side sits Google with its holistic and scalable method, Google's whole strategy for digitizing books has been based on an assumption that all books should be accessed, searched and distributed through a single canonical library. Amazon, which has in most respects taken a 'nominalist' approach to the distribution of eBooks, it doesn't do ePub but its proprietary format 'AZW' is just another ASCII encoding standard, has also embraced a 'holistic' attitude. Amazon offers its customers global searching of the Amazon archive and encourages users to build up a collection, a mini-library of eBooks on their Kindle. Amazon, just as much as Google, would like to have a scalable and totalitarian solution to the whole of published literature. All Kindle titles are atoms in the same collective, distinguished by the fact that they can be sampled or acquired from Amazon, one book at a time as the consumer dictates and purchases.

Perhaps a diagram will aid the explanation of this digital predicament for computerized books:
















What approach to digital books heads to the top left quadrant of this matrix? Why, apps of course. If we think of books as apps, they do have a reality and concreteness which exceeds the flatness of the mere ASCII text, but the book as app is also highly individual. Perhaps a paradigm of this approach is the Atomic Antelope Alice App which has caused such a stir. The inventors of the Alice book found an intriguing way of applying 'physics', acceleration and gravity, to the Teniel illustrations in the Alice book. This is obviously a very special and un-generalisable treatment of a classic work, but as an app it is a brilliant proposition. Apps can afford to be sui generis since they stand on their own, and if this gives cataloguers and librarians a headache, too bad. The Exact Editions book and magazine apps are also in this segment of the diagram. It is, I would suggest, the potential inventiveness and the unpredictable future of the book as an application that has the most intriguing potential for the future of digital books (and libraries). If digital books do something completely novel and free-standing, something unprecedented in the world of print books, it will be because they are also software applications and can in that way assume a digital reality which exceeds our expectations of the traditional text.

Stone, scissors, paper: and the Digital Book Race

It sometimes seems that Google, Apple and Amazon are engaged in a three-way fight over the digital books space. They each have a very important area of strength: Google dominates search (and search-based advertising), Apple leads and designs the very best consumer devices, Amazon has amazing strength in consumer transactions (logistics). And the three fighters are subtly trying to manoeuvre the struggle into the terrain where their particular strengths dominate. So Google is building a massive library that will interact and benefit from Google's supremacy in search, and a lot of stuff should be free and any hardware device can access its service. Amazon is trying to build individual consumer accounts fed by their logistic strength and transactional breadth, obviously not limited to books, physical and digital, and Amazon care more about managing transactions in the consumer's account than they do about owning the device. Amazon only cares about consumers, so -- unlike Google -- they do not offer anything much to libraries. So Kindle books are readable on the iPad. Apple is trying to establish a superior hardware platform in which their range of interoperating devices cannot be matched: desktop, phone and tablet format working together. If Apple owns the superior hardware platform they will control vital pinch-points through their app store (so far limited to Apple hardware for apps and books). They are all fighting on several fronts at once. So Apple, is erecting a system of apps and phone-based demographics which will be immune to Google search. Google will be blocked in Apple's mobile domain, and Apple has built an e-commerce system that certainly rivals Amazon's, though it does not have anything like the breadth of the Amazon offering (yet). Amazon attempted to get into Apple's patch with a hardware device, the Kindle, which now appears to be completely outclassed by the iPad. Google does not want to be boxed-out by the Apple iOS, so it has launched its Android system which it hopes will attract the collective ingenuity of all the consumer electronics companies who are concerned that Apple might eat their lunch. With retaliatory ingenuity Apple is building an advertising system iAds which may seriously limit the Google advertising dominance. So the battle is three way and in deadly earnest.

Is it a game of stone, scissors and paper? Perhaps one being played in several dimensions. If so, Apple is the 'paper', they were always going to be on top of the rather dull 'Kindle' from Amazon: stone-coloured if not yet quite sunk. But Apple appears to be threatened by Google's incredible scissor-like sharpness in search. Perhaps the analogy breaks down with Amazon contra Google. Is there a way a battleground on which Amazon is beating Google? Amazon does appear to have the beating of Google in one area: third party, cloud-based, web services -- Amazon S3 etc. Perhaps this is the area in which Amazon might ultimately have the beating of Google's over-centralised approach to building a universal library. Amazon needs to build a digital book service which is more collaborative and de-centralised and which attracts libraries, authors and publishers as effectively as they have attracted book buyers.

Is there something that could change the dynamics of this three-way tussle? Lots of things. One development that would certainly change matters would be if Facebook entered the fray. Suppose that Facebook, live up to its name and did a deal with Amazon? We might then see an Amazon that really could outsmart Google in the relationships game. Cloud-based book networks.

Do you think that the Google Book Search judgement will come tomorrow? One of these days....

What is Apple's Mission Statement?

We all know Google's mission statement: "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." (Google: Company Overview). Amazon has a vision statement that you may have encountered: "Our vision is to be earth's most customer centric company; to build a place where people can come to find and discover anything they might want to buy online." (Amazon: Corporate FAQ's). I bet you did not know that Apple has a 'sort of' mission statement on its investor relations pages:

"Apple ignited the personal computer revolution in the 1970s with the Apple II and reinvented the personal computer in the 1980s with the Macintosh. Today, Apple continues to lead the industry in innovation with its award-winning computers, OS X operating system and iLife and professional applications. Apple is also spearheading the digital media revolution with its iPod portable music and video players and iTunes online store, and has entered the mobile phone market with its revolutionary iPhone."

That doesn't get me too far. It sounds more like an overly-potted history than a mission statement, it is also somewhat out of date, since it doesn't even mention the latest revolutionary step: the iPad. I subscribe to the view that Apple has incredibly ambitious goals which it probably does not even articulate to itself. It is determined to invent and own the high end of consumer computing, which is going to be the only safe place for a computer manufacturer to be in five years time (see Charlie Stross on "The Real Reason why Steve Jobs hates Flash", or as John Gruber has it 'The iPad really is The Big One: Apple's reconception of personal computing' from "This is how Apple rolls").

So Apple's mission may be so audacious that it would be unwise to articulate it fully. But it may also have crafted its trajectory in such a way that it does not become too obviously monopolistic. Apple wants to revolutionize the world of personal computing (that is what Jobs and Wozniack did first time around in the 1970s) and yet the company does not obviously want to monopolize the market. Carving out the high-end, deluxe end, of the consumer market should be enough. Is that the way that publishing will work in the future? There will be a high-end platform for those who like to buy into Apple standards, and a more chaotic, Android, world of confused standards where stuff is cheaper, where there is more stuff and wilder stuff (including Flash and porn) but perhaps also less reliability and consistency?

Uniquely Attractive Invitations

So the question arises: how are publishers to make their offerings uniquely attractive in the multi-media maelstrom of the iPhone/iPad space? Keep in mind that we are operating under two constraints: first, the shop is a media hypermarket -- iTunes is an ecommerce environment in which all types of media product and service can be purchased (Apple are going to have to do something about that name, 'iTunes' is off-key for most other media). The competition will be naked and ruthless, although slightly less naked this week than last. Second, the iPad (and its iPhone, iPod Touch, companions) will be fully capable of showing all media in gorgeous and slick reproduction and playback. The capacity of the system as a media player is going to be very impressive and will be getting better fast (Moore's law applies). How does a publisher make his wares gorgeously attractive in this fiercely competitive environment?

If you are a media-owner or a publisher-proprietor, you are not allowed to dodge this question! Nor are you allowed to postpone it by forming consortia or by hiring consultants to tell you how to build a new cultural format. Newspaper owners who think that their best future is to build a new kind of Text-TV-PressWire news channel are on a voyage to nowhere (TV channels can and will make their own elegant transition to the iPad, whilst print journalists are still finding out how to clip on their microphones). Magazine owners who think that their future lies in building brand-oriented, vertical, communities, with multi-media components, had better ask themselves why these new sort-of-maybe-products did not work as web-sites, because they will otherwise be making the same expensive mistake with the iPad that they have been making these last five years with their web services.

By and large book, publishers have avoided the temptation to think that the right response to a multi-media maelstrom is to build muti-media products and services. The Vook team may have located a viable niche, but no publisher thinks its a big niche, or that a lot of books are going to become vooks. Book publishers know that there is a digital future for books. Magazine and newspapers show much less confidence about the enduring validity of their format. But they should give it a try. Because putting your magazine, or your newspaper directly on to the iPad has a lot to recommend it. And now for the first time it can be done in a way in which the traditional print format actually looks and works very well. The iPad is going to be very friendly to publications in the traditional print formats.

Getting the book, magazine or newspaper on to the iPad and into the iTunes competitive environment pretty much as it is, is the first, but very necessary step. The second requirement is that the iTunes audience should be able to find your product in the iTunes e-commerce environment and it would be better that they should be able to find it directly, by which I mean that it is very much second best that iPhone users who want to read Business Week or the Independent, currently have to buy their subscription via Amazon's Kindle. Finding magazines and newspapers in the iTunes maelstrom is not going to be too much of an issue once the publication is there. Magazines and newspapers have tremendous brand recognition, tied up in the name, perhaps supplemented by the location (there is more than one Independent). These first two steps are really surprisingly easy.

The third requirement is that potential customers should be able to sample or try your product before they buy it or subscribe to the service provided. Sampling is really the answer and the Apple system also makes this surprisingly easy. Films (with their trailers) and music tracks (with their lead-in samples) are already showing how sampling, try-before-you-buy, works in the iPhone economy.

At Exact Editions we have now realised that the Free App Sample to Paid App subscription is an enormously powerful part of the Apple e-commerce system (and it did take us a few months to recognise how this should work and how to tie the 'free' element in with 'in-app purchasing'). We are now re-positioning all the Exact Editions apps so that they will use this freemium approach. The first of these new-style apps will be released in the next week or so. The user will be able to freely acquire a branded app in the iTunes service. The app will give the user some free pages from the magazine issue in full, the publisher deciding how much, and the rest of the content will be available as a searchable resource -- but only viewable in thumbnail pages. This way of arranging matters for a periodical is especially compelling because it means that the magazines key contents pages, and cover pages can be delivered through the free app as a kind of alert service. The freemium approach is also very compelling with books, and I suspect that this is one way in which book publishers can be highly aggressive in competition with other forms of media. Film makers and music owners will be wary of giving away sizable samples. But book publishers can be very generous in offering chunky samples without undermining the value of ownership.

Books of real quality (and books of marginal, minimal or even questionable quality) will be able to make themselves available as free apps in the Apple system, with generous content chunks being for each book a uniquely attractive invitation to its potential readers. Amazon has already shown with its Kindle, how powerful it can be to promote by digital sampling (hub pages). The interesting thing about the app store is that the publisher, who has to take responsibility for how much to offer by way of a sample, will be in direct control of these decisions and will be seeing the very immediate impact of decisions through the sales reported, day by day. Again the Apple way of doing things is giving publishers/developers more control than they are used to having with Amazon. Publishers will be getting immediate and very measurable feedback from their promotional decisions about sampling. It is also a strong plus that the 'free samples' that can be sync-ed with a book/magazine app will be on the consumers iPhone or iPad, even when they have not yet bought. This puts the publishers sample directly in the consumer's pocket (when did anybody think of downloading a movie trailer to their iPhone?). I suspect publishers will soon learn that it pays to be very generous with samples for publications available through the iPad.

Apple and Amazon in the battle for books

Three weeks ago there was a very public bout of fisticuffs between Amazon and Macmillan over the pricing and sale of eBooks. The fight was a by-product of Apple's announcement of the iPad and Macmillan's desire to extend the trading relationship and pricing parameters that will now be deployed for the iPad to its existing business with Amazon. After the dust settled it looked as though Macmillan and the authors, who largely backed Macmillan, had won; that Apple had won without needing to raise a finger and that Amazon has lost. From now on pricing will follow the so called 'agency model' which is really just the supplier management system that Apple uses in its iTunes store. The term 'agency' is a huge misnomer, because Apple is much more than an agent for the publisher. Apple 'owns' the customer and Apple retains all the information and almost all the demographics relating to users (this is something that the magazine and newspaper publishers are very upset about). Under the Apple one-size-fits-all e-commerce system, the publisher sets the price and sells the product (eBook or digital license) to a customer and Apple takes a 30% cut from facilitating and exclusively managing the transaction. Amazon is now being invited/instructed by publishers to follow a similar route, and in fact Amazon had earlier seen this coming and announced that it was willing to work with authors/publishers on a 30:70 split provided some other conditions applied.

Although this dispute appeared to be a dispute about pricing: it was really a dispute about control. Macmillan as a publisher, having been reminded of its role in the supply chain by its dealings with Apple, was asserting its power to set the terms of sale and to regulate the flow of goods. The best commentary on the upshot of this change in the balance of book power comes in a pair of blog postings by Michael Clarke at the Scholarly Kitchen. Why Publishers have Won and Why Publishers have Lost.

The real reason the iPad marks the end of pricing controls for ebooks has nothing to do with Apple’s iBooks pricing policy. In fact, the iPad renders Apple’s own ebook pricing policy as irrelevant as Amazon’s. The real reason the iPad renders any ebook pricing policy irrelevant is because the iPad is not a dedicated ebook reader. Why Publishers have Won

Because the iPad is not a dedicated ebook reader, there are, unfortunately, many things that users can do with the device other than read books. .......Publishers may have won the pricing war, but the real struggle is going to be for users’ attention. Why Publishers have Lost

We can add that the book publishers also lost in a way which they appear not to have noticed or minded, Apple's definition of 'agency' presented the publishers with apparent control of list price but snaffled the customer while they were pondering the various regions and the 85 tiers in the Apple pricing matrix. Reverting to Clarke's observation that the iPad is a multiply undedicated book reader: we should point out that it is a media pad with an impressive technical specification and at the same time a peculiarly empty and neutral format, such that it can be used for accessing and displaying many kinds of media. Certainly the iPad is not primarily to dedicated to books (as is the Kindle), and it is also not restricted to reading books in any particular format or digital manifestation. Books could be on the system as ePub files, but they could be there as title-specific Apps, or they could be there as web resources simply accessed through the browser, plain old HTML, or they could be there as viewable via title-agnostic apps (as Amazon already has a Kindle app on the iPhone platform, and Exact Editions has a generic app, Exactly). Clarke, we must assume, has been studying Derrida and Lacan in preparing for the iPad (I am positively certain that Steve Jobs reads Derrida); for, as the post-structuralist theoreticians might put it: the flexibility of the iPad is radically overdetermined since the consumer can not only read books on it in different ways and from distinct routes and formats, it is also much more than a book reader: music, film, TV, photos, email and the web will all crowd for attention on the device. The iPad is a great but 'undedicated' digital picture frame, a fabulous but undedicated hold-in-your hand TV consol, a truly amazing, undedicated, but remarkable music centre, wonderful for games etc.... It is this very flexibility and media-omnivorousness of the iPad that led to the initial "Is that it?" reaction to the Apple presentation ("Just a large iPhone with a chunky bezel"). The device appears to be strangely empty because it seems to invite or depend upon such a confusing variety of media inputs.

This may seem like a confusing situation and a perplexing opportunity for media creators and media owners. It is. But I will draw one urgent conclusion from the confusion. Scoffing aside, the iPad is a huge and wonderful opportunity. The flexibility and omnivorousness of the device will remain a feature, but the apparent emptiness will not. Book publishers, magazine and newspaper publishers had better figure out quickly how to make books, magazine and newspapers more attractive than film or TV shows. Or, at least more attractive in themselves. Did you notice that Apple are encouraging TV broadcasters to offer their shows for 99c each (a 50% price cut)? So winning in this competition is partly a matter of pricing, where comparisons will be drawn with other media. But it is also a matter of availability and even more of attractiveness. How do publishers make their digital offerings on the iPhone/iPad peculiarly and uniquely attractive? That is the key to success in a multi-media, marketplace, maelstrom.

Making the newspapers look more like broadcast news is surely not the answer; and making the magazine look more like a collection of YouTube videos, or Flickr slide shows is not going to be a winning strategy either....

Too Many App Stores?

As is generally known the Apple App store handles payments for developers and some distribution functions in exchange for a 30% cut on the revenues obtained from the sale of those apps. 70% is passed along to the publishers and developers who make the apps. The Android App store is run along similar lines (30% to Google for handling the transaction, collecting the monies and maintaining the store front: 70% to the developer). Amazon last week announced its own App store, along with an invitation to developers to produce Apps for the Kindle platform. Co-incidentally it announced a new and improved deal for authors and publishers, whereby under certain not too onerous conditions the author/publisher will get 70% from the Amazon sale. It is fishy the way that these deals seem to cluster around a 30% cut. Is there something about the investment and infrastructure needed to set up and run an App store that dictates a 30:70 deal? Who is going to be first to blink, and move to 20:80?

Along with its brilliant iPad, Apple just announced an iBook application within the iTunes store. Edward Nawotka, an industry pundit wonders whether this presages Apple offering a direct route to publication for authors. Amazon has been cutting direct deals with authors (sidelining the publishers). Google is in the class-action settlement of the century in its effort to become the digital publisher or republisher of millions of out of print but in copyright books. It would seem that in there effort to establish dominant positions in the distribution of digital books these three great companies are moving back up the publishing chain in an effort to secure greater security of supply.

As well as trying to buy into a dominant supply position (it would be fascinating to see the details of the exclusive deal that Amazon struck with Rosetta for McEwan's backlist. What guarantees or minimums are in that package?), these great companies are also trying to muscle into the other guy's distribution channel. Both Google and Amazon have built apps for the iPhone which allow users of the Apple device to access resources hosted/published for Kindle or by Google Books. Somehow it is barely conceivable that Apple will produce apps for the Kindle or the Android app stores.

What does this tell us? It tells us that building an app for the other guy's store is a sign that you have either lost the market, know that you are going to lose the battle in the long run, or are not really concerned to establish a dominant software or hardware platform for books in the first place. Apple can afford to ignore (in fact can afford to welcome) the Kindle and Google Apps, because these book reading systems will only take off on the iPhone/iPad platform if the users are able to purchase media content directly to the device through iTunes and the app store. Any such transactions are a direct win for Apple at the expense of rival platforms. If Google or Amazon were to support Apple's in-app purchasing they have lost the market and 'lost' the customer relation. My hunch is that Amazon really doesn't care too much about the market for 'soft reading systems' and does not care at all in the long run about the hardware market. They care about selling digital books and built Kindle as the first stage of the rocket that would take them to being everyone's digital library. They would be very happy if the Kindle became a mere brand, a virtual personal library system; if need be on Apple's hardware and O/S. They really do not want to lose the digital books market, especially not to Google. There is therefore scope for an alliance of sorts between Amazon and Apple, if Apple wanted it. Apple has the whip hand in these matters with its clearly superior hardware and software package, but it could offer Amazon a pretty exciting prospect as the digital books back-end to the iTunes content management system.

Will the App Store make a Good Book Store?

There are a few reasons for thinking that the iPhone's App Store may become the next and best digital book store. These are a few of the reasons that occur to me:

• iTunes is already the most important digital music store and the AppStore is inheriting a lot of the momentum and the kharma of the iTunes e-commerce system
• the iPhone App Store is already a pretty good App Store and seems to be building Apple a possibly dominant position in the race for mobile Apps. Robert Scoble has some perceptive observations on this.
• Apple is rumoured to be building and close to launching a tablet computer, which will share the iPhones touch interface and the e-commerce system that supports the iPhone and the iTouch. The possibly mythical Apple tablet was last seen bounding through the Australian outback looking for media content, but when when this wallabook/kangoozine finally lands it will be a gorgeous display for newspapers and books. So Apple in producing a tablet is trying to make their hardware the best for books (and newspapers, films and albums!).
• Users like reading stuff off their iPhones and when there is a tablet the chances are that they will like that even more.
• The Apple system despite its creaky approval process, and the very weird rules that Apple imposes on its developers, is in some respects (and surprisingly) more open than the Amazon or the Google systems. Amazon for its Kindle and Google (for Google Books, or Google Editions) require that the books they distribute or will sell reside on their servers and in their 'format'. Amazon and Google already know what digital books are. Apple is not so sure. The architectural potential with Apple is more open: any publisher or author or inventor can throw an App with some new software and display potential at the Apple system (paying their small fee) and see if it catches on (Vooks or Enhanced Editions can be experimented with in the Apple media space). Google Editions and Amazon's Kindle have no such open-ness, no inventor-driven potential, and the same goes for Sony and Barnes and Noble.
  

On the other hand, we can find some reasons for not too readily buying into the Apple-flavoured vision of the App Store as bookstore (or even Vookstore or Nookstore).

• I think it was Tim O'Reilly who said that the book as App does not scale well. Which I took to mean that whilst we can envisage having one or two or several Books as Apps on our phone, it is not likely that we can manage libraries this way. That may be correct, but individuals, unlike institutions, merely accumulate libraries. We buy books one at a time and if we buy enough of them within our iPhone ways will be found for managing those collections. I have been impressed by the way in which Apps can be found within the App Store. Even though it seems to be lamentably lacking in shopper-oriented convenience and friendliness. Users have been finding and buying the Exact Editions Apps for the Spectator and Opera magazine, though there has been very little explicit advertising or promotion for them (yet). The offerings within the App store are being found. Traffic is being generated. With a bit of merchandising skill from Apple, it is conceivable that millions of individual book Apps could be found and purchased within the App store by the tens of millions of users who have iTunes accounts. Scaling may not be such a big problem.
• Perhaps a more serious issue with the one book per App model for the Apple Bookstore is that books need to be open and to work with each other in ways which Apps do not. Apps are self-contained applications and do not provide much scope for interoperation and interaction in the ways that digital books really need to do. But is this merely a short-term problem? Apple are developing their mobile developer environment and interoperating Apps are bound to come.

The Appstore/Bookstore could work out rather well. Especially if Apple resists the temptation to over-control the environment. If Steve Jobs really is sitting on the final specification of the iTabloid as he scans the latest field reports from Wooloongabba, Woomera, Bullaroo, Geelong and Gulgong, my advice is that he should ditch the pink, opt for matt black, OK the slightly larger form factor, the bigger memory, better battery (please! a better battery) and sign off. It will not be in my Christmas stocking but I am ready to stand in line in January, or February, or whenever....

Bookserver and the Right Architecture for Books

The pace of change in the books space is hotting up. Two weeks ago Amazon announced that its Kindle will be internationally available. Google last week at Frankfurt announced its Google Editions proposition (or perhaps we should say they re-announced it). In three weeks Google has an appointment with Judge Chin on November 9, to re-present its much discussed Google Books Search Settlement. Techcrunch had a piece on 24 Android phones (some of which are admittedly merely rumoured, but most of which will be touted for reading books). Yesterday Barnes and Noble presented their new Nook, eReader. And the day before yesterday the Internet Archive (with several collaborators) announced its BookServer project.

The BookServer proposition seems to be very much a work in progress. Thinking on the hoof and probably a fair bit of smoke and mirrors (see Peter Brantley's Web of Books presentation and Roy Tennant's blog) . But one aspect of it feels a great deal more right than the Google Books Search proposition in its various forms. The architecture is essentially and deliberately open and multipolar:

As the audience for digital books grows, we can evolve from an environment of single devices connected to single sources into a distributed system where readers can find books from sources across the Web to read on whatever device they have. Publishers are creating digital versions of their popular books, and the library community is creating digital archives of their printed collections. BookServer is an open system to find, buy, or borrow these books, just like we use an open system to find Web sites. (Internet Archive's BookServer page)

This is a good central position around which the Internet Archive can build its coalition. But it would seem that they may end up with some unlikely allies. They are following the path of, and working with, Lexcycle's Stanza (now Amazon owned) in their strategy of orchestrating, coalescing access to formatted ePUB files, and one wonders whether the BookServer backers will fill their obvious lack of full text search through an alliance with Microsoft's Bing. There are indeed some interesting challenges for Microsoft and Amazon as they contemplate whether to address Google's potentially massive lead in proprietary book aggregation by making a more Open alliance with the Internet Archive and other champions of free and open. If the Internet Archive can maintain its footing in a genuinely open and independent position (which includes encouraging Google to spider and search, as well as Bing), it has a good chance of establishing the crucial principles that it articulates. It has a good chance of being more open to innovation than Google.

Kindle and Digital Magazines

We are quite often asked whether the Exact Editions platform works on the Kindle. To which we have a number of answers:

1. The Kindle is not available in Europe so we have never tested it and are not sure whether the web pages we serve would work on the non-standard browser that the Kindle offers its users. There is no word on when the Kindle is coming to Europe and I would say "Dont hold your breath".
   
2. The Kindle does not support colour, and most magazines really benefit from colour, so we dont regard the Kindle as an ideal magazine reading platform.
3. The Kindle supports re-flow (text can expand or shrink more or less at will) that is not a feature that would work with Exact Editions. We deliver pages the way they were designed. Exactly as they were laid out by the artist or repro house.
4. The Exact Editions pages and images can be easily zoomed or shrunk (especially on the iPhone). That doesnt work on the Kindle.
5. The Exact Editions system makes pages highly interactive, so web urls are live as are email addresses, phone numbers can be clicked to call (again a great resource on the iPhone, but no help on the Kindle)
6. The content on the Kindle is tightly controlled by Amazon, and they probably would not be pleased to have content passed their way be a technology partner (Apple are very different on this) and they strike tight and onerous deals with their publishing partners. Probably no room for Exact Editions in that clinch. If Amazon wants to have magazines on their platform they will approach the publishers direct.

It is not quite a matter of chalk and cheese, but it would be fair to say that Kindle looks at the world of digital books and digital editions in a very different way than Exact Editions. We feel that Google and Apple are more kindred spirits.

Apple as a Retailer

Mike Shatzkin over at the Idealog Blog has taken aim at our recent posting about Apple, Amazon and Google. We are in agreement with Mike that this ebooks, digital books, story is a good deal more complicated than it first seemed. We surely are in the very early stages of the game. Too early to call a winner, probably.

But Shatzkin has not understood what Apple are doing with the strategy announced for the iPhone 3.0 SDK. They are tackling the retail environment head on and building the retail functions. Shatzkin thinks that Apple will fail the retail test. Did Mike view the video presentation with which Apple gave a preview of 3.0 SDK? Consider that the very first item that Scott Forstall discusses (before even 'cut and paste'!) is the way that they have enhanced the App Store. Note that its a store. A place where consumers shop. It is a retail store which enables developer creativity and it will support discovery of books, magazines, games etc, browsing and sampling, search, metadata, price choice and traditional bookstore price anarchy, and after sales support (though some fulfillment and much support will fall to developers and publishers). Most striking is the near total freedom that publishers are given on pricing (99c -- $999). Especially in comparison to Amazon's half-hearted effort to get a $9.99 ebook price, and Apple's notorious inflexibility on music pricing in the iTunes store. It is surprising that anyone would think that Apple who have made such a considerable success of Apple stores and online retail selling will find themselves out of their depth with digital books. Nobody would say that building a retail system for digital books is going to be easy, but Apple clearly are a good candidate to do it. Especially now that they have announced this co-optive strategy.

Have book and magazine publishers learned much from the mistakes that music publishers made with digital music? They surely have learned something, but we can be sure that Apple have learned through bitter experience from the mistakes that music publishers have been making with music (often at Apple's expense). Steve Jobs has been having too much grief with the music supremos, eg over price and DRM. This time Apple are stepping back, facilitating a more open retail environment in which the publishers and software developers are invited to decide prices and to create concessions, services and brand-oriented offerings which Apple will transact for them. If a publisher is foolish enough to foist DRM on his customers that too can go through the Apple system. Above all the fashion, style, presentation, pricing and packaging elements can be left to the publishers and content experts. Apple will stick to its knitting.

The Race for Digital Books and Apple's Lack of Strategy

The three biggest players in the digital editions or eBooks space may have already announced their presence in the market: Amazon, Google and Apple. Apple did it this week and I am not sure that onlookers have yet understood the Apple position. There has been a persistent view that Apple may be planning to develop an eBook or a digital books strategy. I think it is now clear that their very clever strategy is based on the insight that they don't really need one.

Amazon and Google have been shaping up for a tussle for a while, and seem to be pulling the book market from opposite ends like a giant Christmas cracker waiting for it to come apart in their hands. With a bang. Apple, on the other hand, has been sitting coyly on the sidelines, with Steve Jobs publicly and sceptically wondering whether there is going to be a market for digital books.

The announcement earlier this week about Apple's iPhone OS 3.0 made it at last pretty clear how Apple is going to become a player and the strategy is so simple and solid that I am surprised that more of us did not see it coming. Apple has taken the very sensible position that it doesn't need to be a big player in the digital books or the ebooks market to win the game hands down. Apple is going to let authors, publishers and developers get on with their business and work out how the digital books market is going to work and Apple is just going to collect the market-maker's fee for letting it happen, on and in the iPhone arena. Apple is being quietly agnostic about the way that digital books should work, it is just inserting itself in the situation with the proposition, that if they are to be sold on the iPhone platform, Apple will take a 30% commission.

To get back to the Christmas cracker that Amazon and Google have been pulling at: Google thinks that the future of books is a future of digital editions in a global digital library (managed of course by Google). This is a world in which books are in a database in the cloud. Amazon thinks that the future of digital books is a future in which we all have, Kindle-shaped eBook readers in our pockets in which we store the books that we own. From the Google end of the cracker we are talking about massive databases where most usage is surely going to be free. From the Amazon end of the cracker we are looking at file formats where a lot of books, certainly new books, will be downloaded and probably sold, mostly by Amazon. Google has recently been showing some mild indecision about its own vision, first in producing a new type of re-flowable file format for its GBS Mobile offering, and then by offering half a million 19th century eBooks to the world via Sony. I dont think Google is really going down the eBooks road but it does look a bit like backtracking. Amazon has also shown some mild indecision by producing a virtual Kindle a Kindle 'environment' for the Apple iPhone which means that you do not need to have the actual bit of Amazon kit to read the proprietary file format. Amazon may have wobbled, but Amazon seems to be sticking to the view that it is in the bookselling business rather than the library business. Interestingly enough both these bouts of indecision took place on the iPhone platform. What is this telling us?

The position that Apple have announced for themselves is stylish, decisive and agnostic. Apple doesn't mind whether books are based in the cloud as web resources, or shipped around the internet as book-specific file formats. Web-based books, digital editions and ebook file formats can all run easily on the iPhone if that is what is needed: "Open house, come over here and play". That is the message from Cupertino. But Apple is also saying that if you want to trade these new booky gizmos on the Apple platform and sell them through the Apple e-commerce system, you will be expected to pay 30% of the gross to Apple. While you are at it you might as well call them Apps. In consideration for this courteous invitation, Apple will handle the transaction and any strictly necessary hosting fees.

Since Amazon have a track record of obtaining 55-65% discounts from book publishers, and since Google's terms have trade for the Settlement have been announced at 38% (plus a bit more), the Apple share does not look too greedy. But for the daily expense in running the Store it is a fat margin. Apple will thus appear to most publishers and authors as a reasonable partner, a less monopolistic partner, than either of the other West coast web giants, and since Steve Jobs is quite agnostic about the way in which the books will work Apple has a good chance of coming up with the prize hidden inside that cracker. If this is a race, I am tempted to call it for Apple. But there are quite a few laps to go yet.

Google Books on Sony eBook Reader

Sony has done a deal with Google to make 500,000 public domain books available to users of the Reader device. This suddenly jumps Sony ahead of Amazon in terms of the race to get the bighest number of titles accessible from the Kindle or the Sony Reader. The Kindle owner has about 250,000 to choose from.The books on their way to Sony will be the 500,000 titles with cleaned up ASCII from the recently announced Google Books Search mobile operation. 500K titles are public domain worldwide, (about another million are available to US users of Google Book Search but they would not figure in the deal because the Sony reader has an international reach). The Google Books implementation will still be superior, because it will offer both the ASCII text and the backup page images, which are presumably not in the Sony versions.

Believe me, a lot of the books are very, very boring. Hardly of interest to anyone, in amongst the cobwebs there is a lot of wonderful 19th century literature, and we will see how Sony can tidy up a way of selecting relevant titles (Austen, Dickens, Twain) from this vast stockpile and then present them to readers who can only carry around 1.000 or so downloaded titles on the Reader device.

This is clearly an alliance between Google and Sony. That much is apparent. But who is competing with whom? Is it a matter of Google against Amazon (Google trying to slow up the advance of the Kindle, so that the concept of books as dataservices can get time to gell)? Or of Sony against Amazon (capture the mind-share for the worldwide eBook reader market, since Kindle seems to have won that match already in the USA). Or of Google against Apple (by showing that the iPhone is not the only mobile device which can carry a lot of good books)? Or is it really a matter of Google competing with Sony and the publishers (by showing that there are so many good books out there for free, that the market for paid for downloadable books is going to be a tough proposition to sell to consumers). On the face of it, giving away free access to half a million books when your device can only hold a very few of them is a trifle strange. Google ends up being the winner in that comparison.

Perhaps the way in which Sony delivers on this announcement will make it clearer who is competing with who. Come to think of it, since the Kindle can only be sold in the US and Google has another million books which can only be treated as public domain within the USA, should we be expecting the Kindle to emerge with access to these 1 million restricted titles? According to the NYT article Google is willing to make its catalog of digitised books available to "any other e-book distributor that shares its goals of making books more accessible." I will be surprised if that happens, but we live in strange times, and certainly Amazon shares with Google the goal of making books more accessible.

Ebooks, Online books, Digital Editions and Content

One of the problems which the eBook market faces is that we are not completely secure about what to call the thing that we are bringing into being. What are we talking about when we talk about eBooks? There is a fair old jumble of substantives clamouring to receive our attention: digital books, ebooks, electronic or computerised texts, textual databases, interactive texts, online books (or texts), plain old content, digital libraries, digital editions, web editions, etc. So here are some proposed definitions and qualifications:

An eBook is something which, in the general case, requires a dedicated eBook reader for it to be read. That is to say, an eBook is something that you will find in a Kindle, or a Sony eBook reader.

Distinct from the eBook is the file format in which the text is held. This might be something like the proprietary format of the Kindle (AZW) or it might be non-proprietary like the EPUB, formerly Open eBook format. An eBook will have a file format, and although it will generally be read through (on?) an eBook reader, this could be a virtual or layer of eBook reader not necessarily the physical hardware system for which the eBook was originally devised. So we have the Stanza reader on the iPhone or the PC which will read a lot of different books in the same software environment. Also we have the recently announced Kindle App which in a manner of speaking puts a virtual Kindle on the iPhone (and a similar trick could be performed for other hardware platforms). File formats, we have to point out, have different instances, and publishers and booksellers may sell individual copies of the eBook and track their destination through digital inventories. File formats can also be corrupted and encrypted, some publishers corrupt files by encrypting them in Digital Rights Management software. This practice (DRM) is a really terrible idea which insults and damages the market, but publishers are tempted to use it because digital files have marginal cost to copy and if books are encoded in file formats they look terribly vulnerable to illegal acts.

The file format for eBooks works to define and individuate particular books or titles, or works, or serials or issues (yes plenty of confusion there unless you keep all those matters straight). The Google Settlement has also introduced the fascinating new concept of an insert, and an insert generally does not contain its own illustrations but it, probably, will contain its own children's book illustrations, diagrams, charts and graphs (but not maps). I hope that is all perfectly clear, if it is not and further perusal of the Draft Settlement leaves you in any doubt I suggest that you engage the services of a copyright lawyer (preferably one with a background in the part-work printing industry).

Having introduced the topic of Google Books, we should explain that whilst it is generally sensible to ask about the file format for an eBook, it is generally not relevant to ask questions about the file format of digital editions. Here we may be engaging in some creative definition making, but we define and differentiate Google Book Search books and Exact Editions magazines and books as digital editions rather than eBooks. Digital editions are made from books as files, but it is not helpful to think of them as having a file format. The PDF which the publisher produced or the scanner generated is used to create a database, but the format of the book as input has little to do with the format of the book as it is used or browsed by the consumer. The Google and Exact Editions systems deliver them to users as a service, searchable, citeable and potentially shareable, but they are web services in which each printed page has a corresponding web page, a web page with a JPEG at the centre and chatter of more or less relevant HTML around it. One might think of the individual book as the total of its urls, and thus postulate the individual title as having a web file format defined by its web instances. But this is not too helpful because the books are held in a database and it is the functionality of this database and the API's to it, which effectively generate and limit its performance and usability. So unlike eBooks, digital editions, we say, do not have file formats and its not relevant to use the language of unit sales or DRM. Digital editions come from databases that host them, probably in the cloud, and this is a completely different ball of wax -- nor should you be deflected from this perception by the confusing fact that Google Book Search (and Exact Editions) offer you the opportunity to download a PDF, whether of individual pages or of the whole work.

That may be enough confusing terminology for one day, but we will doubtless return to the subject in future postings.

Improving Searchability and Findability

We have enhanced the searchability and findability of the Exact Editions service with a site release which is being rolled out today. The internal name for this enhancement is 'universal preview' and it brings magazines more into line with the way books are handled on the Exact Editions platform.

1. Users can now search every issue of every title in the store. A search for Omdurman will bring up search results and fragments of pages. No full view pages. The first result of a search for Tony Blair is a page which is available in full view (its in a trial issue)
   
2. Users can browse all the content, but only at thumbnail size. If any publisher chooses not to allow archival searching and thumbnail previews, this can be accommodated.
   
3. Contents pages and front covers can be zoomed up to full size.
4. The text of covers and contents pages will get pulled into search engines (Google and others).
5. Existing "full" trial issues are undisturbed, and still feature on the magazine's marketing page.
6. The grid of all issue covers on the marketing pages are now live click-throughs to the thumbnail previews.

We expect that this change will improve the traffic to sample issues, to searches and subscriptions to magazines in the service. There is a cost attached to offering free searching and search results from all the archives (an order of magnitude increase in the content searched from typical queries) but the efficiency gains we have realized since moving to Amazon S3 more than offset the cost of the additional database activity. So this improved accessibility is a direct benefit of cloud computing.

Amazon's Kindle on the iPhone

At the launch of the Kindle 2 a couple of weeks back, Jeff Bezos dropped some heavy hints that users would soon be able to synchronize their Amazon eBook content between the Kindle and other mobile devices. Yesterday they launched the Amazon App for the iPhone. This is a fascinating development, and I am sure that there will be plenty of ramifications. It has to be a good step for the overall development of the digital books market. Here is why:

• It is a significant step away from the Amazon exclusivity that the Kindle appeared to embody. All the sales will still be going through the Amazon e-commerce system, but this move shows that Amazon reading experience will not be stuck within a totally proprietary environment.
• As well as being a sign that Amazon is a bit more open than we thought, this move shows that Apple too is more open than some of us might have supposed (Apple's approval is needed for the App to get into the App Store) .
• The Amazon books might look better on the iPhone than on the Kindle. Books no longer need to be stuck with its grey-scale only eInk environment. The iPhone, of course uses colour, so at least the covers of books and magazines in the Kindle format can now offer colour, at least on the iPhone. I wonder when Amazon will get this organized?
  
• The Kindle still looks like an overly proprietary, insufficiently mobile, over optimised and limited, format, from which support might one day be withdrawn: but now at least there is a graceful way for Amazon to bow out if they decide to move on. They can allow the format and their licensed offerings to continue and survive on the Apple hardware (and other synchronised devices) when they finally decide to get out of the dedicated eBook hardware market. And my bet is they will.
• We don't know how Amazon's license with the publishers works. Clearly Amazon reckons that it allows them to do synchronised distribution to the iPhone. This may be allowable under the terms of the license because Amazon can guarantee that the iPhone is tied to the Kindle owner's account. A more 'untethered' form of mobile phone could pose them with a licensing issue. They are probably stuck with the deal that they originally promoted and offered to publishers. I suspect that there may be some tight and tricky corners for them to negotiate.
• Still no sign of the Kindle in international distribution. Perhaps Amazon's biggest problem here is figuring out a profitable and effective deal with carriers (they have a very unusual deal with Sprint in the US). Perhaps 'tethering' the Kindle to some other mobile platform will be a way to cross into Europe. Do I hear Kindle knocking on Nokia's door, or Vodafone sidling up to Amazon?
  

Perhaps there is a bit of cox and box going on between Amazon and Google. A few days before Amazon released Kindle 2, Google announced the availability of Google Book Search for mobile (at this point, this is most evident through the iPhone accessibility). Now Amazon have surged around the flanks of the massive archive of old-Google books, with their own outflanking movement. There must be a chance that Amazon will put their Kindle content onto the Android platform. We live in interesting times.